Thanks to Equip’s faithful donors and volunteers, over the past seven years we’ve been able to deliver more than 400 care packages to homeless LGBT+ teens and young adults. God delights in the good work of His people! Celebrate with us all the ways our volunteers and donors have blessed the most vulnerable of the LGBT+ community this year and in years past. If you have ever attended a care package party or giving toward the purchase of gifts and backpacks, thank you. This work would be impossible without you.
When an expert in the law asks, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus’s reply in Luke 10 reveals that it’s the people around us who our neighbors, whether we have anything in common with them or not. And we are to love and care for our neighbors in the same way we love and care for ourselves. For those of us in Nashville, that includes homeless LGBT+ teens.
Some of the most vulnerable of the LGBT+ community are teens and young adults. Though LGBT+ people make up less than 7% of the total US population, approximately 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBT+. In fact, LGBT+ youth have a 120% higher risk of homelessness than heterosexual and cisgender youth. Though the numbers fluctuate month to month, approximately 3,500 people in Nashville experience homelessness at any given time. Statistically, about 120 of them are LGBT+ teens and young adults.
Many of these teens became homeless when conservative, religious parents forced them to leave home when their same-sex attractions or gender incongruence was revealed. Some have run away from home due to a family member reacting violently after they came out. Nearly all of them have had negative experiences with Christians or Christianity.
These teens and young adults are our neighbors. Neighbors we are called to love and serve. So each year, Equip volunteers put together care packages that go to individuals who are served by a nonprofit right here in Nashville that helps at-risk LGBT+ teens and young adults by providing overnight emergency shelter, a shower, and a hot meal during the cold winter months. Thanks to generous donors and those who attended the Care Package Party, 40 backpacks filled with snacks, gifts, and notes of encouragement went out to LGBT+ homeless teens and young adults this week in Nashville!
These care packages are a small part in a bigger work
We want our churches and homes to be places where LGBT+ Christians thriving according to historic sexual ethics becomes ordinary and where parents and pastors are equipped to tell a better story of God’s love and wisdom for LGBT+ people.
Sadly, it’s often difficult for many LGBT+ people to believe that God loves them or that His plans for sex, sexuality, and gender are worth following. They entered the closet at a young age and had to make sense of their sexuality or gender with only the lies of the Enemy and culture to guide them. They didn’t see any LGBT+ Christians thriving in their faith or experiencing healthy belonging and family when they followed God’s wisdom. And their pastors and parents weren’t equipped to speak God’s better story of love and wisdom over them.
Though 86% of LGBT+ people grow up attending church, over half of them will eventually leave the Christian faith. And gay teens are 5 times more likely to die by suicide than their straight peers, due in part to the rejection they experience at the hands of those who claim to be Christians.
So we hope these care packages play a small role in these young adults’ lives as a bright spot in what might be a dark holiday season spent without family and without a place to call home.
Will you join us in praying for the teens and young adults who received a care package?
Bless now, O Lord, these care packages,
that they might be received as evidence of Your mercy.
While these care packages might provide passing happiness,
we pray they would also stir the hearts of their recipients in some deeper way,
as a small echo of a greater grace.
Christ, you are the gift of God who gave all, gives all, and is all.
So let these care packages be offered in great love,
and received as humble expressions of a holy hospitality
and reminders of a divine kindness.
May our acts of service and giving be met and multiplied
by the mysterious workings of Your Holy Spirit
who weaves all things together toward a redemption more good and glorious
than we yet have eyes to see
or courage to hope for.
May our love and our labors now echo Your love and Your labors, O Lord.
Use these care packages for works of love and mercy
and for the increase of Your glory.
Amen.
