stories of hope and love

Two similar - and very different - autobiographies have recently hit the bookshops and they both deserve a wide readership.

I was fortunate to hear Jayne Ozanne preach at the University Church, Oxford on the weekend her 'Just Love' volume was published. Jayne took the Gospel passage for the day (two encounters with Pharisees from the end of Mark 2 and beginning of Mark 3, where Jesus declares himself Lord of the Sabbath and then heals on the Sabbath because it is lawful to do good) and spoke powerfully about the love of God which transforms people who have been pushed down and hurt. God's love heals, restores and makes new. She read a passage from her book as she spoke, and it was a terrific mixture of exposition and proclamation of very good news indeed.

Her autobiography is at times simply a rollicking good yarn. It reads like one of the page-turning missionary tales of yore that I would devour as a callow Christian youth. Her story of profoundly trusting faith, of deep relationship with "Mister God" takes her around the globe as she works for major secular companies and extraordinary Christian agencies. She experiences the draw of financial stability and finds herself abandoning it in order to pursue the heart-calling which God gives her.

And yet through it all, there are acres of pain. Sorrow. Loneliness. This is written of with honesty but without self-pity. Jayne is repeatedly very vulnerable, and again and again offers simply a remarkable and difficult story and the bedrock of God's love which keeps her going.

There are moments of gratitude for faceless friends along the way; pain at both the lack of deep companionship and also at the fleeting nature of love. The fear of honesty in being gay and the reward in finding truth are constant undercurrents, but more than this - it is a life filled with hope and with a God whose love surprises and overwhelms. I came away from this book inspired and again filled with respect for the faithfulness and fearlessness of Jayne Ozanne.

Vicky Beeching's 'Undivided' is also very inspiring. It's a page-turner too - Vicky takes us through her meteoric rise in the Christian music world and builds up to her break down and her subsequent public self-outing in 2014 very patiently and dramatically, and I found myself deeply moved as I read this book.

I don't know Vicky; I do know her story - I think many of us who are evangelical and gay have the arc of a 'knowing we are gay, hiding we are gay, getting ill, deciding to do something, coming out, finding life is different now' story to tell. So lots of this feels familiar in a way that feels very, very real even for those of us who have never lived the life of a major Christian recording artist!

Sometimes, I wanted to stop and ask questions as I read.

An example: after Vicky comes out as gay, she finds herself repeatedly disappointed by evangelical friends and churches where once she led worship and worked because they no longer invite her to play, to sing, to dine with them. But in the earlier part of her book, she goes into great detail about how she regularly felt she built up a very distant personality, and was often by herself. It was as if she was afraid that getting close to people might mean giving herself away; she feared that letting people see she was gay could be career suicide. (Eventually, it was.) I understand the fear; but at times I wanted to ask - do you ever think if you'd not felt like you had to keep your distance beforehand, some might not have kept their distance afterwards? The only people described as close friends before her coming out are described as staying close after. The risk in being open is frighteningly described by Vicky - but I confess I felt a bit of sympathy for those who showed no understanding to her. Not for their bigotry; but because they never really knew her anyway. Their double loss, I think.

For me this was more powerful than some of Vicky's overtly theological stuff. This got me thinking about the power of fear for those of us who are gay in the church, the fear of rejection simply because of who we are, an experience-based fear which limits us from making full connections with people and so becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of exclusion. It is a terrible thing, with devastating consequences.

Jayne describes the experience of taking this risk of revealing herself to others repeatedly in her story, (and I have certainly taken it in my own life; frankly - for me, it's a risk that has played out both with success and with crushing failure) and she demonstrates how time and again God blessed those risks, even if sometimes there was rejection. In the end, Vicky's Christian music business world therefore feels an even harder place than Jayne's high-powered Anglican evangelical churches and councils. I'm glad I'm just a parish priest and have only ever brushed against the edges of either...

Both women are terrific role models. They encourage people to believe they can be Christian and gay - which is fantastic. They stand out and - through good times and bad - show God's love and his power to bring life in all its fulness.

I'm deeply grateful for both these books and wholeheartedly commend them.