The Rainbow and the Spirit ─ Spiritual Experiences of Some Same-sex Oriented Christians

By providing both theoretical and practical primary research data, this book gives a spiritual and theological voice to the religious experiences of persons whom many Christians ostracize as persons outside of God's blessings and salvation. This study provides that voice by listening respectfully to some LGBT Christians' stories of their spiritual experiences and allowing those narratives of their experiences of God in their lives to be heard, while letting them speak for themselves, alongside the theoretical-historical information. Through their experiences of God working in different ways in their lives, all four research participants were able to reconcile and integrate their faith with their sexual orientation, and to arrive at the point of believing that holiness or salvation and homosexuality are not mutually exclusive. This book treats the narratives of these same-sex oriented Christians as spiritually revelatory and thus a contemporary medium of God's revelation in our post-modern era. It can therefore help us all, homosexual and heterosexual Christians alike, including those who are struggling to reconcile their faith and their sexual orientation, to see that holiness or salvation and homosexuality are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This book is a sequel to my earlier book, Blessing Same-Sex Unions: Theological Reflections (2005).