#generous spaciousness

[faithstrongtoday-blog]

Your Story #9: Wendy Vanderwal Gritter

This week, Melinda Estabrooks welcomes her good friend, Wendy VanderWal-Gritter, author of Generous Spaciousness and Executive Director at New Direction Ministries of Canada, to share her story. Wendy is an internationally recognized contributor in the conversations around faith and sexuality.

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[sacredtension]

Tolerance vs. Hospitality

In her excellent new book, Generous Spaciousness: Responding to Gay Christians in the Church, Wendy VanderWal-Gritter explores a crucial distinction between hospitality and tolerance that I believe would do us all a great deal of good to meditate on. After years of living in the extreme dissonance of working with gay people and the church, she has a lot of wisdom to share with the rest of the…

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[davidunfinished-blog]

Same-sex attraction is different from opposite-sex attraction, but how are we to understand this difference? Paul Egerston (1935-2011) was a retired bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and also the father of a gay son. In an article he wrote for parents, he presents four common ways in which homosexuality is viewed within different parts of the Christian community. He says some Christians view homosexuality as REBELLION, some see it as an ILLNESS OR ADDICTION, some see it as BROKENNESS, and some see it simply as a DIFFERENCE, a natural variant.

Wendy VanderWal-Gritter, Generous Spaciousness, chapter 4 (emphasis mine)

I'm not even sure where VanderWal-Gritter stands (maybe she reveals it at the end of the book), but Generous Spaciousness introduces a lot of fresh and insightful vocabulary that I believe will help make future conversations go smoother.

I explained just the other day to my best friend how the church has changed its reaction to homosexuality with very little reference to Scripture. It's all been about how we see the principles we believe in actually playing out in the real world. We've gone from exiling and abandoning people as rebels, to treating them with therapy to overcome their disorder, and now to just trying to help them with their particular brokenness or "cross to bear."

And this is all because each method proved to end with a non-Christlike result. And now many Christians are starting to move into the Difference category. There's no particular Bible verse we looked at that said, "Don't treat gay people with ex-gay therapy, and don't force them to remain celibate." We just looked at the results of our beliefs and saw them causing damage and said, "This is not of God."

[jarredlharris]

Generous Spaciousness: Whose Space is It?

Generous Spaciousness: Whose Space is It?

Earlier this week, i received my Kindle edition of Wendy VanderWal-Gritter’s book, Generous Spaciousness:  Responding to Gay Christians in the Church.  I’m about to start chapter 11 (which puts me a little over halfway through the book), and it’s so far been a pretty good read.  I haven’t decided whether I’m going to do a review of the book itself yet.  I’ll have to wait until I get finished with…

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[jarredlharris]

Spotlighting a Couple of BTG Posts

I really don’t have much to say today.  This is fine because it gives me the chance to point out a couple of posts written by Wendy over at the Bridging the Gap blog.  The first post is where she gives a brief summary and a few thoughtst about about the…

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