GCN Radio - April 3, 2004
Transcribed by Vombatus

To listen to this episode, visit http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio

[music]

JUSTIN: Welcome to another edition of GCN Radio. I’m Justin in Raleigh, North Carolina …

BRIAN: …and in Muncie, Indiana, this is Brian. We’ve had a little bit of time off here. A few things have happened since our last show, and I’m particularly happy to be here.

JUSTIN: We have! I’m glad for you to be here, Brian. You’ve been in the hospital and we’ve been praying for you. Not everybody at GCN has been keeping up with the message boards and knows what’s going on, do you want to update us a little bit?

BRIAN: Well, briefly: I thought I had the flu but what I had instead was an excess of blood poisons building up in my system and it was related to the fact that twenty years ago I had a kidney transplant which I’ve done very, very well with, but the kidney decided that it was going to go kaput. So I am in kidney failure, and I’m now undergoing outpatient dialysis treatments. Definitely a change here in the next few weeks as I adjust to this new routine, new schedule, new diet and a lot of chemical changes in my body. But I’m feeling a lot better. I’m out of the hospital and back to work. The main thing now is my doctor wants me to stay built up and stay strong and I’ll be undergoing workup for a new kidney transplant in the next several months.

JUSTIN: Well, definitely we all need to keep you in our prayers, and I know a lot of folks at GCN already are and those who are just finding out about this right now I’m sure will do that as well.

BRIAN: Thanks. I appreciate everyone’s good wishes and nice thoughts and everyone has been so kind and I can’t say enough how much I appreciate everyone’s warmth and everyone’s prayers.

JUSTIN: Well, we love you and we don’t want anything bad to happen to you.

BRIAN: Thank you very much. Thanks for everybody’s concern. But life goes on and GCN Radio goes on and we have a very special guest today, one of my dear friends, joining me right here in the studio, our only other GCN member from Muncie… It’s Oboeguy from the message boards, Jason, my very good friend. Welcome, it’s good to have you along.

JASON: Thank you very much.

BRIAN: Jason is a very fine oboe player and flute player and great musician and that’s kind of how he and I met. We do some church music together and other projects, but we’ve just enjoyed being good friends here for the past few years.

JUSTIN: Well I feel so left out because you guys are both in the studio there in Muncie and I’m stuck all the way here in North Carolina.

BB But you sound like you’re right here, so it’s one big happy family.

[laughter]

JUSTIN: Well, normally when we do the show, our guest is somewhere else so we’re all in three different locations and it all gets edited together but this time I’m the only one by myself.

BRIAN & JASON: Awwww…

BRIAN: Justin’s all alone.

JUSTIN: Yes!

BRIAN: No, we don’t want him alone.

JUSTIN: One of these days I’ll have to come to Muncie and we’ll do a show in Muncie.

JASON: Exactly.

BRIAN: That’d be great!

JUSTIN: Or Brian, it might be easier for you to bring the studio to North Carolina.

BRIAN: I’ll just pack it right on up, I’ll be right there. Next week it’ll be right from your living room.

JUSTIN: Wonderful, fantastic.

BRIAN: And we expect the whole caviar and cheese and all that.

JUSTIN: Well, there will definitely be some Cheez… Wiz™.

[Laughter]

BRIAN: I’m sure there will be. So, Jason, tell us a little bit about some of your work. You have a very interesting job in the arts.

JASON: What I do exactly is I am a music educator for music education in arts access called Very Special Arts (VSA). It’s a national organization that reaches out to those persons with all types of mental disabilities, mainly people who are in special education classes in school. I work with 18 month olds all the way up to adult age. So I span the whole lifespan. Well, I teach, and we have age-appropriate classes for each age level. We work with community schools in our area to give them arts enrichment in their lives that they would not otherwise have through the school corporation, and it’s just a beautiful program to reach these children and adults. It’s so rewarding and it’s truly changed my life and I can’t imagine not doing that. So that’s part of my life, what I do. My other part I do, as Brian said, I’m a flutist and oboist and I’m a singer and I love gigging around doing chamber music at churches, for classical concerts, and musical theatre. I recently accepted in November a music director position at a small Methodist church in town.

BRIAN: And this is indeed a small, small church.

JASON: Methodist church. The youngest people are a couple who are 55; the oldest member in the congregation, she is 96. Very elderly congregation, very conservative. Sweet people, though. But the minister is quite intriguing. I was raised by my grandparents and raised to be who I am. I was so blessed, I was allowed to be me, being gay. And I feel so fortunate that I had them. So with that liberal upbringing, I come to this point in my life where I’m this music director at a conservative church, and it’s been a challenge. I think through God I’m being taught tolerance. What Brian and I, we giggle about, is two weeks ago—actually, I laugh now, but I was quite upset—Pastor Bob, gave a sermon about… it started off very nice, actually, it was very inspiring about how Winston Churchill to a class of high school graduates, “Never give up”. And that was great! I was getting all jazzed about that because in life at time we just want to give up, you know, but this was going to a good point, or so I thought. Halfway through it, it took a horrific turn, so to speak. He told the congregation—mind you, I told you the age range of these people—“I have fallen into sin in my life.” He’s in his second marriage. He had a first marriage, of course. And this is what he goes on to say: “In my first marriage, I fell into sin. My wife brought in pornography because she though I needed it. She bought me movies and magazines that had porno pictures in them because she thought I needed it. She got me movies with porno themes, because she though I needed it. She took me to motels with pornography playing because she thought I needed it!” Now, mind you, everyone, he is blaming the woman in this. He’s taking no actions for his sins, or responsibility… it’s just total chaos and horrible. Typical straight man. But anyway! So then he went on to say—now this is where it gets really bad—that doesn’t rule out the sins of prostitution, homosexuality, and murder. He lumped that all together. And I was ready to just stand up and say, “Wait a minute, brother.” I was very upset. After church, some of the ladies in the congregation who are sweet and know me saw that I was very upset and said, “Please do not leave us, we need you.”

JUSTIN: Now, Jason, are you out to this congregation?

JASON: Uh, no, I never came out. But there is one member who does know. She’s seventy-five and she is, like, a big advocate for me. And I know that some of them know and just don’t care; it’s not an issue for them. I don’t talk about it, they don’t talk about it. Me being gay is not my job there, it’s me bringing music, through ministry, to praise God in this church. That is my mission there. Not, “Oh, am I gay, am I straight”, that’s not what it’s all about. But it is my problem when he’s preaching about who I am as totally wrong and sinful, since I obviously do not believe that way. The one woman who knows me said, “Honey, if you want to glitter and be gay, praise the Lord, because that is who you are and no one has the right to tell us to not be who we are.” And that was uplifting, she says, “This church needs you, please do not resign.” Because I was very tempted to resign. So, in light of hard times, I guess my theme is that God never does a thing unnecessarily(??). So I felt I really had to give this over.

JUSTIN: You know what’s interesting is that I’ve found that there are a lot of conservative Christians who are very down on gay people and really want nothing to do with us. There are others, though, who take a very conservative approach, but they view homosexuality as a sin in the same way that they view these other behaviors as he was mentioning. And in a roundabout sort of way, it may be that what he was trying to say is that he’s no better or worse than anyone else, because he has these same sins in his life. Which is frustrating for us because we’re not viewing our sexuality as a behavior, something that we’re doing, but rather as part of our identity, this is part of who we are.

JASON: Exactly.

JUSTIN: This is the only way we know to be. It’s not something that we can choose to do or not to do. It’s not as simple as whether or not you have porn in the house.

JASON: Well, right. I guess that’s what really upset me is that I just felt like no matter where I was, even if it wasn’t a church service, I think that’s very self-righteous to do because it wasn’t about a sermon, it was a self-therapy session for him and that definitely was not appropriate. I just felt so weird after that, that I couldn’t believe that I was serving in this church! But the thing is, that was just about him, it wasn’t about the church as a whole and that’s not why I’m there.

BRIAN: I wanted to ask both of you, what do you do in a situation where there is an issue in the church that we do not agree with? Do you leave over it, or how do you reconcile things?

JASON: What I have done, sometimes I think I agree to disagree. If I feel comfortable enough with members of the church, I’ll talk about that with them. Because they certainly were abuzz after this certain issue with the minister’s sermon. They agreed with me that that was really out of place, and that’s as far as I felt comfortable going. I wasn’t at that point going to come out to them, per se, but they, the congregation, made me feel very welcome and never made me feel like I was out of sorts. I think a lot of it is our attitude… you know me, Brian, I love people and I don’t like to be in disarray with anyone.

JUSTIN: I think it also depends to some degree on the issue and the circumstances.

JASON: Right.

JUSTIN: You know, I’ve been in churches where I thought that they were on target for the most part, but there were some things I didn’t agree with. And in those cases, usually I’m okay to stay there and I just recognize that I don’t necessarily agree with everything that’s preached from the pulpit. But then, there are times that a particular issue is too much of a hindrance, and you say, “You know what, I really think…” Either it’s a big theological difference or it’s just that you don’t feel welcomed for whatever reason. It’s very difficult to worship in a church if you don’t feel welcomed. And I think like you say, there can be churches where maybe they don’t agree with you theologically, but they still make you feel welcome.

BRIAN: It’s always a personal decision; it’s always a prayerful decision to make.

JUSTIN: It is, definitely.

BRIAN: And that’s why I wanted to have Jason share his story today is because I think that these things happen.

JUSTIN: Oh yeah, absolutely.

BRIAN: What else can we add today? Anything else that we should be discussing?

JASON: I think that—just something that’s been on my mind for a while—is that just everything happening in our world, the way it is, I just hate all these barriers, and segregations in society… that we’re here, and something that the Bible does teach that is so true and evident, as human beings we were created to act in love and kindness with one another and walk humbly with our God. There’s a song that has that text. And I just love it because that’s what I attempt and try to do everyday, because it think that that’s what it’s all about, no matter the orientation, the gender, the race… just give it a shot, give it a chance to reach out to someone you may feel that friction with. And try, try to reach out in love and kindness.

JUSTIN: Yeah, that’s definitely important that we can’t lose sight of the fact that we are here, in large part, to show God’s love to the rest of the world. And that means everybody, not just the people that you happen to like or agree with the majority of the time.

JASON: Justin, I think that you’ve done a wonderful job in creating an online community for that to take place, and I need to spend more time… I’m guilty of that, I’ve not done that…I need to spend more time in embracing that community online and maybe this summer I’ll get a chance to meet some of these wonderful people. I think how beautiful that is that you’ve done that and that’s really awesome.

JUSTIN: I would definitely love to meet some more of the folks from GCN and I’m working on projects as fast as I can.

BRIAN: Projects?! Not you, you’re not working on projects, Justin.

JUSTIN: Oh, my goodness gracious. I’m working really hard on a project and I don’t want to say what it is just yet but everyone will find out soon. Actually a couple of projects and you’ll find out more about that fairly soon, but that’s going on.

BRIAN: That’s great.

JUSTIN: Oh, and I just have to share this because this is funny to me. Ever since, because we’re incorporated and we’re a corporate entity and a non-profit, you would not believe how much mail I get.

BRIAN: Wow!

JUSTIN: You think that you get a lot of junk mail just as an individual? Try being the mailing address for a corporation. I get so much mail to my apartment trying to sell me business supplies. I get these big, thick office supply catalogs and all kinds of stuff. And it’s funny to me because I got an envelope that had something in it. I could tell, I mean, it had a big, bulky place in the envelope. And so I was intrigued and I opened it up. And it’s from a company that sells personalized pens, and they sent me a pen that says GayChristian.Net on it.

BRIAN: Oh, awesome!

JUSTIN: And it’s a really nice pen, too! It’s not one of those little cheap kind of pens that you buy in packs of ten or twenty. It’s a great pen that writes really well. So I’ve got this really nice pen that says GayChristian.Net.

JASON: That is wonderful.

JUSTIN: But I’m not going to order any because we can’t really afford to be personalizing pens right now and I don’t know what we would do with personalized pens anyway. Unless somebody really wants personalized pens. If there are people out there who are just dying to have GCN pens, let me know and then we’ll see what we can do.

BRIAN: Well, I think we’ve come to the end of another great show. Jason, what a pleasure to have you today, thank you so much.

JASON: Well, thank you for having me come on here.

BRIAN: We hope, maybe next time you come on we’ll do some music together.

JASON: That would be awesome.

BRIAN: And Justin, as always, it was great to have you along and we’ll look forward to having everyone along next time. And as always you can listen to us online anytime at www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio. E-mail us at gcnradio@gaychristian.net.

JUSTIN: And you can e-mail me directly at justin@gaychristian.net. Brian, make sure that you get some rest this week, please?

BRIAN: I will.

JUSTIN: Take care of yourself, and I’m sure everyone will be patient if we have to wait a little longer in between radio episodes while you’re getting some rest.

BB Well, thank you. Everyone’s been great about letting me have some rest time. Well, thank you so much everybody. From Muncie, Indiana, this is Brian and Jason…

JUSTIN: And I’m Justin, way over here by myself in Raleigh. Y’all take care!