Owerri is a Christian city in the way that water is wet. My family was in church every Sunday and most weekday evenings. I sang. I knew the hymns before I could read them. I believed, and I want to be clear about this because people assume that a gay man who writes about the church must be writing to settle a score: I believed, and I believe.
What was preached
The sermons were not subtle. Homosexuality was an abomination, a Western disease, a spirit to be cast out, the reason for every misfortune from the exchange rate to the rainy season. Pastors who could not agree on anything else agreed on that. And I sat there, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and learned to keep my face still while a man with a microphone explained that God hated me.
I prayed to be changed. Every night for years. I fasted. I went forward at altar calls. I read every verse that was quoted at me and every verse that was not. Nothing changed, and slowly I understood that the silence was not God refusing me. It was God declining to fix what was not broken.
God never answered the prayer to change me. He answered the other one.
The prayer
At some point, and I cannot tell you the day, I stopped praying to be different and started praying for the people like me. In the pew, mouth closed, while the congregation said amen to something else: God bless gay people. It was the only honest worship I had left. It is still the truest thing I say to God, and it is why my first memoir has that title and why the site you are reading exists at all.
The Path to God
My first book, The Path to God, is a devotional, seven steps from awakening to eternal hope, published under the name my friends use, Jay. People find it strange that the same man wrote that and God Bless Gay People. I do not. The faith was never the problem. It was the thing that kept me alive on nights when nothing else did. The problem was what people did with theirs.
To the church
I am not asking you to change your doctrine. I am asking you to count. Count the boys in your third pew who have stopped coming. Ask where they went. Some are in Lagos pretending. Some are in London. Some are in the ground. Then ask yourself whether a Gospel that produces that result is the one you were given.