Sexuality is often treated as a taboo subject, yet it deeply shapes who we are. This session will equip parents and mentors to engage their teens in honest, shame-free conversations and guide them toward healthier choices.

Hartland Fall Convocation 2025: Engage Clarity Mode

<p>Sexuality is often treated as a taboo subject, yet it deeply shapes who we are. This session will equip parents and mentors to engage their teens in honest, shame-free conversations and guide them toward healthier choices.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hartland Institute of Health and Education

Michael Carducci

Open Conversations: Sexuality without Shame

Father in heaven, thank you, Lord, for this opportunity to present.

And Lord, conversations are so important, and we need to be engaging in more conversations.

We don't always need to have the answers.

And I just pray, Lord, that you will provide for us the answers tonight, because you promise, Lord, to give your Holy Spirit liberally to those who ask and we're asking recognizing our own desire to know more, how to interact and how to have those difficult conversations.

So lead and guide us I pray in Jesus name, Amen.

Alright so we have the issue and if as Peter had introduced me, Coming Together Ministries was started 15 years ago.

So actually in 2010 was when we started the ministry.

There were 5 individuals that had 4 ministries among them, and we had met for the very first time.

So you can imagine, after living in the gay culture and also identifying as transgender for the first 20 years of my life, I thought that it was the only person that would possibly come out of the gay culture and into Adventism or Christianity.

So imagine my surprise when I found that there were 4 other individuals that had already come out and come into the church culture.

So we got together and we decided, well, if 1 story is good, then imagine the power of 5 stories together.

And so that's how Coming Out Ministries was formed.

But what we realized, and something that you may not know, or maybe you do know, but in Christianity there was this kind of attitude or there was this kind of viewpoint that homosexuality was something completely different than all the other behaviors and sins in the church.

And so we thought that our approach was totally different, and it wasn't until we started doing our ministry that people would come up and say, you know, I was never gay, but I really identify with everything that you've said.

And so we started to realize, oh, homosexuality is no different than anything else.

And when you look at 1 Corinthians 6 and 9 and 10, homosexuality is listed with the adulterer, the fornicator, the licentious, as well as the gossiper and the murderer.

And what that means is that everybody gets a t-shirt.

So that was why we changed our ministry to be more inclusive.

And what we started to realize is righteousness by faith is how God reached me, which is also how God reached you.

And so it's the same message, but we come from different backgrounds, we come from different stories.

And I don't know that our ministry would be as popular today if it wasn't for the promotion of identity and sexuality, which has definitely escalated in our world within the last 20 years.

And so we believe that, well, as a matter of fact, Duane Lemon calls us a, what is the term?

So I don't think that without this issue that's going on, now we no longer have the silence, the ability to be silent on this issue, and we do have to have these conversations.

And as difficult as it is in the church, our Ministry, I believe, is about equipping the church first before we're meeting the needs of individuals because when we can present and change the culture in the church to be inclusive of everybody, no matter how they identify or how they sin, then I believe that we can truly change the world and change the attitude in the communities to recognize that the church does offer love and truth combined.

It's a pretty good pitch, don't you think?

All right, so I put up this image and of course you can, you know, see that that's Jesus holding back the gay pride colors.

I have a program called In His Image, which basically talks about the rainbow colors.

Did you know that in the gay pride rainbow, there's only 6 colors?

And in the original rainbow that God covered the ark with, you know, after the flood, has 7 colors.

So my program is really about teaching children all the colors of the 7 colored rainbow, teaching them the principles about identity and sexuality without destroying their innocence, and doing that as a foundational way to teach our children before they become adults.

And a lot of times, many people, and you should be concerned because many people say, what?

An ex-gay is coming to our church and he's going to teach our children about identity and sexuality?

But what people find out is when we do start presenting, they start to realize, oh, this is a redemptive message that we point to Jesus Christ and not to our feelings and not to our culture and not to those things that we identify ourselves with.

So again, I think it's important to know that already, by the time children are 4 and 5 years old, they're being exposed to books that are out there that are in the culture that are promoting this ideology.

Now for me at 4 years old, my very first conscious thought as I became aware was that I was a girl trapped in a boy's body.

Now there are books that are actually being targeted to preschoolers and that the earlier you can expose children to identity and sexuality, the sooner you can allow these children to express themselves, to take hormones that are going to destroy their puberty, to have disfiguring surgeries, they're gonna mutilate their bodies before they're even 16 and 17 years old.

I remember at 4 years old, these thoughts that I didn't identify with my dad, but I identified with my father and my sisters.

And so until I was 20 years old, I was haunted with this ideology inside my mind that I really should be a girl and not a boy.

Even at 20 years old, even as a Christian, I thought, oh, the perfect solution.

Because at 13 years old, I started to have same sex attraction.

And I thought, great, I have the solution.

If I have a sex change, then I'll be a woman, and then God will be okay with my attractions to men.

Can you see the confusion that I was struggling with for the first 20 years of my life?

So a book like this would have been really powerful.

Jacob's new dress, it shows Jacob standing on the landing of his home in a dress, and it says there are lots of different ways to be a boy.

And so that would have been a great introduction for somebody like me.

This is another book called The Princess Boy, and the father tells his boy how pretty he looks in a dress.

The father takes him by the hand and he tells him to twirl.

All of this is about affirming to our children that don't understand the difference between fantasy and reality, that they can be whatever they want.

And can you imagine the damage of what this book would have done for somebody like me at such a tender age.

So living in Tennessee, I thought to myself while I was getting my tires changed at Walmart, what does the Bible Belt offer for Christians?

And this was a book that I found in the book section.

And it says, God is like a mother, and it shows mothers being attentive to their children.

And it says God is like a father and it shows the father.

There's not any piercings or tattoos or wild colored hair.

But when it got to the page of what God is really like, take a look at this.

God is represented as 3 non-binary individuals with green, orange, and purple hair, dancing on a ribbon of rainbow, and you can see how subtle it is that these principles are being put in.

Any kid would look at that and say, yeah, I want green hair, I want a nose ring, I want to dance on a ribbon of color.

And I can see just how subtly these issues are coming into our schools.

A pastor called me 1 time and he said, you know, I have a 15-year-old daughter.

I don't know why she cut off her hair and shaved 1 of her eyebrows, and now she's hanging an LGBT flag in her room." And I asked him, I said, well, you know, does your daughter kind of, you know, talk to you?

And he says, well, she always participates in family worship.

And then I asked a question, I said, well, does your daughter have access to the internet?

And he said, well, of course, you know, I have no restrictions on the internet.

I expect that my 14 year old is gonna be able to know how to, you know, manage the internet.

And I said, pastor, I said, there are 50 year old men that can't control themselves on the internet.

And I said, giving your child complete access to the internet is like giving a razor blade to an infant.

I go, you're having the family worship and then you're giving your daughter access in her bedroom to all kinds of societies.

And so it makes perfect sense why your daughter would be leaning this way.

And so a lot of parents are ignorant to what's going on in the world today.

I want to play for you this trailer and this is called Childhood 2.0 and I think for every conscientious Christian as well as every parent, grandparent, sister, brother, and or uncle, I think that this should be mandatory watching because a lot of us have really missed out on a lot of things of what young people are being exposed to today.

A long time ago, families were in communities.

I was born in the very depths of the Great Depression.

I was put to work carrying wood, carrying water.

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Open Conversations: Sexuality without Shame

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Parent Conference

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Sound Doctrine