“I lost my community when God saved my soul.” 

I remember being struck by those words when I first read them in Rosaria Butterfield’s testimony of coming to Christ and leaving lesbianism. For Butterfield, faith in Christ demanded tremendous costs, including giving up her hospitable, loving, and close-knit LGBT+ community.

Ultimately, Butterfield found a new, hospitable, loving, and close-knit community in the local church. But the journey between the two was, in Butterfield’s reckoning, nothing less than “a trainwreck.”

It’s been a decade since Butterfield published her memoir, and a new generation has grown up with their own identity struggles. Like Butterfield, they need community but are facing a trainwreck. 

One of those young people is Grace.

Grace was a kid from a Christian family who was welcomed by the LGBT+ community at her school. They accepted her, gave her a sense of identity and purpose, and convinced her she was really a boy. Suddenly, Grace wasn’t the socially awkward kid that people ignored: “Everyone in the school was like, ‘You’re amazing! We love you!’. . . All these kids who I’d previously occasionally said hi to in the hallway were going out of their way to say hi to me. I was cool.”

Grace’s experience (you can read her whole story at TGC) bears out what Carl Trueman wrote recently about identity in a modern world: “The strongest identities I have, forming my strongest intuitions, derive from the strongest communities to which I belong.” We become by belonging.

You probably know a Rosaria or a Grace. At work and school and family reunions, we each encounter people who are asking fundamental questions about their own identity as human beings and who are seeking belonging in a community. 

The challenge for the church, then, is to be the strongest community possible. For our own sake, and for the sake of our neighbors, we must be a place of welcome and worship, of love and truth, of faith and action. We must be people who loudly proclaim our identity as the Lord’s and who are ready to invite others to join us, whatever it may cost.