Young Life is a Christian Ministry that operates a number of faith-based youth camps around the country that includes overnight lodging with youth. According to the ministry, the camp is centered around “kids getting away from the pressures of everyday life, having fun with friends and their Young Life leaders, and hearing the message of God’s love in terms they can understand.” For the most part, this involves parents sending their children away to these camps and trusting them in the care of Christian ministers.
Yet, it apparently has been a magnet for homosexual leaders who are upset that the ministry is uncomfortable with them sharing cabins with boys.
In a piece in the Denver Post, a man by the name of Joshua Truitt says that after he, a youth leader at one of these camps, came out gay and intended to give a pro-gay speech to his students at the camp, the organization told him that was a no-go. The article states,
Three staffers waited for him at a red picnic table, the Rocky Mountains towering before them. The conversation quickly turned from small talk to a more serious tone about Truitt’s testimony topic — and his future in the organization.
After hearing about his sexuality, Young Life was uncomfortable with the volunteer leader sleeping in the same cabin as the campers, Truitt said staff told him. All his one-on-one chats with the teens he had been mentoring all year needed to be done in public where others could see them, he recounted the staffers saying.
“The people there didn’t explicitly call me a pedophile,” Truitt said. “But it was very implied: Because I was gay, I was dangerous.”
Of course, anybody in their right mind would understand that a homosexual man — particularly one who says he has “embraced” his queerness — would be a danger to children at a youth camp. Yes, he’s dangerous. Even if he never laid a finger on any of the youth, his position as authority while he practices sexual immorality is dangerous — spiritually dangerous.
The gospel leaves no room for unrepentant sinners to continue in sin indefinitely, and it definitely does not leave room for one to embrace their sin. So, for Truitt, he was definitely not there to, as the ministry’s purpose states, share the “message of God’s love in terms they can understand.”
The article in the Denver Post goes on to whine about how discriminatory the Christian camp is against the LGBTQIA+ and linked to an open letter by several other gay camp leaders who said they experienced the same thing and a petition calling on the camp to change their ways and become more embracing of sexual deviancy.
