Same Sex Attraction, Faith, and Finding My Way Through: Sam Allberry

Shelby: Sam, when did you first experience attraction to other men?

Sam: The first time I noticed it, I was about 14 or 15. My best friend at the time had just started dating a girl. For some reason, that left me feeling completely devastated. I didn't know why. Everyone else was happy for him. At one level, I was happy for him. But at another level, it felt like the sort of bottom had fallen out of my world. Looking back on it, I realize I was so emotionally attached to him that the thought of him now being really close to somebody else, left me feeling very insecure and as though a significant part of what my life was about had now been taken away from me.

Shelby: Somewhat anxious, always authentic. This is Real Life Loading...

I'm Shelby Abbott and I'm here with Sam Alberry. Sam, now you are a pastor. You are an author. You're a speaker, and you are a same sex attracted Christian who has chosen not to act on those desires because of what you believe about Jesus. You've communicated about this topic of sexuality quite a bit over the last, I guess, what is it, 10 years? Has it been about 10 years or so?

Sam: Yes, it's been 10 years.

Shelby: Yes. How did you feel when that happened? What you were just talking about when you first experienced that? Were you excited? Were you scared? Did you feel ashamed? What was going on in your mind and in your heart?

Sam: Well, the first sign of what that desire was, was depression over what was going on with my friend. I wasn't at that point thinking, “Oh, I've got these feelings of same-sex attraction.” I was having this feeling of something has just devastated me and I don't know why I'm suddenly feeling like this. So, it took me a while to get my head around it, and as I became aware, okay some of the feelings my friends are describing having towards girls, I'm having towards one or two of my friends.

As that became clear, it wasn't exciting. It was actually, it felt kind of catastrophic, because this was in the early nineties it was a very different cultural time. I wasn't a Christian. My friends weren't Christians. There was a sort of background homophobia in the culture of the school I was at. There were lots of gay jokes whizzing around all over the place. I was already a self-conscious enough teenager that I just wanted to fit in with other people and I was already insecure that I didn't. So, this additional thing about something that felt so defining at that age of what it is to be a boy was. It was a complication I really didn't want. I just wanted to fit in and like girls, like everybody else did. So, it was very painful.

Shelby: Yes. How long was that season of like wrestling and feeling that pain before you became a Christian? because you became a Christian in late, late teens, is that right?

Sam: Yes, yes, just as I finished my schooling. Yes, before I went to university.

Shelby: So, you had like four years or so of wrestling with this. What was that season like?

Sam: Yes, it was painful and isolating. I mean, it wasn't always that every moment of every day, but it was difficult. It got slightly easier as I hit 17, 18, and we became fractionally less immature as a peer group.

Shelby: Fractionally.

Sam: I mean, 16 is in my experience was just the worst time to be a male human being around other male human beings. So, it got a bit better. But even so, there was still this deep sense of I'm different and if anyone finds out it's game over for my social life and my social life felt kind of insecure enough already. It didn't need extra pressure on it, so that was hard.

All the conversations were about dating and who do you like and all the rest of it. I did date a couple of girls during that season.

Shelby: Oh, you did?

Sam: Mainly because I found in each case, I found out they liked me. And I thought, “Oh, okay. That's a low risk conversation to have, and that way I can have a girlfriend.” That was a needed part of life as I understood it at that age. Neither relationship lasted more than I think a matter of weeks.

Shelby: Okay, so normal high school.

Sam: But for those weeks I was like, “Oh, I'm someone who has a girlfriend and therefore--

Shelby: Yes, Yes, Yes.

Sam: --I can talk about that and fit in a bit more. So, yes that wasn't an easy time. It wasn't hell on earth, but it was difficult and challenging.

Shelby: You became a Christian. I know you were thinking when you went to college, maybe I could just kind of live a, a double lifestyle and they'll accept me at college, because university is the type of environment that accepts all that kind of stuff. But then you met Jesus and God saved you. When did you realize that maybe my relationship with God is going to drastically impact these feelings that I'm having? Do you understand what I mean?

Sam: I do. In one sense, I sense that on day one of my Christian life, not because I had any sense of what Jesus thought about sexuality, but because I had such a clear sense that Jesus is going to affect everything.

I remember thinking, “He isn't everything or nothing kind of person.” I can't just have Him at the side of my life. If I have Jesus, I'm actually giving Him everything. I knew enough to know that following Jesus means giving Him your whole life, and I knew I could trust Him with my whole life.

So, I assumed that would upend everything. I didn't know how it would in detail, but I knew this would impact every part of life in some way. I was up for Jesus coming into each part of my life, and part of me was kind of excited to discover what that would look like, what He would have for me in each of those areas. But I also knew that that was going to be stretching, that giving Him the reins of my life was meaning that I didn't hold onto them myself.

Shelby: So Yes. Okay, I have to contrast that maybe with my own experience, because I grew up in a, in a nominally Christian home. I thought I was a Christian for a long time because I was good and that God - I was doing God a favor basically by being a follower of Him. But then when I actually did become a Christian my freshman year of college, It seemed like, yes, this is just kind of normal. This is like my lifestyle that I do. I didn't feel those things that you were thinking and feeling like it's going to cost me everything. I didn't think that it's kind of mature of you.

Sam: Well, like I wouldn't describe it as that. I think it was just my encounter with the gospel for the first time showed me that Jesus was far more compelling, but not easy. And that because He was wanting my whole life, those were the ground rules from day one for me. So, I didn't kind of come to that sideways. I came to that head on in my first encounters with the gospel. I'm grateful that the people who first explained Christ to me explained the Christ who is going to call for you to give Him your life.

Shelby: A full the gospel, yes. I think the highlight so much happens to be when we share the gospel with people, that Jesus is your Savior, but not necessarily your Lord.
So, He died for your sins.

If you were to ask someone what is the gospel? They might say, “Jesus died for my sins. That is the gospel.” But there's so much more to it than that. There has to be a submission.

Sam: There is because he's not just canceling your debt and fixing your record so that you can then run off and go, you know, as you were. He's pulling us into a relationship with Himself, and there are lots of pieces I didn't have at that point. I didn't know I. That Jesus himself was the prize.

I knew I needed forgiveness. I knew he had secured forgiveness, so I knew I needed Him for my forgiveness. I knew that an entailment of having Jesus for my forgiveness was I now have to follow Him. And I wanted to follow Him. But what I would say now, looking back on it, is I came for the forgiveness, but I stayed for the Forgiver.

It's now much clearer to me that actually forgiveness wasn't the prize. Jesus was the prize.

Shelby: Yes, that's really good.

Sam: And so, I came in thinking, “Oh, oops, I've sinned. I need this.” And as I then went on in the Christian life, this took a long time to fall into place, beginning to realize actually it isn't the stuff Jesus has won for me, that is the prize here. It's Him. It's all about Him.

Shelby: Sam, thanks for being open and sharing about your experiences. You've also shared some of your story in a book you wrote called, Is God Anti-Gay?

What was the catalyst for you deciding to write that? Did somebody come to you or were you like, I just have to speak about this, because I have a kind of quote unquote, like insider experience to be able to talk about it in a healthy way and apply the gospel to it?

Sam: Yes, it was a bit of both actually. I had already opened up to friends and family about my own sexuality. That had been by and large, a kind of healing process, a very really positive process, but still an emotionally intense process. By the time I kind of finished off the list of, okay, I think these are the people who need to know or who I want to know. By the end of that process, I was like, “Okay, I'm done talking about this now.”

One of them even said, “Are you going to like do ministry on this, are you going to give talks on it.” I was like, “No way. I'm not going to be that guy.”

So initially I had no desire to do anything on this. It had been an area of significant pain for me and a measure of shame. I'd wrecked at least one good friendship through all of this.

Shelby: Mm-hmm.

Sam: But as the cultural shifts kind of took place in the early 2010s, very quickly mainstream culture went from not really approving of gay marriage to obviously approving of gay marriage.

As those changes were going on and we were having a kind of in the UK a nationwide conversation about should we legalize gay marriage all the sort of talking heads were coming out of woodwork and yelling at each other.

It always seemed to be some really likable, lovely LGBTQ type person giving the reasons for that legalization. And then some cantankerous, negative sounding, conservative giving the other view. And I was like, neither of those views speaks for me.

Shelby: Yes, yes.

Sam: Neither of those views is getting at what I know to be the case through Jesus. And I just thought, “I wish there was someone who could speak into this discussion from inside of it in a way that shows the goodness of Jesus.” That just became more and more of a burden. Not the I want to talk about my sexuality aspect, but the I want people to know how good Jesus has been to me. That was what pushed me into adding my voice. And as I started tentatively to give a couple of talks here and there, write an article or two here and there. Immediately there was traction because at that point there were very few such voices out there.

There’re just amazing voices out there now. That's when the publisher said, “Hey, we actually want to do a little book on this. It's in a kind of Q and A format. Would you be interested in doing it?” So that's where that came from.

Shelby: So, it just recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary, that book. And there was like some sort of sticker on the new version or like something that said, “So many copies sold.” How many copies have sold of Is God Anti-Gay? Do you know?

Sam: Well, I know it's over 200,000, which is absurd to me because writing it was not easy. In that writing generally isn't easy because the words are never doing what you're wanting them to do, but because it was a painful, personal thing to write on. It was again, just that feeling of defeat and shame.

Shelby: Mm-hmm.

Sam: It was at times very overwhelming. It was a very, spiritually painful place to go into. And I just thought, I'm never going to finish this book. It's only a tiny book, but I just thought, “I'm never going to get to the finish line. This is never going to see the light of day.” So, the fact that it did see the light of day and then has been used in this way is, it feels like a private joke between me and God. Because He and I both know none of this is my ingenuity or expertise. It's just, It was my weakness and His grace.

Shelby: That's, yes. That's incredible. And I know that you've lived that too, knowing you behind the scenes as well.

So, you said experiencing shame, even in the midst of writing that book, were there older people who came alongside of you in that process to remind you of the truth? That shame is not something that should define you, or were there people your age or even younger people that were able to minister to you in that process so that you could cross the finish line?

Sam: Only a little bit, funny enough. I mean now, yes. I mean, in the years since I feel like I have an abundance of such voices, but I don't think it was on my radar to know that I needed such a voice in my life. It probably wasn't on the radar of the people who could have been that voice in my life. I mean, people were cheering me on in sort of generic kinds of ways.

Shelby: Mm-hmm.

Sam: But no, it was that was part of what made it such a hard process was I did feel like I was kind of doing it on my own. I had a couple of friends I would send drafts to just for, “Hey, does this make any sense at all?”

I even had a gay friend, not a Christian guy, but we would meet up and grab lunch regularly and he'd sort of was interested in Christianity. He was intrigued by my story being Christian, and yet having these attractions. He was just starting to write his first ever gay romance novel. He said to me, “Hey, would you be interested in reading it? I'd love your thoughts on it because a lot of it's autobiographical.”

I was thinking, “Well I want to get to know my friend better, and if this is going to help me understand him, I'll, I'll take a look at it.” But I said to him, “Well yes, I would love to, and I'm writing a book too, about sexuality and how it intersects with my beliefs. Would you be interested in reading that? No pressure to be nice. But he said he would. So, he was one of the first people to actually read my book. And it led to some good discussions. He, at the very least, he said to me, “Okay, I now get why you believe what you believe.”

Really? And I thought, “Okay, I'm actually really happy with that.” That was my aim. I'm not pretending this is going to persuade every human being who reads it.

Shelby: Right, yes.

Sam: But if they can at least understand, “Okay. So that's why I, Sam as a Christian, is living in the way that he is. Then I'm thinking, okay, that to me that was a win. Yes, the seed, the gospel seed has been sewn there.

Shelby: Yes. That he believes it's good news. That was one of the major things that I took away from when I started reading your stuff and listening to you speak, before we even met was just like, is the gospel good news for people in the gay community? And we always treated it like it wasn't. They were just sacrificing so much for Jesus, but like, no, it's good news. You beat that drama over and over again. I was super thankful that you did.

Sam: Well, I still meet pastors who, if they meet LGBT friends, psychologically, they're thinking, “Oh, they won't want to hear the gospel.” Well, the gospel won't have traction with them.

And I'm thinking, “No, no. It's the power of God for the salvation of everyone.” It's not harder for God to save a gay person than it is for God to save a kid who's grown up in a homeschool Christian family. It's the same amount of grace and miracle for each of us.

Shelby, let me flip that on you then.

Shelby: Okay.

Sam: Obviously my process was coming to terms with same sex attraction as an awkward, self-conscious, anxious teenager. What was discovering your own sexuality like for you as a, I'm assuming to some extent, self-conscious, awkward teenager, giving you a very self-conscious, awkward adult? I'm just assuming you.

Shelby: I'm still the same. That's very good. I was trying to make a joke in there, but you kept talking. [Laughter]

Sam: That's, that's my strategy.

Shelby: You didn’t turn on me. You know, I was late to the game. I was a late developer and everything, so I didn't finish puberty until my senior year of high school.

Sam: Hmm.

Shelby: And so, girls didn't really give me the time of day in high school because I was little and I was always viewed as younger and like a kid - amongst, you know, grownups. I hated that going through it. But looking back on it, I'm very grateful for it because I think I probably would've been, as you know, careless with my sexuality as any other kid in high school who didn't know Christ.

Sam: Hmm.

Shelby: So, my discovery of it - like I remember even getting my freshman year involved in a Bible study after I became a Christian and guys in particular talking about masturbation and all the stuff that guys deal with. I remember pulling one guy aside later on and just telling him, “Hey, this is just something I've never struggled with.” And he laughed like I was joking. And I go, no, seriously. I've never wrestled with the temptation of looking at porn or masturbation. And he was like, okay, man, okay.

He still didn't believe me, and I thought to myself, “There's something wrong with me that I am not like every other guy struggling with, you know, sexual temptation. And sadly, I think that led me in the wrong direction, because I felt like I needed to experiment with it a little bit in college. Not being with women, but just looking at pornography and stuff like that. That was one of those things that I think back on and I'm like, again, God really protected me from a lot of things and I'm super grateful.

But I mean, I was the kind of kid who well - I was sexually abused when I was five, just one time. I was raised in an environment without my biological father for years and years. I was overly connected emotionally to my mother for years and years. I kind of fit the bill as a kid who would wrestle with same sex attraction. Not that there's like a formula or anything like that.

Sam: No, but there's often a kind of cliche people have.

Shelby: Yes, I think I would've checked a lot of those boxes. But I've never, never had that experience. Never wrestled with that at all, and I don't know what that means. But I do know that like I was not taken seriously as a quote unquote man for a long time. And going through it as an adolescent and a high schooler, and even in early college, it felt like a curse, but in many ways, I feel like it was a blessing because I could have been taken down by sexual sin in a lot of ways that men are.

Sam: I resonate so much with that because obviously I felt like I wasn't taken seriously as a man because I wasn't dating girls sequentially and constantly and all the rest of it.

But like you, there's aspects of this I'm grateful for because the fact that I was becoming aware of my sexual feelings in that particular cultural context meant I wasn't about to look for opportunities to act on them. And by the time I came to Christ, Christ got to me before I had the opportunities.

And so, I've been spared a lot of things that I would now be grieving over. I remember some of my Christian friends saying, man, I wish I'd sinned more before I became a Christian because now I'm not allowed to do this. And, you know, it's a dumb thing you say when you're like a 17 year old convert or something.

But it's interesting that sense of am I really a proper man in the eyes of others? There’re so many types of ways we feel like we're not. I've spoken to so many guys who for really different reasons, have always felt like maybe I don't measure up.

Shelby: Mm-hmm.

Sam: And it's just a, a reminder that most of us have our own kind of crazy. I remember thinking once, you know, we talk about childhood being the point of childhood is to prepare for adulthood. I think if there's anything I've seen in pastoral ministry is adulthood is all about recovering from childhood - normally our teenage years.

Shelby: Totally true.

Sam: We just bring so much weirdness and craziness and baggage into our adulthood from those years.

Shelby: Yes, I completely agree.

Sam: We've all been screwed up by, yes, just living in the kind of world we live in.

Shelby: Yes. And you know what? The question you asked me, I don't know if I've ever been asked that question before. It's been asked of you a lot because you've talked about this. Do you ever get sick of talking about this?

Sam: Oh, yes, yes. I do. I mean I don't mind it, don't get me wrong. I'm not resenting every moment of this conversation.

Shelby: Right, right. So, oh no, we can't invite Sam to speak on this anymore.

Sam: No. I mean, it's not my favorite thing to talk about. I don't mind talking about it because it's part of my story and my story has been caught up with the story of Christ. It's part of the journey He's used to bring me to Himself. I want this to be something people feel like they can talk about. Because as we were saying earlier the gospel is such wonderfully good news for every part of life. We miss out on so much if we don't have the conversations that enable us to bring the gospel to bear on stuff like this.

You needed the gospel to be brought to bear on your view of yourself, as you were coming out of your teenage years with those self-perceptions of, I'm not taken seriously as a man - you know all those different factors. Those things carry on haunting us and chiseling away at our psychology, and we need to bring them into the open. We need to bring them into conversation with the gospel. So yes, I hope talking about this makes it easier for others to talk about it.

Shelby: You know, it reminded me you told that story, I think it was your pastor, TJ Tims, can you remember that story about him building an addition onto his house and the lesbian couple. It's just fascinating, it reminded me a lot of like, is this good news? Like, is it good news? Is it worth it? Can you tell me that story?

Sam: Yes. My pastor here in Nashville, TJ Tims, he doesn’t mind me sharing this, that they've talked about this publicly before. Anyway, wonderful guy, his wife's mother was in a long-term lesbian relationship. And they, as a couple were living in Alabama, weren't walking with the Lord, weren't interested in in Christianity, but would obviously come up and visit TJ and his wife and the kids and be part of the extended family.

I can't remember the exact sequence of what happened, but there was certainly one Sunday where they did come to church and there was enough to get under their skin. Such that when they went back to Alabama, I think they started watching occasional services online. Either way, they kept thinking about stuff and one then the other realized, I want to come back to the Lord, and I want to become a Christian.

When it got to the point where they were both talking openly about this. They thought, let's phone up. We don’t know what this means. We don’t know what to do. We want to go back to church. The only church we know of really is this church up in Nashville. We kind of know we'd be okay there. So, they phone up TJ and his wife and they say, “Hey, we want to come back to the church. We want to come to your church. We're actually prepared to relocate to Nashville to do that. We have a daughter and one of them had also adopted a young girl.” So, there's four of them, like, “How does this work? What is this? How do we do this?” TJ and his wife said, “Well just come in and live with us and we'll figure it out together.

Shelby: Wow.

Sam: TJ had been in construction prior to being a pastor. So, on a day off, he'll build an A-frame or something.

Shelby: No big deal. [Laughter]

Sam: I can't hit a nail into a wall on my day off for that. He needs to phone up someone to help me.

So he just builds an extra half house onto the side of their property. So, they all move in and immediately then he's not being overly prescriptive, right? The first step you've got to make is this, and then stop that and start this, right? He's just like, come and do life with us. We'll just stumble forwards together somehow and figure it out as we go. And so they do, and they had already stopped kind of being a romantic couple at that point.

Shelby: Um mm-hmm.

Sam: They got involved in the life of the church and discipleship. I remember getting to know them kind of a few months into this, and I remember just saying to them one day, “You were a couple for 15 years or so, now on the eyes of the world, you're just good friends.” I said, “Do you miss, do you miss being a couple, is it hard downgrading, for want of a better word?” And they said, “No, no, no. We are so much closer as sisters in Christ than we ever were as lovers.”

Shelby: Wow.

Sam: So, they would not say they had downgraded from romantic friendship to just normal friendship. They would say, they've gone from an illicit, counterfeit form of love to a real form of love. And I was surprised when I first heard them say that. That was kind of like, whoa.

But then the more I thought about it and the more I thought, “God is love, so of course He knows more about how to really love each other than we do.” We're not going to miss out on love if we go in God's way. We're never going to come up with more or better love behind His back, than we are by following what the God of love is saying we need to do in order to love each other well.

Shelby: Yes, yes, I love that story. We need more stories like that. We need more examples of people going, no, the downgrade is not a downgrade, it's an upgrade.

Sam: It is, and it's always, following Jesus means there's pain, there's sacrifice, there's things you've cut out of your life that you feel like - stuff you really need.

Shelby: Yes.

Sam: But over time you think, “Oh, no, no, no. This is way better God's way than my way. Even if it's called its own attendant challenges.”

Shelby: Yes. It reminds me too, that like the Christian life is, it feels like little deaths along the way, but it's leading to life. Whereas sinful lifestyle feels like little bursts of life, but it's really leading to death. But we need to experience those little deaths in order to get to the true source of life.

Sam: Yes.

Shelby: Okay. So sadly we had to cut things off there for the sake of time, but the great news is that Sam will be back with me next episode. And when he's with me again, Sam is going to respond to some of his book's worst reviews on Amazon. Ooh, drama.

If you like this episode of Real Life Loading... or you thought it was helpful, I'd love for you to share today's podcast with a friend. And wherever you get your podcasts, it could really advance what we're doing with Real Life Loading, if you'd rate and review us.

It's unmistakably easy to find us on our social channels. Just search for Real Life Loading or look for our link tree in the show notes.

I want to thank everyone on the Real Life Loading team. You all make it happen. I'm Shelby Abbott and I'll see you back next time on Real Life Loading....

Real Life Loading... is a production of FamilyLife®, a Cru® ministry.
Helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.

We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?

Copyright © 2023 FamilyLife®. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com