Coming Out: Five Things Parents Must Do—Part 1

Coming Out: Five Things Parents Must Do:

It is a far too common experience today for a Christian parent to discover their child identifies as gay or transgender. If you have heard this news from your son or daughter, you know that this can be a devastating experience. The initial shock of trying to process all that you’ve just heard, and the waves of emotions and feelings that can follow, can be a very disorienting thing for a parent. It is difficult to know what to do when you’re thinking of how to best love your child while moving them towards walking in the truth of the gospel.

Well, through this blog series, I want to give you five things you can do to help your child. Now, these five things won’t guarantee that your child will change, but they can be used by God to stir up his or her heart, and also to help orient you in this process.

Get to Know Your Child

The first thing I want to give you is, you need to get to know your child. Now, this might seem like unhelpful advice to consider, but I really do want you to think: do you really know what has led up to your child’s decision to identify this way? It’s possible that they have been wrestling with these thoughts and desires for years. Although that initial disclosure is a difficult thing for you to hear from your child, it took great courage for them to disclose this to you.

Lead with Compassion

You want to lead with compassion in this. Listen to what their experience has been like. This is one of the best ways that you can actually love them. Invite them to share their story with you. Ask them, “When did these feelings first begin? What was it like growing up in a Christian home and church while wrestling with these thoughts? Were you isolated? Was this hard for you?” And even ask, “How do you envision living out your sexuality or gender from here? And what do you want our relationship to look like now that this is out in the open?”

Now, this is by no means meant to interrogate your child or find out all the specific or graphic details of their sin. I simply want to encourage you to seek to know where they are coming from, seek to know their experience, and be moved by compassion. By doing this, you’re not affirming their decision to identify in this way, but this can lead you to have deeper conversations that move to their heart and not just stay with their behavior.

God at Work

God can use conversations like this to strengthen your relationship with your child, to lead you to talk about past relational hurts or experiences that have impacted them, and even make them more receptive to hearing from you when you’re speaking truth to them, in a way that they will receive it, because you’ve taken time to know their experience. And I also want to encourage you: if you’re a little farther removed from your child’s initial disclosure, it is never too late to have these conversations. You might just be surprised by what they share.