An Army Rising
‘I will rouse your sons, O Zion…and make you like a warrior’s sword.’ (Zech. 9: 13)
In spite of scandal and slumber, the Roman Catholic Church remains the most cohesive and powerful voice for sexual morality in the world today. If the annual Courage Conference last weekend is any indication, she is rediscovering that voice in proclaiming and administering wholeness to those with same-sex attraction.
Under Father Paul Check’s sound direction, Courage–the RCC’s official arm of pastoral care for Catholics with SSA—gathers priests, religious, therapists, and laity to raise up the Church’s foundations. These core truths define who we are as sexual beings and how Jesus through the Church restores our original dignity.
Last week’s conference combined incisive teaching, testimony, and worship. Like swords, leaders and strugglers alike were sharpened by the truth which is our freedom, a truth that exposes false compassion and justice in order to become the basis for a humbled people, arising to become His Body, broken for one another.
We confessed together: what the Church upholds about sexual wholeness, she has often failed to live. The compromised Body has allowed her mouth to be gagged, her hands tied by the lie that ‘gay is good’; she has opted to be ‘nice’, not morally beautiful, in her response to those with SSA.
Though the Bride has shrunk back from her own inheritance, the Bridegroom is raising up churchmen and women who are willing to stand upon the truth, to embody it. Might we become an expression of the Gospel so splendid and stern that it has power to welcome home the prodigal, and to raise the sin-sick from the dead?
Together we admitted we had been broken by the world’s version of homosexuality. Together we arose in unity to manifest the emerging beauty of our true humanity. Jesus is preparing us, His broken Body, to become an army whose offense lies solely in the beauty of Jesus, the ground and crown of our freedom.
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