I Wonder How Many....

There are many conservative religious folks out there who claim that a person cannot be both homoesexual and a person of faith. Yet there are several blogs that I visit either regularly or occassionally that proudly proclaim and even talk about their religious faith and their sexual orientation. Based on my relatively small sampling, I can only imagine how many more GLBT folks of faith (ALL faith communities) there really are out there. I know that the number is far greater than folks like Fred Phelps, Jim Dobson, Jerry Falwwell (Oh, wait! He's leaving us alone at the moment and calling Ms. Clinton awful names), Paul Cameron, and a host of others might lead us to believe. And even though we are many, many of us often feel alone or isolated--isolated from the faith community of our choice because we are "that awful thing that they don't like" or isolated from the glbt community because "who needs religion?". I would really like to hear from you, your friends, your churches, temples, mosques, etc. either your story or at least your best guess estimate of percentages of GLBT people of faith. In projecting growth potential within my church which is predeominantly gay, I often consider the "ten percent" of the population that is glbt, and then consider even one percent as potential church members . That means in a city of 500,000, a church of 500 SHOULD be a do-able number. (I believe this formula allows for people of other faiths, people who are comfortable in other Christian groups, etc.) Yet, even with such a realtively small goal, we are more likely to be a church of 50-100. That tells me that either we are doing something wrong or there are still too many glbt people of faith who are in the faith closet. So, with National Coming Out Day looming (October 11), let's take a minute to come out to each other, to talk about how to connect with others of faith and how to reach the multitudes of glbt folks who have either lost or never had a faith journey. There is too much hopelessness in our community -- it's up to us to reach out -- how do we do it without sounding nutty? If you are gay and a person of faith, drop a comment -- forwwrd this post to your friends for their comments. I will update you on responses in a week or so. Let me hear from you.