Michael Carducci

Love in the Making

Breakout Session B

Walk by Faith Ministries

Sharing the Cross, Shedding the Bias

Father, thank you for this opportunity to talk about how it is as a church that we can love somebody and show compassion that doesn't compromise the Word of God.

And so Lord, it's very difficult to address this issue, and I pray Father that you will guide us through this discussion.

So 1 of the things that I realized coming into the church culture, what, 17 years ago, is now we have these 2 different opposed kind of positions in the church.

And we either have the 1 like, you know, the Baptist church that says that fags die, God laughs, God hates fags, or we have the complete opposite now.

It says Jesus had 2 dads and he turned out okay, thinking that, you know, homosexuality is okay.

So I thought that coming into the church I definitely experienced this side of it.

I don't recall that 1 but now I start to realize that wow you know what if I bought into this understanding then I would ultimately be lost if I accept the Word of God as what my truth is.

So here we have 2 positions that are both wrong and how is it that we can find that in the middle?

Because this side definitely needs some compassion, right?

And so how is it that we can get those together and get rid of the things that aren't according to God's Word?

And so I think that's what the challenge is.

So growing up myself I had gender dysphoria.

I thought that I was a girl trapped in a boy's body.

I remember going to school and what happened is that I had defensively detached from my father.

He was angry and raging, as you saw in the film.

And so for me, I thought that I was a girl trapped in a boy's body.

So the 1 thing that I needed is I needed male affirmation.

I needed to know that I was accepted by other males.

And so then when I went to school, the 1 thing that I needed became more elusive because they started calling me little girl, sissy, fag.

And so what that did is that pushed away the 1 thing that I needed most, and that was male affirmation.

So what that did is it pushed me further back into thinking that I was a girl, that I was like my sisters.

And you can imagine this confusion, depression that I had because I certainly wasn't a boy, but I wasn't a girl either.

And so I was like stuck in the middle somewhere.

So imagine my disappointment at Christmas and birthdays when I got boy toys when I really wanted to girl toys, Barbie's Dreamhouse.

And so as I was growing up, I remember my sisters getting these really beautiful dresses.

I had 3 sisters and no brothers, so I was surrounded by girls.

So again, it was really difficult for me, you know, to adjust to that and to think how can I fit in?

And so I spent most of my time just trying to go through the motions and to be chameleon.

I was stuffing all of these feelings inside, not knowing where to let them out, where to express them in a way where I could at least get understanding, so I didn't even think that help was available.

It wasn't until I was 20 years old when I came out into the gay culture that I realized that I was okay being a male.

They actually have laws now that will help children like me, that if I feel that I'm a girl trapped in a boy's body, the law will go against my parents and allow me to take these hormones and to eventually retire the puberty process so that about 13 or 14, I can finally have the sex change that I desire.

And so if that was available when I was a child, I would have been standing first in line.

And so what happened is I'm grateful because at 20 years old when I came out, I realized that masculinity was more valuable than femininity.

And so what I wanted was male affirmation.

So if I just butchered up a little bit and worked out in the gym, I found that I got all the attention from men that I wanted.

You imagine the private purgatory I would have been in had I had a sex change at 15 or 16 years old and then all of a sudden at 20 realized that I should have been a male.

You know, these surgeries, they mutilate and they massacre our bodies to make them appear like the opposite sex, but the bottom line is, is the DNA is still whatever your birth gender is.

And so people are realizing, even John Hopkins University has done extensive studies, and the LGBT community is extremely upset with them because, John Hopkins even said, it does not give them what they're looking for.

It does not give a male the biological difference of being a female.

And again, what it does is it may give you the appearance, but the bottom line is these men still cannot have children, they cannot have successful relationships with other men or whatever, and the same for women that want to become men.

So they found that the suicide rates are still just as high, that the depression is probably in some respects even higher.

There's a woman named Nancy that was in Belgium and she became Nathan.

And so Nathan was so distraught when he saw his appearance in the mirror with the scarring and everything else that he was so depressed he didn't want to live anymore.

And he petitioned the government to have an assisted suicide because he just could not bear the fact of living the way he was, and therefore the government granted Nancy that suicide.

So Again, we found that the rates of suicide attempt are 41% in the transgender culture and that's the, I'm sorry, 41% will attempt suicide but 30% actually commit suicide.

Those are the highest statistics among any group of people.

I didn't realize this until I came into a relationship with Jesus Christ that there was something else going on.

Exodus 20 verse 5 talks about the sins of the generation to the third and fourth generation.

And so basically what that means is that when the sperm and the egg come together, they bring with it the history of 3 to 4 generations before that.

So using my family, my mother was molested by her father, my grandmother was raped by her stepfather, and my great-grandmother was a prostitute.

So just on my mother's side alone you can see the hereditary cycle of sexual sin.

And while I wasn't born gay, I was born with the hereditary tendencies for sexual sin.

And then on my father's side, my dad was a sexual addict.

He was also addicted to pornography, 2 of the things that I also struggled with as an adult.

My father's mother was raised by a single mother because her father shot and killed a man that he thought was sleeping with his wife.

And so here you can see not only sexual sin on both sides of my family, but anger management, alcoholism, drug addiction, all of these things that have followed through as well.

So even my same-sex attraction wasn't necessarily something that I chose, but there were hereditary tendencies that the Bible confirms has already been set in motion, as well as epigenetics, which is science.

As a matter of fact, I had 3 sisters that were praying for me.

2 of my sisters, My sister Kathy worked with me in my salon.

I was what I called a poster child for the gay life.

I was a hairdresser and an aerobics instructor, and I don't know that you can get any more gay than that.

I had a gay dog, and it's a six-pound joe about that big.

I had 9 hairdressers working for me in my shop.

I was making great money, drove a convertible Mercedes, had a house with a pool, had a condo on a lake with a boat, so I had the world by the tail and a rich boyfriend with big blue eyes and big arms.

It was like the devil was just giving me everything that I could possibly have and yet I was still struggling with a sexual addiction.

And there were times when I would think to myself, wow, is this the best life is going to be?

Thinking about how great life was, and just thinking to myself, something still seems to be missing.

I can look back now and realize that that was the Holy Spirit drawing me because I had 2 sisters that were praying for me.

My sexual addiction was so strong I was acting out as often as 3 times in a day with different men and as often as 3 or 4 times a week.

You do the math for 20 years of that kind of life.

Unfaithful in the 5 significant relationships that I had, I knew that I was out of control and I had sex, unprotected sex with men that would be dead 3 months later.

There was just no way I could stop this addictive drive.

And yet because of their prayers, I believe that God held his hand over me and that's why I stand before you today.

And so 1 of the things that I think is so paramount to tell people is that prayer works.

And the sad reality is if we buy into the lie that God's okay with your homosexuality, I wouldn't be standing in front of you.

That they wouldn't have prayed and they would instead they would have prayed for God's blessing and instead what happened is God was able to use those consistent prayers to help pull me out because I wasn't praying for myself.

GYC 2015: Called. Chosen. Faithful.

Unraveling the Gay Spin

Wayne Blakely

Danielle Harrison

Ronald Woolsey

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

6. Your Questions Answered- Panel Discussion with ‘Coming Out’ Ministries

This message was presented at the GYC 2015 conference called Chosen Faithful in Louisville, Kentucky.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

Did you get your cat naps in this afternoon?

We're gonna keep you awake with this Q&A this afternoon.

I want to introduce you to a very close and good friend of ours, Brian Savinsky, who has been a strong supporter of our ministry for the last 4 years.

And so we're just waiting on Mike, who went to grab his iPad so that brian can have the questions right in front of him I'd just want to take this opportunity also if you were at my presentation on when did we start thursday thursday morning and you didn't get the handout but you wanted 1 the handout is here That's where we talked a little bit about the Andrews University statement or position paper on homosexuality.

So while we're still waiting for Michael, I would just wonder if Brian, if you would offer a prayer for us this afternoon.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this Sabbath day.

We thank you for another opportunity for us to come before you and to do the work that you have for each of these team members today.

We pray, Lord, that your presence would be here.

We pray that you would, through your Holy Spirit, work through each of these, each of the coming out ministries members today.

We thank you, Lord, for the opportunity to be blessed with so many questions on the issues that we're all facing in our world today.

And again, we pray that you would be with each of us now.

Okay, and there's Michael now, perfect timing.

Just a couple of housekeeping notes first.

We did want to thank you for the amazing response.

We have many questions to try to cover in a very small period of time.

So I'd ask that you please pay special attention to each of the questions as we read them because they may not be worded exactly the way your individual question was submitted, but due to the similarity in some of the questions, we've had to, you know, pull those together.

Another thing I'd like to mention is that we did have to enforce a deadline as far as which questions would make it onto the list today.

As the questions continue to come in, please feel free to continue to use that number and ask additional questions.

Any of the team members would be happy to talk with you.

Please stop by the Coming Out Ministries booth, and they'd be happy to talk to you about anything that we aren't able to address today specifically this afternoon.

So, starting with, and these are very much in random order, so I'll just read the first question that we have here.

And this was, we decided this was for Michael.

How do you suggest dealing with an LGBTQ individual as an Adventist summer, at an Adventist summer camp?

If they are a physical boy that is convinced they are a girl, where should we let them shower, sleep, et cetera?

Having been a young person in Adventist camp and struggling with identity issues, I remember the special problems that I had was that we had open showers for the guys and while I felt that I was transgendered, I still also had attractions to same-sex.

So, also even in academy, we had open showers.

So, I think that those pose special problems and needs for people that are transgendered.

But as my colleagues and I were discussing this question specifically, we really realized that we couldn't come up with a really sound answer for this question within just a few minutes of discussion.

I believe that this question alone has so many levels to it because If a child comes and they're identifying as a female when they're a male, then that means that they probably have a closet full of girl clothes.

That also means that they probably have parents that have allowed him to paint his room pink and that are actually supporting this move as well.

So how do you tell this little boy that he now has to dress as a boy in this camp, how do you protect him from the other boys in that camp that are going to call on him or make a prey of him?

And so we realized that this is an in-depth question that needs much more prayer and study to come up with a legitimate answer that not only meets the need of this individual but also protects the children in the camp as well.

And so again, we don't always know the answer for this, but we certainly identify that there's a great need to have this discussion, especially in the leadership.

Recently, I heard a movie called The Danish Girl, based on a real story that is about a man who was transgendered.

As researchers studied him, there was a chemical imbalance within his body.

He was born with partly developed male and female genitalia.

There are multiple cases of people born with both male and female glands.

Did Christ make people this way for a reason?

How can you approach this and how is this something we can approach or begin to understand in the church?

Also, how can this be something that God has planned?

I know that it comes to a lot of people's minds.

We ask why did God do this about a lot of things.

In a presentation that I have, I start addressing the sin problem in the fact that it was God that created only 1 male and 1 female as perfect, and after their sin, we have the introduction of sin and the consequences of sin.

I would like to say, first of all, that we don't have all the answers.

When we have these Q&As, we like to say that While we don't have all the answers, we will always point you to the 1 who does.

But from our experience and from referencing those who struggle with things like this, if God is in their life and God is their focus, That's the most important thing.

An intersex person has choices that you and I don't have.

If they have Christian parents, they can watch the behaviors and watch counsel with physicians and psychologists and pastors and the Bible and God himself to see how that person's life is going to shape.

But intersex people are an extremely low percentage in the population.

Also keep in mind, again, what Satan is trying to use on us to confuse us and to bring about counterfeit.

If you are a transgender and you date a person of your original gender, does that make you a homosexual?

A situation happened not long ago where a parent called me and she was very concerned about her son that had transgendered to a female.

She debated about this, felt like it was wrong, but her son was suicidal and also on drugs, out of control.

He had a five-year-old son that still called him dad.

And so she agreed to allow her son to have the sex change.

And then when he came back, now that he was finally in the gender that he was comfortable with, she bought into the whole idea that now, you know, her son is now her daughter.

And so she had called and her concern wasn't about the issue of what, you know, gender her son was now, a daughter.

Her question was the fact that this person was still attracted to females.

And she said, I'm concerned about his salvation because now that he's a woman, his attractions are homosexual or lesbian.

And when I thought about that, I thought how confusing is this, you know, and what do you do in a situation where you have transgenders in our schools or in our churches and what's appropriate dating for someone like that?

Listen, it's difficult for us here on this panel who recognize our genders and our previous attractions and what the future holds for us, but what about somebody who is transgendered and then the confusion that comes in what's appropriate dating?

And then I realized once again that you can mutilate your body.

I could have breast implants put in and I could take my genitalia and have it deformed into a, and mutilated into a position where it actually resembles the female anatomy.

But the bottom line is, is my DNA is still male.

They've done research and found that even dissecting the brains of trans- transgendered male to female, that they still have the same brain dynamics as a heterosexual male.

And so my answer to this woman is, listen, the issue isn't even about his attraction because those are still intact.

It was the body that was changed to resemble the opposite sex, but it never did that.

Many transgender, 40% of transgender attempt suicide because they find that even while you may manipulate the body to appear as the opposite sex, bottom line remains that inside they still recognize and know that they are still the same gender that they were born with, and it does not resolve the mental conflict that came from the gender dysphoria.

How do you address leaders of students who are, how do you address leaders of students who are secretly promoting Seventh Gay Adventists?

You know, this is, we are living in difficult times and challenging times, and on our, even on our Adventist University campuses, we have people in leadership who approach the topic of homosexuality from multiple perspectives.

I think we have to apply the Matthew 18 principle here in going to that person and asking them if they would come to agreement with what the Word of God has to say.

And I challenge everyone on campuses, whether they're in leadership or whether you're in a learning position, to go back to the Word of God.

We always Propose to you that regardless of who you're listening to whether you're listening to us or somebody that has a position That's different than ours go back to the Word of God and see if it is in agreement with God's Word If you're practicing a Matthew 18 principle then there is hope under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, under prayer, that someone who misunderstands or misrepresents God's Word could come in agreement with God's Word.

I personally have had that experience, as some of you may have known, with a position paper that I wrote with regards to a leader in an Adventist university who gave a pro-gay sermon.

And so my call is that they would be re-educated, that they would come back to God's principles, to God's guidance on the issue of homosexuality.

I understand that there is a difference between transgenderism and people who are born intersexed.

However, I'd like to better understand the difference between both groups of people choosing a gender for themselves?

Wouldn't an argument made for 1 group be easily made for the other?

The incidence of the intersex births is probably very, very rare, and I'm not a medical person, but my observation is that that is a very rare situation.

There have been attempts to determine a gender for such a person while he's still an infant or a very young child, which I think is a very great mistake.

5. Meeting Today’s Challenges from the LGBT Agenda

We're going to do some rapid fire programming this morning.

We're dividing up presentations among 4 of us, actually 7, I think.

Revelation 12 11 tells us we overcome the accuser of the brethren by the blood of the lamb and by what else?

And Danielle, Mike, Wayne, and I have shared our testimonies numbers of times with the GYC family in the past, and we have 3 other people that are going to share what the Lord has done for them in this arena.

And then I will bring up the close if there's any time left over.

I'll bring up the close with some myths that need to be dispelled and briefly some facts that if you're going to be equipped to deal with this issue, the sin issue, period, it's important that you are equipped to know what is false, what is true.

Satan is the master of deceit, and he is putting forth lies to the Church to make us timid about presenting the gospel, and we need to expose His lies with the light of truth.

Let us have a word of prayer as we begin this morning.

Our Heavenly Father, we are so thankful for another opportunity to stand before you and testify for you.

As we realize that we are in the great controversy between good and evil, between Christ and Satan, that we are all players on the stage of your Theater of Grace.

We all have such amazing opportunities to demonstrate before men and angels and the universe your power, your recreative power to transform lives and your amazing, incomprehensible love.

And we pray that you'll help us all be faithful as we live out our roles in this great theater of grace.

We pray that you will be uplifted today, that we all will be blessed as we hear how you do work and how you have worked in the lives of others.

And we just want to thank you 1 more time for your amazing grace and love.

1 more thing that I want to announce is the phone number.

I'll give it to you here real quickly if you want to write it down.

We will be having a Q&A program tomorrow, and that's usually our most exciting program when we have the interaction with the audience.

So if you have questions that have not been answered already through our presentations, or if you were not here to hear the answers, write them down, give them to 1 of us, or text them to the phone number that will be up on the screen later in the program this morning.

We're going to just jump right in, in the interest of time.

And Wayne Blakely is going to introduce our guest, Ms.

It's great to see all you guys here this morning, nice and early.

I want to introduce to you a young lady, Tandi Chawiah.

I think you're going to be very blessed today.

A lot of times people hear specifically just from coming out ministries like there's nobody else around that's that's come out of sexual sin, sexual problems in their life, but there are those who are willing to speak up.

And so we've been able, we've been blessed to be able to come and talk, come in contact with some of those individuals and have them share with you today.

Tandi, we have been talking about sexual purity and we've been highlighting same-sex attraction.

And I just want to thank you for your willingness and your boldness and your transparency to be able to come and share with us today.

It's an honor and a privilege and if it makes a difference in 1 person's life then it's worth it.

I am currently attending the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University, and I work as a sales associate for White House Black Market.

Would you tell us a little bit about the beginnings of your life?

Back to Menu

Presenter

Michael Carducci

All Recordings

Sharing the Cross, Shedding the Bias

1h 13m

6. Your Questions Answered- Panel Discussion with ‘Coming Out’ Ministries

1h 15m

5. Meeting Today’s Challenges from the LGBT Agenda

1h

4. Be Free! Stay Free!

1h

3. Sharing the Cross Connection

58m

2. Identity Matters

1h

1. Transgender vs. Transformation

1h

6. Q&A Session

44m

5. Blessed Sex

28m

4. I Want Out!

56m

06-Turn Around: Q&A

1h 16m

05-The Lost Father

1h

Sound Doctrine