How can I minister to a family member who is practicing homosexuality?

When a family member is actively homosexual and does or doesn't want to be in the family it creates incredible tensions. You face questions like "Can I bring my partner home for Thanksgiving dinner?" or sentiments of "I never want to darken the door of your house again."

We want to combine compassion and conviction.

We don't want to lose the conviction that God says that to relate to a man or a woman in an unnatural way is sin. That's the conviction we hold. In fact, it's a very dangerous sin that, if you don't repent of it, will destroy you.

Yet we want to be compassionate because these are human beings created in the image of God and they're in our own families. And once upon a time perhaps they professed faith, so they may be struggling at a level that is still inside the house of faith.

For those reasons we want to express to them our love: "We want to help you, we don't want to exclude you." "We want to bless you; but you have to understand that we seek it within the context of moral judgments rooted in Scripture, because they are for your good."

You want to somehow keep communicating to them through emails, letters, personal contacts, and lunches in which you are saying to them, "I want your best."

If the person is a professing Christian then you've got a complicated issue, because then the Bible calls for a kind of holy ostracism. It says you don't hang out with a brother who is living in sin. You say to that person, "You need to change, or we can't hang out together." But if the person is not a believer then you treat it like evangelism, and you move forward in the kinds of outreach that can exist even within the family.

One more thing: Investigate and find out those ministries where they have some experience in dealing with folks who've walked through this and are willing to help. So you might acquaint your family member with such a ministry and, though they might reject it at first, in some dark night they might say, "I should give this number a call." And somebody who ten years ago was where they are but is now free might have incredible power to help them move to where they want to be.

So it would be good for them to know about delivering ministries that can help people cross the line from homosexual lives back into lives that are biblically structured.