I fear that rather than establishing a faithful path for Christians, Revoice is precipitating a grievous division in the American church. They do this first by grounding their reading of the Scriptures in secular ideology, second by insisting the disagreements about identity are purely semantic, and third by claiming to uphold a biblical sexual ethic while at the same time embracing those who reject this ethic, calling them Christian brothers and sisters.

Revoice 2021 Together met in October 2021 in Dallas to encourage what they call “sexual minorities” within the church to obedience, to reach out evangelistically to LGBTQ people, and to minister to “sexual majority” Christians. The conference featured Eve Tushnet, Preston Sprinkle, Greg Johnson, Misty Irons, Greg Coles, and many other speakers, as well as panels on gender minorities, racial minorities, and women. With an emphasis on community support (reflected in the theme “together”), the speakers called the gathered assembly to be obedient to a biblical sexual ethic, as well as acknowledging the pain that the church has caused to those who identify as LGBTQ.
Revoice 2021 positions itself in the theological mainstream, as if the controversies surrounding the conference and movement are purely semantic. The wider evangelical church, for example, by policing the language of people who identify as LGBTQ, are said to erect artificial barriers for entrance into the kingdom of God, akin to those of New Testament era Judaizers. Revoice, as a movement, is prepared to forgive and reach out to those in the church who are complicit in this grave sin, but the church should repent and move on from these kinds of debates for the sake of mission and the witness of the gospel.
Rather than a purely semantic disagreement over whether or not to use the word “gay,” the language applied to self-hood and identity by Revoice points to underlying philosophical and theological assumptions that Christians should identify themselves by sexual behavior and inclinations, grounding this identification in a secular gender ideology rather than the Scriptures. Furthermore, by framing the semantic issues as Side A and Side B — referring often to “Side A brothers and sisters” — they make the question of sexuality, both behavior and identity, to be adiaphora, a non-essential issue that Christians are free to disagree about. Rather than a “slippery slope,” both the ideology and language that Revoice is embracing will eventually take them over a spiritual cliff.
“The Gospel is for men as they are and as they think they are,” writes John Taylor in The Primal Vision: Christian Presence amid African Religion. He wrote in the middle of the last century, half a world away from the debates and controversies surrounding Revoice — an “annual gathering for Christians who are sexual minorities” seeking to “flourish in historic Christian traditions.” Taylor asks, “What has the Christian, present in such a world, to share or to learn about the self?” He posits one answer to that question — which is ours as well — with a line by Dr. J. H. Oldham: “The individual self has no independent existence which gives it the power to enter into relationships with other selves. Only through living intercourse with other selves can it become a self at all.” As if to take up that very work, Revoice’s 2021 theme was “Together.” That word encompasses, for them, the extraordinary communion they share because of their various sexual identities. Though they cannot engage in the actions associated with those identities — sex — experiencing sexual identity provides a deeper and richer sense of what it means to be human in relationship to other people. Their LGBTQ posture toward the world offers a baptism of affirmation to those of every sexual orientation.
With calls to be fabulous, to worship and adore Christ, but overall to be obedient, the speakers at Revoice, though at times defensive in their articulation of frustration and pain, positioned themselves as the new theological mainstream. Rather than continuing a protracted and contentious argument with critical voices in the church, they see themselves both as forging a way forward that reaches out evangelically to a world soaked in LGBTQ assumptions, and as uniquely called to minister to a too long ascendant Christian sexual majority culture.
I was by turns heartened and troubled as I watched the Revoice21 Together conference, the fourth conference since its founding in 2018. To stand publicly for sexual fidelity in celibacy and marriage and to proclaim the universal need for repentant belief in the gospel in a decadent time such as this is, to understate it, courageous. And, from that exposed and isolated position, especially when considering the grief represented in a room full of people who also feel rejected by other Christians, it is understandable that the leaders and speakers of Revoice would say that purely semantic matters of identity are settled. Continued disputes threaten to destroy the witness and mission of the whole church.
Nevertheless, I fear that rather than establishing a faithful path for Christians, Revoice is precipitating a grievous division in the American church. They do this first by grounding their reading of the Scriptures in secular ideology, second by insisting the disagreements about identity are purely semantic, and third by claiming to uphold a biblical sexual ethic while at the same time embracing those who reject this ethic, calling them Christian brothers and sisters.
If Revoice were to listen, however painfully, to what their critics are trying to say, it might be possible for the fissures to be mended and unity in the church to be restored. However, from the murky theological and philosophical assumptions articulated by many speakers, as well as the repeated reference to people who call themselves “Side A Christians” (people who believe that God has created and blessed monogamous homosexual relationships) as “our Side A brothers and sisters,” I fear it will not be so.
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Your desires for love are, at root, good. They’re innate, inescapable desires for Christ. And yet sin distorts our desires for love and leads them astray (sometimes far astray). That means romance can be a friend or a god, an ally or an enemy. So don’t run from your holy desires, and don’t idolize them. Make your earthly loves (or potential earthly loves) serve your first and greater love for God.

Before romance became an ally for me, it was a terrorist, because it had become a god.
It was a subtle god, of course. But subtle gods — money, sports, career success, relationships — often wield more functional authority than the gods of organized religion. You may find more devotion in sports arenas, movie theaters, board meetings, and social media threads than in many pews. And the worshipers of those gods gather seven days a week. Through my teens and twenties, I read my Bible regularly and rarely missed church, but if you watched really closely, you might have assumed that marriage, not God, was the only pleasure great enough to fill my restless soul.
I dated too young, and too often, and took those relationships too far, emotionally and physically. Through those failures, I discovered just how desperately I needed forgiveness and redemption. And I learned that dating (and marriage, and sex, and family) would never satisfy all I desired. Because romance had become a god, I betrayed God — the one true and living God — to serve my golden calf. Relationship after relationship, I was burning down the gold he had given me to fashion something that might more immediately meet my longings.
By God’s grace, like Saul along the road to Damascus, romance was dramatically converted in my story from murderous terrorist to servant of Christ. So if you, like me, have bowed at the altars of romantic affection and intimacy, I hope to open your eyes to a greater Love (and a greater, more fulfilling vision for earthly love). I hope you’ll begin to see how romantic love is simultaneously at the core of what’s right and beautiful about this world (hence why dating and marriage can be so thrilling and satisfying), and yet also at the core of what can be so wrong (why the two can be so destructive and devastating).
Your Good Desires for Love
My desire for romantic love, even as a naive, impulsive teenager, wasn’t totally dysfunctional. I was experiencing something that God had created in me. After all, he himself says, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord” (Proverbs 18:22). That means he who wants a wife wants a good thing, and wants favor from God.
We see the goodness of romance in the very first paragraphs of Scripture. Notice how the first six days of God’s masterpiece come to a climax: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . .’” (Genesis 1:26). He’s lit the stage, hung the moon, carved the seashores, formed the mountains, planted the flowers, unleashed the birds, and uncaged the bears. Now he’ll put something of himself on that wild and wondrous stage — he’ll pick up handfuls of dust and mold the kind of creature his Son will one day be.
So God created man in his own image,in the image of God he created him . . .
But that’s not all he said. And that he says more gets to why I innately had such high, even unrealistic expectations of romance.
So God created man in his own image,in the image of God he created him;male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26–27)
Not just male, but male and female. And a few verses later, they were no longer separately male and female, but one flesh. When God sculpted his image into creation, he didn’t just make a man — he made a man and a woman, together. He made a marriage. Marital love, at its best, tells the story the universe was made to tell, about the love within God himself (Father, Son, and Spirit), and the love of that Son for his bride, the church.
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Mark isn’t finished with the wilderness at the mention of John. He will have Jesus in the wilderness for his temptation. This too is intentional. God, through Mark, wants us to see that Jesus enters into the wilderness in order to redeem it. He enters into the place of our greatest shame, emptiness, brokenness, and he redeems it. This is why Mark is so adamant about having us see John as in the wilderness. It’s his way of tying us back to all of the hope of the Old Testament and eventually showing us how Jesus is the Great Rescuer.

Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey.
–Mark 1:6
Mark tells the story of Jesus in a little over 11,000 words. That’s 7-8000 less words than Matthew and Luke. He is concise, intentional, and action-packed. This begs the question, why stop and tell us about the clothing and diet of John the Baptist?
Why Even Tell Us About John?
Doesn’t it seem a tad strange that Mark begins by saying, “this is the gospel of Jesus Christ…” then he proceeds to tell us about some guy named John? What is he doing here? There is no birth narrative. We don’t know where Jesus came from…but we know that he came on the scene at the same time as some strange dude baptizing people out in the wilderness? What is Mark doing by starting his gospel account out in the wilderness?
The wilderness was an empty, abandoned, wasteland. It was symbolic of the wandering Israelites—a place that was spiritually bankrupt. You don’t want to go to the wilderness. But Mark wants us to start there. Why?
Mark starts in the wilderness because it will be out of this emptiness that great hope is found. The wilderness is the place where our nakedness and vulnerability is fully exposed. It’s the place where we are stripped of our own efforts and resources and are forced to rely solely upon God. It is because of the pruning of the wilderness that it became a place of hope and new beginnings. The wilderness is also the place where Israel will find God’s love for them and rekindle their love for God. This is why around the time of Jesus there were many desert dwellers waiting upon God for salvation.
Mark tells us about John the Baptizer as a bridge to the prophetic hope of the Old Testament. He quotes from Exodus, Isaiah, and Malachi to place John as the fulfillment of this out of the wilderness time of renewal—where a prophet like Elijah would prepare the way for the Lord Himself. That’s why John appears at the beginning of Mark’s gospel.
Why Mention His Diet and Dress?
If John is in the gospel account to serve as a bridge to the Old Testament, it would do us well to walk across that bridge and make the connections that Mark is intending.
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