For Christians who oppose Pride Month and the LGBTQ community’s overwhelming use of rainbows during June, boycotting participating retail stores with other consumers is good for the conscience and bad for corporate profits.
For Christians who’ve left LGBTQ lifestyles to follow Jesus, Pride Month, parties and places festooned with rainbows are opportunities to shine His light.
Rainbow Revival-Freedom March, a diverse group of former LGBTQ people, is celebrating its fifth year of loving its neighbor by sharing testimonies of transformation.
Pride Month is no exception.
During June, some Rainbow Revival members from Freedom March events across the nation are capitalizing on Pride Month by praying for and sharing the gospel with LGBTQ friends and neighbors.
“We wear a seven-color rainbow—a symbol of the Lord’s promise to never again flood the earth. This month is a great opportunity to demonstrate humility, remember our brokenness and God’s greatness.
“In 1 Corinthians 12:9, Paul says we boast in our weakness, for there God is manifest strong. It’s a great time to remember how weak we are,” Rainbow Revival leaders MJ Nixon and Kimberly Zember explain here.
This year Freedom March officially changed its ministry name to Rainbow Revival, which will host its first event of 2023 in Dallas, Texas on Oct. 21.
Rainbow Revival’s stated mission is to gather and share testimonies of freedom, and to call the body of Christ to love LGBTQ neighbors with the truth of transformation through relationship with Jesus.
Unlike his faith-building experience at Freedom March, Karl Johnson’s former celebrations of Pride Month was frequently marked by parties, drugs and alcohol.
That is until the Lord delivered him from an addiction to crystal meth and sexual promiscuity, following his grandmother’s death two years ago.
To ease the pain of his grandmother’s loss—she was like a mother to him—Johnson attempted suicide by taking an overdose of drugs.
While in the lifestyle, “lukewarm” Christians condoned his sinful behaviors, he says.
“Undoubtedly, if I had died in my former lifestyle I would have gone to hell. My blood would have been on their hands.
“The person you see today is not the person I was a year ago,” says Johnson, who believes he’s alive because of his grandmother’s prayers.
They are why he’s a “fisher of men,” committed to evangelizing the community he left behind, which includes a family member.
Another man convicted by the Holy Spirit of “a hedonistic lifestyle” four years ago sees the LGBTQ community as a mission field.
Living in south Florida today, Jarrod Tobias participated in Pride festivities from coast to coast for 25 years—his entire time in the lifestyle—until the Lord asked him to follow Him.
“I knew that meant leaving behind many friends who were all broken in their camaraderie—like a family,” says Jarrod, who didn’t think his lifestyle or theirs was wrong until the Lord showed him otherwise.
The Lord revealed his brokenness and, as he started dealing with it, “blinders were taken off my eyes and how I see things is completely different,” Jarrod says.
His heart breaks for friends—he calls them his people—who are LGBTQ. “My best friend and I were recently reminiscing about old times.
“I let him know that I think about (the) guys all the time,” says Jarrod of his friend who, grieving the loss of his father, still isn’t interested in conversations about leaving the lifestyle.
As for Jarrod, his faith in Jesus grows stronger every day, despite battling lusts of the flesh common to believers.
“I’m not the same person I was four years ago,” says Jarrod for whom Pride Month in Columbus, San Diego, Los Angeles and south Florida is different now that he prays for friends in those cities, rather than party with them.
“It’s a mission field now,” Jarrod says.
“I pray that the Lord opens a door where I can see that He’s working and, just by His grace, allow me to partner with Him,” he adds.
A single woman from rural West Virginia, Tori Ann, battles loneliness even in churches, where Pride Month celebrations are a toss-up among bodies of “believers” in her area.
But going to a LGBTQ party is out of the question for Tori Ann.
“Why go back to what, literally, took me to the train tracks in 2021,” says Tori Ann, who believes the Lord is calling her to pray for West Virginia’s gay and trans communities.
A ministry leader, Daniel Mingo, heard the Lord say 20 years ago: “There are men coming along behind you who need to know my redemptive power in the homosexual’s life,” says Mingo, who was himself sexually addicted to men.
He founded Abba’s Delight (abbasdelight.com), a recovery ministry for men like himself who spent 30 years hooking up in anonymous sexual encounters.
Though Mingo never assumed a gay identity or lifestyle as a born-again, Spirit-baptized man, Pride Month is troublesome for him, due to the sheer numbers of deceived people celebrating it.
“Pastors tell me they never knew a ministry like mine existed; there are 250 ministries throughout the world that have helped millions of people,” Mingo says.
A Pennsylvania woman, Ellie, who’s been out of the LGBTQ lifestyle for nine years says she too grieves for her friends who are still in sinful bondage.
Even Ellie’s new church is undecided about celebrating versus mourning Pride Month.
One of her closest friends is still in the LGBTQ community. “I talk to her about my faith like she’s a Christian already, and she absorbs it,” says Ellie.
She will continue to plant seeds until they germinate, maybe even pray and fast for her friends who need Jesus. {eoa}
Steve Rees is a former general assignment reporter who, with one other journalist, first wrote about the national men’s movement Promise Keepers from his home in Colorado. Rees and Promise Keepers Founder Bill McCartney attended the Boulder Vineyard. Today Rees writes in his free time.
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