An Education in the Character of God

Forty years wrestling with faith, sexuality, and truthfulness before God

Author’s Note

This essay grows out of a Spiritual Directors’ Network day where I was invited to share my journey. Some in the room had wrestled deeply with questions around sexuality; others had not, and some remained unconvinced by where my journey eventually led.

So I have tried to tell the whole story, not merely the conclusion—because re-formation did not come through fashion or pressure, but through time, fruit, and pastoral reality. The question underneath is one we cannot avoid: what is our theology producing in actual human lives?

For many years I believed I was defending Christian truth.

Only slowly did I realise that some of the certainty I had inherited was crushing the very people Christ had come to restore.

This is the story of how that realisation changed everything.

It feels slightly strange to tell my own story online in 2026, because none of it was planned. I never set out to become associated with debates about sexuality or theological controversy. I simply wanted to follow Christ faithfully.

Looking back over four decades of ministry and pastoral listening, I can see that what unfolded was not primarily an education in sexuality. It was an education in the character of God.

And along the way I was forced to confront a question that many churches quietly avoid:

When theology and lived experience collide, which one listens?

Beginnings: Love, Collapse, and Early Lessons

I grew up in a loving post-war home with two younger sisters. We did not have much materially, but we were rich in parental affection.

As a boy I was hopeless at sport, but music opened a different world. In 1962 I became a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral. I even sang at Sir Winston Churchill’s State Funeral—something that sounds extraordinary in retrospect, though at the time I was simply overawed.

During those same years, my parents’ marriage was quietly unravelling. What marked me most deeply was not only their separation, but the church’s response. There was little curiosity except of the whispering kind, minimal empathy, and great certainty.

Rules were rules!

I learned something early: religious certainty, when handled without tenderness, does not merely wound—it distorts the face of Jesus.

Discovering I Was “Different”

In the mid-1960s, public debate about homosexuality was loud and anxious. I had barely the faintest idea what it meant, yet I carried a quiet awareness that the conversation was somehow about me.

While my school friends discovered girls with enthusiasm, I found myself noticing men.

Some readers of a certain generation may smile at this: I remember watching Dr Kildare and feeling something awaken in me when Richard Chamberlain appeared on screen. Not mere admiration—something deeper and involuntary. I did not have language for it. I only knew it was powerful.

Decades later Chamberlain himself would come out as gay. I felt a quiet shock of recognition—as though the secret I was learning to carry had been hiding in plain sight.

My question was not sociological. It was theological:

What does God think?

Fear and Fundamentalism

I gravitated toward a strong evangelical church. The answer I received there was unambiguous. God was against homosexuality. Judgment loomed. There was hope—but only for repentant sinners.

So I repented. Constantly. Neurotically.

Hell was not metaphorical to me; it was a nightly fear. I became scrupulous, hyper-conscientious, desperate not to offend God.

The pastors who taught me were sincere. They believed they were rescuing souls. But when absolute theology meets fragile adolescence, the result is rarely liberation. It is terror dressed as faithfulness.

The Gift—or Imposition—of Celibacy

Within that world, the framework seemed straightforward. Marriage was between a man and a woman. Anything else lay outside obedience. Therefore, my options appeared limited: lifelong celibacy, or change of desire through prayer and sanctification.

Why did I not simply embrace celibacy?

Scripture presents it as a gift. Some receive it joyfully, and their lives bear witness to something beautiful.

But what we faced was not a vocation to celibacy discerned—it was celibacy assigned to an entire category of people, irrespective of temperament or longing. There is a profound difference between vocation freely embraced and deprivation imposed.

Over the years I watched men attempt lifelong celibacy because they believed they had no faithful alternative. Some carried it with quiet dignity. But for many it brought a loneliness so deep that it brushed against despair.

When companionship is experienced not as gift withheld but as moral prohibition, the isolation is rarely neutral. It becomes entangled with shame—a shame subtly attributed to God himself, though more truly born of our theology.

And the long-term fruit was often painful to watch. Without the daily humanising friction of intimate relationship—without being known, answered, softened, corrected, comforted—something in the emotional life can begin to contract. It is not simply “hardening.” It can become a kind of dryness: rigid, brittle, easily irritated, increasingly unable to receive or give tenderness. What was meant to look like holiness can slowly turn into a struggle for survival.

For some, the weight has been heavy enough to awaken thoughts of suicide—not because they lacked faith, but because they felt sentenced to permanent aloneness under the supposed will of God.

By contrast, I have seen how a marriage or committed partnership becomes one of the most demanding schools of spiritual formation. To live closely with another person is not indulgence. It exposes selfishness and calls forth patience.

Genesis tells us that even in a world unspoiled by sin, “It is not good for man to be alone.” That statement speaks not merely of sexuality, but of companionship.

As friends married and built families, what lay before many of us was not merely sexual restraint, but lifelong relational solitude.

Change, then, did not feel like ambition. It felt like necessity.

Building Hope

In the late 1980s I travelled to San Francisco to visit Love in Action, led by Frank Worthen. Frank was a pioneer. At a time when few churches wished to engage this question at all—and long before there was any cultural approval for such work—he had established a structured residential programme offering Christian community, accountability and disciplined formation to gay men and women seeking change.

What began as a visit became something far more formative. I stayed for four months, living within the programme. I shared meals around a common table. I sat in group sessions where men spoke candidly of longing and shame. I observed the daily rhythms of prayer, Bible study, household chores and pastoral supervision that gave shape to the community’s life. I wanted to understand not simply the ideas, but the practice—how such a ministry was structured, sustained, and led.

I absorbed it all: the language of restoration, the patterns of accountability, the hope that sustained Christian discipleship, faithfully applied, would reshape desire. I returned to the UK not merely impressed, but convinced—persuaded that this was compassionate obedience in action.

Something even more striking had been happening quietly in the background—before the Courage UK ministry was ever conceived.

Two or three years earlier, I had begun forming friendships with other Christian men who shared my experience. There was no plan to launch a ministry. We met because we needed companionship and faithfulness in a landscape that offered neither.

Yet in retrospect, something was already gathering.

These friendships deepened. Trust formed. We prayed together. We spoke honestly. Without naming it as such, we were becoming a community.

Only later did I realise that the very men who would form the core team of Courage were already there—almost as though they had been prepared in advance.

There had been no recruitment drive, no public call. They simply appeared—through conversations, introductions, ordinary encounters that, in retrospect, felt anything but ordinary.

It felt providential: as if God had drawn together a small band of men who loved Christ and were willing to shoulder something difficult. And many of those friendships endure to this day.

In 1988 we began Courage under the oversight of our local church, and later established a charitable trust with a board of trustees. We wanted accountability. We wanted to do this responsibly. We genuinely believed we were offering compassion.

With hindsight, it would be easy to dismiss it all as naïveté. But that would not be truthful. There was grace there. There was courage. And I do believe God was present among us.

What we did not yet understand was that God’s presence with a people does not guarantee that every framework they construct will prove sound.

That recognition would take time—and cost—it would require a complete re-thinking of everything we had understood until then.

In Search of Authority

At the time we felt an almost constant pressure to explain ourselves. Not simply to those who disagreed with us, but to those who supported us too.

The evangelical world we inhabited carried a stark assumption: if same-sex attraction existed, it must inevitably be the fruit of rebellion against God—a straightforward reading of Romans 1 applied as a settled verdict. In the eyes of many Christians, people like us were already under divine judgement, moving steadily toward destruction. Conversation seemed almost pointless. If God himself had already condemned us, what was there to discuss?

So when psychological explanations emerged offering a different narrative, we were eager to listen.

We were not psychiatrists. We were not trained therapists. We were pastors and believers trying to respond faithfully to a pastoral reality that few churches were willing to touch. And we were repeatedly told—sometimes by critics in the gay community, sometimes by professionals—that we had no right to do this work without credentials.

In a sense, they were correct. The stakes were high. People were vulnerable. We wanted to be responsible.

But what is often forgotten is that all of us were vulnerable—including those of us trying to lead.

We were not established experts. Most of us had never expected to be running ministries at all. We were simply initiative-takers responding to a problem that nobody else seemed willing to touch. Churches were largely silent. The professions were divided. And those of us wrestling with such needs for pastoral care and questions ourselves had nowhere else to go.

So the work began in the way many pioneering efforts begin: not because experts arrived with clear solutions, but because I and a handful of people decided something had to be attempted. That did not mean we possessed the wisdom the situation required. It meant only that we cared enough to try. The criticism that we lacked professional grounding was therefore not entirely unfair. Yet it left us with a genuine dilemma: where, in those years, was reliable help to be found?

Many clinicians still regarded homosexuality as pathology or lifestyle choice. Some were as committed to “change” as any evangelical minister. I even met one therapist who suggested that my deepest problem might be my religion. Perhaps he had a point. But the only remedy he offered was to abandon the faith that was central to my life.

So we found ourselves caught: criticised for lacking expertise, yet offered little credible help from the professions themselves.

In that vacuum we did what people often do. We leaned—perhaps more heavily than we realised—on those who spoke with confidence: professional confidence, spiritual confidence, psychological confidence.

The Appeal of Explanation: Elizabeth Moberly

Dr Elizabeth Moberly, a Cambridge psychologist, offered a developmental theory suggesting same-sex attraction arose from unmet early attachment needs. For many of us, this was deeply reassuring.

We were not rebellious, as it turned out. We were wounded. Wounds, after all, can heal.

Her work gave evangelical churches a language of compassion. “These men and women are not enemies of God,” some could say. “They are damaged sons and daughters—in need of restoration.”

When it came to women, the explanations offered in those circles were often far less coherent—confidently repeated and rarely evidenced: trauma, father absence, hostility toward men. Looking back, those accounts reflected cultural anxieties as much as they reflected anything solid.

But at the time, we embraced these frameworks because they offered two things we desperately needed: moral innocence, and the hope of repair.

What we did not sufficiently ask was whether the evidence justified the confidence. Moberly’s theory was purely theoretical. It had not been demonstrated through sustained therapeutic practice, and there was no long-term body of evidence showing that these developmental explanations reliably resulted in heterosexual transformation.

Yet we believed it, because we needed it.

Need is persuasive.

When Intensity Felt Like Transformation: Leanne Payne

Soon after, the ministry of Leanne Payne began influencing many charismatic evangelical circles. Her conferences emphasised repentance, inner healing, and the restoration of masculine identity. Extended, often ecstatic worship created heightened spiritual atmospheres. Bold testimonies stirred hope. Vulnerability was encouraged.

It felt powerful.

But within a short time I observed something troubling. The intensity of those gatherings did not consistently translate into lasting change.

Part of what made these settings so compelling was their emotional logic. A charged atmosphere can do something real: it can open people, soften defences, bring buried grief into the light. In such moments, a person may genuinely feel different. They may feel clean, liberated, remade. They may believe—completely sincerely—that a decisive healing has taken place.

And then the conference ends.

The person returns to ordinary life. The familiar patterns of desire return too. And now something else begins to form—not merely disappointment, but bewilderment. What happened? What did I do wrong? Was it real? Was I imagining it?

Worse still, because the “change” was publicly testified to, the private struggle carries a second weight: embarrassment. It can feel like having been taken in—like believing a promise that turned out to be far more fragile than you knew. The reaction is not unlike the shame of someone who realises they have been scammed: not only loss, but humiliation.

I cannot recall a single lasting transformation that emerged clearly and consistently from those conferences—with one often-cited exception, Leanne Payne’s student and amanuensis Mario Bergner. For most, the fruit was sparse.

And there was another mechanism at work. When expected change did not endure, it was rarely the framework that was questioned. Instead, failure was often explained in spiritual terms: insufficient surrender, insufficient repentance, insufficient faith.

I also noticed something else that troubled me deeply. A number of people began developing serious health problems while trying to sustain the internal battle indefinitely. Chronic exhaustion, breakdowns in resilience, even conditions such as epilepsy or ME began appearing in ways that felt more than coincidental.

I cannot claim a medical explanation. But pastorally it felt as though the body itself was protesting—as though something in the human person was saying: this conflict cannot continue indefinitely.

One thing has often struck me. In the Gospels, when Jesus healed someone, even his fiercest opponents never denied the reality of what had happened. They questioned his authority, or his timing, or the day on which he healed—but not the evidence. Yet in more recent church experience, when expected “healing” has not occurred, the explanation has invariably shifted to the individual’s lack of faith.

That contrast should make us pause. Not to sneer, but to ask deeper questions about how we discern what is truly of God.

Because those on the receiving end of such explanations had already endured years of raised and dashed hope. Each new promise rekindled expectation. Each disappointment deepened despair. By the time some arrived at these conferences, they were not merely fragile—they were exhausted. For a few, the emotional and spiritual collapse that followed was severe enough to awaken thoughts of suicide.

That is not something I say lightly.

Slowly and incessantly a question pressed itself upon me: If what we were calling faithfulness to God consistently produced exhaustion and despair, what exactly were we defending?

Marriage, Embodiment, and What I Had Not Understood

There is another part of this story that cannot be left out.

In 1991, during those same years of ministry and certainty, I married my dear friend Bren.

She was—and remains—an extraordinary woman: courageous, thoughtful, a natural leader long before many churches were ready to recognise women in such roles. We cared deeply for one another. We believed companionship, shared faith, and goodwill would be enough.

And for a time, our communities celebrated what they believed they were witnessing—the promise of healing fulfilled.

But gradually something became impossible to ignore.

I could offer Bren kindness, loyalty, practical care. What I could not offer was heterosexual desire. And although that absence was not immediately named, it communicated something devastating. In her own later words, she had felt like a “non-person.”

That sentence has never left me.

For years, in our theological discussions, desire (and sexual desire most especially) had been treated as secondary—even suspect. Holiness was foregrounded; embodiment was muted. Yet marriage—whether straight or gay—is not sustained by duty alone. Desire is not an optional accessory to intimacy. It is woven into the core and life of a relationship.

Watching our marriage struggle taught me something no theory had: embodiment matters. Affection matters. Being desired matters.

When churches speak as though desire were either sinful or spiritually irrelevant, they risk discipling disembodied people—and no such people exist.

This was not simply a personal sorrow. It was a theological education.

To omit desire from our theology of relationships is not a small adjustment. It is to remove oxygen from the room.

And it prepared me to recognise a change I had not expected to see.

When the Fruit Changed

Meanwhile, within Courage itself, something quieter was unfolding.

Some members had reached a point of exhaustion. “This isn’t working,” they would say. A few made a conscious decision to step outside the framework and meet other gay people—simply to see what life might hold.

For many people the real turning point had come with a deeper question: “Who am I, really, before God?”

Not merely someone experiencing an unwanted temptation. Not simply a problem to be solved. But a whole person—capable of love, intimacy, commitment, and faith—whose orientation happened to be towards someone of the same sex.

When that question was faced honestly, something shifted. The struggle was no longer simply about behaviour. It was about identity before God.

This was a bewildering step into unknown territory. They were leaving the relatively protected world of evangelical Christian culture and entering a landscape for which they had no map. Many did not see this as a step of faith at all. On the contrary, they feared they might be stepping outside God’s will entirely. They were certainly not walking toward what they believed to be God’s blessing. In many cases they believed they were walking into darkness.

Yet, as time passed, something surprising became clear in retrospect: God had not abandoned them there. Even in that uncertain territory, they found themselves slowly guided—sometimes falteringly, sometimes through mistakes—but not alone.

Not every story was neat. There were misjudgements. One man joked he’d had to “kiss a lot of frogs before finding his prince.” But I did not observe moral collapse. What I saw instead was a gradual calming. When people stopped waging war against themselves, something inside them began to settle.

Then one of our former members—a man who had once attempted suicide—telephoned me one day, his voice transformed: “I’ve fallen in love.” When I met him and his partner together, I saw tenderness, attentiveness, delight, commitment.

Across other lives I noticed the same pattern. The frantic self-surveillance softened. Laughter returned. Emotional steadiness grew. Prayer re-emerged—not as desperate pleading to change, but as quiet communion.

Often people came to speak with me expecting rejection. They would describe their new experiences cautiously, sometimes almost apologetically. Occasionally they would refer to someone they had met without even using a name — as though the person did not quite deserve one.

At those moments I would sometimes ask gently, “What is his first name?” After all, God knows people by name—even those we assume to be far outside the boundaries of faith.

Once we began speaking about real people rather than anonymous encounters, something shifted. It became possible to notice signs of grace even in places where we had long assumed God could not possibly be present.

Sometimes I would say, tentatively, “Perhaps God has been present in this process all along.”

And I noticed something remarkable. The tension people had carried into the conversation would visibly ease. Many left looking as though a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders—not because every question had been resolved, but because they no longer felt they had to hide their lives from God.

If despair had been the fruit of our certainty, and integration was appearing where we predicted rebellion, something required re-examination.

Re-formation: The Wilderness Years

In 2000, Courage UK publicly shifted its pastoral stance to affirm committed same-sex partnerships. The announcement was clear. The implications were not simple.

We had to rethink formation, discipleship, and what constituted spiritual health. Much of what we had assumed about change, calling, and obedience had to be revisited. In many ways we were learning in public.

The transition was not tidy. But it was necessary.

Thirteen years later, Exodus International (a coalition of ex-gay ministries) closed, publicly acknowledging that its central promise had not been realised. For many of us who had once looked to that movement for guidance, it marked the end of an era.

Yet what we were discovering had already begun long before.

When fruit consistently contradicts our frameworks, theology requires re-formation.

And re-formation takes time.

Sometimes I have thought of Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep. In the Gospel story the shepherd goes searching for the one who is lost. Yet in too many churches the search never seemed to begin. The sheep were left to fend for themselves, while the wolves waited patiently at the edge of the field.

Belonging: Finding an Integrated Life

For me personally, belonging took time.

It was another twenty-two years before I was formally welcomed into membership in my local parish church—not because the parish had adopted an ideological or inclusive label, but because the vicar believed that when he could see someone who sincerely seeks to follow Christ, the Church should make room.

There remain those who disagree with my theological conclusions. They are welcome. And I am welcome.

That lived tension may be closer to authentic Christian community than uniformity ever was.

Closure and an Unexpected Kindness

After 25 years, Courage UK closed in 2012. It had completed its season.

But the story did not end in fracture.

My marriage to Bren came to a gracious conclusion. In August 2020, I had the privilege of walking her down the aisle as she married Tim. Placing her hand in his remains one of the most redemptive moments of my life. There was no bitterness. Only gratitude that grace had proved larger than our earlier certainty.

That same year, in a small service (at the local United Reformed Church) during Covid restrictions, I married Paolo.

For the first time in my life, desire and discipleship were no longer in tension. There was no internal argument to silence, no performance to maintain. There was simply ease—a sense of integration I had not known before.

I did not feel I was offering God a compromise. I felt I was offering him honesty.

After a journey of forty years, that felt like grace.

What I Learned About God

This journey was never ultimately about sexuality. It was about God.

If Jesus reveals the Father, then any theology that repeatedly produces despair must be re-examined.

Fruit is not everything. But fruit is not nothing.

If your theology produces secrecy, exhaustion, self-hatred—pause.

If it produces integrity, steadiness, and prayerfulness—pay attention.

I have deconstructed and reconstructed my theology more than once. That has not weakened my faith. It has deepened it.

Because what matters most is not being right, but being truthful before God.

Truthfulness is sacred ground.

Again and again, as people spoke honestly about their lives—sometimes fearfully, expecting condemnation—I found myself returning to the same discovery: Jesus did not withdraw. He welcomed them.

Not with conditions attached. Not with the quiet threat of rejection if they failed to improve. Simply with the same invitation he offered so often in the Gospels: Come.

“You will know the truth,” he says, “and the truth will set you free.”

God does not need defending. God needs reflecting.

And Christ is not afraid of the truth.

Which means we need not be either.

Jeremy Marks, 5th March 2026