Gifted by Otherness: Gay and Lesbian Christians in the Church

By L. William Countryman and M. R. Ritley. Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse Publishing, 2001. x + 164 pp. $16.95 (paper).

L. William Countryman, Episcopal priest and Sherman E. Johnson Professor in Biblical Studies at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and M. R. Ritley, associate presbyter at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Francisco, have gifted the entire church with a book that refuses to follow predictable patterns. This is not another plea for acceptance. They do not try to persuade the rest of the church that lesbian and gay Christians can be faithful to Scripture and tradition. Instead they simply begin from the conviction that the grace they have encountered-as gay and Christian-is no illusion. This involves something of a wager, but then whose faith does not?

While others are invited to listen, the authors' primary audience is "God's gay tribe" (p. 110), by which they mean Christians (and others) whose spiritual awakening involves discovering and affirming a sexual identity that differs from prevailing patterns. They ask those of us who fit that description to stop fretting over the church's acceptance or rejection and to start "creating a gay spiritual understructure powerful enough to reshape the very terms in which the Church perceives and understands us" (p. 4).

Each chapter can be read as approaching this common theme from a different angle. For the most part, Ritley and Countryman take turns telling their individual stories and exploring overlapping themes such as Scripture, tradition, grace, sexuality, spiritual formation, and ministry. Countryman's story is that of a lifelong Christian who planned from childhood to teach in a seminary and who only came to terms with his sexuality in midlife, after Stonewall and after having become a husband and father. Ritley, on the other hand, stopped going to church at thirteen and came out at eighteen, before Stonewall, stumbled onto Sufi wisdom taught by a gay mystic, and then stumbled into the Episcopal Church at the end of her thirties. Small wonder, then, that both authors speak of grace in terms of surprise.

Again and again, the authors exhibit how, for them, coming to terms with their sexuality and coming to terms with God are inseparable (though not always recognized). And in so doing they repeatedly summon other gay and lesbian Christians to find grace-full moments in the often painful twists and turns of their own stories. Discovering such moments and celebrating them with the church is perhaps the most crucial ministry God's gay tribe can pursue. Indeed, the church's very identity depends on it. "We have been called to bring the totality of ourselves into the community, which is precisely what has formed the richness of Christianity. The Church has gathered strange and contradictory elements and held them together in a single community. It must never settle for being a club of like-minded people, but a living organism in which opposites fight and woo each other, and ultimately yield new beings" (p. 28).

Those who want to rehash old arguments will doubtless need to look elsewhere. The authors consistently refuse to engage them. But those who want to pause in wonder at the utter strangeness of God's summons will be delighted to find a book that finally speaks to and for them.

Charles Allen

Christian Theological Seminary

Indianapolis, Indiana

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 2003
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