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Gay Adventists Say: It Gets Better

In a just released video, gay, lesbian, and transgender Adventists share their testimony and offer hope to all who care about Jesus’ gospel of inclusion. Their simple message is that it actually does get better, including in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Continuing the project started by columnist Dan Savage responding to the prominent suicides of several LGBT youth, the “It Gets Better” message has turned into a world-wide phenomenon with support from a variety of people and organizations including the Chicago Cubs, Google, Microsoft, President Barack Obama, the University of Michigan Law School, and Daniel Radcliffe.

Now Seventh-day Adventists are publicly witnessing that it gets better too.

It is especially brave of these Adventists to share their stories as our church still officially treats them as second class citizens, defining their sexuality as a sin that is somehow different from their sinfulness. This official policy is used by many—from local churches to General Conference leadership—to keep LGBT Adventists from serving in ministry positions in churches and silencing their voices in official church publications. Several of these leaders organized a 2009 conference and connected their reputations to a message of exclusion, misinformation, and hate toward homosexuality. At this conference, out Adventist homosexuals were silenced and the Adventists who support them were excluded from the agenda. But despite those who choose the wrong side of history, civil rights, and the gospel, recent news about an Adventist legislator in New York and this video show that attitudes are slowly changing in the church.

These brave voices—in order of appearance: Rob Depew, Christian Bryan, Sara Jones, Corrine Galván, Morris Taylor, and Dave Ferguson—employ personal testimony to give hope to LGBT Adventists and those who support them around the world. It shows that the climate is slowly getting better as gay and straight Christians, colleges, and even Adventist congregations increasingly try to practice the gospel of love.

This “It Gets Better (for Adventists Too)” video was produced by Daneen Akers and Stephen Eyer, the producers of Seventh-Gay Adventists, a forth-coming documentary that asks the fundamental question: is there a way to reconcile faith and identity? Click here to watch the eighteen minute extended version of their stories.

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