The group is the first of its kind on campus and gives students who identify as queer Christians a safe place to worship, Rowe said.

“There is one thing for my family to be against me, (and) there is one thing for my friends to be against me. But to tell me my God is against me is — I could cry just thinking about it,” she said. “I don’t stand alone in my belief that God is not biased.”

The group was given space to meet once a week through the MSU LBGT Resource Center, said Deanna Hurlbert, the assistant director and liaison of the LBGT Resource Center. She said she noticed a strong need among the LBGT student body on campus to address religion and sexual identity through worship.

“Some students have grown up in a church, and they have become disassociated with their church for a number of reasons,” she said. “Either they have been pushed out or they have walked away because they haven’t felt welcomed in their church communities.”

Students, such as Justin Drwencke, an interdisciplinary humanities junior and treasurer of PRIDE, understood the confusion some students in the LBGT community face after hosting the God and Sexuality event earlier this semester. The event allowed Christians and Queer Christians a chance to start a dialogue by dissecting biblical text for interpretation.

“There is a lot of people that are — once they realize themselves as (LBGT) — they assume that they cannot be religious, and in time a lot of people then turn away from religion for that,” he said.
“I wanted to … present the alternative to that. You can be gay, and you can be religious. They don’t have to be conflicting.”

Local and affirming churches, such as Canterbury MSU, 800 Abbott Road, an Episcopal Ministry denomination at MSU, have noticed the need to address those within the LBGT Christian community, said Rev. Sarah Midzalkowski, the chaplain of Canterbury MSU.

“People who are LBGT have had to be sort of schizophrenic when it comes to their sexuality and their faith because the churches and the religious groups have been intolerant,” she said.

“Now (many churches) are starting to evolve in our understanding of human sexuality and its relationship to being created in God’s image.”

The Message

Some traditional interpretations of the Bible are not applicable in today’s society, Midzalkowski said.

“(Some) old testament (codes) … have very little bearing on anything we do today,” she said. “They’re lumped in with the same thing that says not eating shell fish and (mixing) fibers when making cloth (and) all the stuff that we don’t actually do because they don’t apply to the life we live today.”

Although the term homosexual cannot be found within the Bible, passages including the Holiness Code in the book of Leviticus and the Pauline epistles are used to prove homosexuality as an interpretation of unhealthy sexual behavior and male prostitution within the temple, said Kari Nicewander, pastor of Edgewood United Church, 469 N. Hagadorn Road.

“One of the things I see from taking the Bible seriously is that the overarching theme of … love,” she said. “Jesus says that you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul. … To love your neighbor as yourself is to love and affirm people who are LBGT because that is who they are.”

The Faith

As a little girl, Rowe grew up watching her father preach at their church in downtown Detroit. Rowe said she plans to follow in his footsteps by becoming ordained. Although the United Methodist Church is an open and affirming denomination, it will not allow the ordination of openly LBGT individuals.

“A lot of my call to ministry is around lack of this voice — lack of a voice that says there are people who believe that God doesn’t have an issue with your sexual identity,” she said.

Rowe still plans to pursue ordination within her denomination of Christianity, hoping the regulations will change upon her graduation in May or until told otherwise.

Although a heterosexual woman, Nicewander knows the struggle of ordination all too well as she left the United Methodist Church for the United Church of Christ because it was too difficult to be a part of a denomination that did not fully accept the LBGT community, she said.

“I have colleagues who have had to pretend to be someone other than who they are in order to maintain their standing as ordained clergy,” she said. “It’s really frustrating because it just feels like we’re going backwards when we do that.”

Conflicts such as this have caused some people, such as Ashley Sobczak, a criminal justice and psychology junior, to waver in faith after her trust within the Christian church was shaken when she was asked to leave several church services.

“It’s not like they are running me out. They are simply asking me to leave — that this is not the place for me,” she said.

Suffering under the double jeopardy of being accepted within the Christian community and being condemned by the LBGT community for remaining a member of an institution that constantly denounces one’s identity is difficult to handle, Sobczak said.

“Then within my own community, I guess it’s more accepted, but it’s off the wall,” she said. “Why would you want to be a part of something that doesn’t necessarily accept you? You just have to try harder to find a certain church or organization that will accept you for who you are.”