Exclusive! North Point Church Leader Recommends All-LGBTQ+ Queer Counselling Collective For Struggling Gay Children

For years North Point Community Church, led by Andy Stanley, has been partnering with and promoting affirming LGBTQ+ organizations when desperate parents come to see them for help with their struggling gay children, all done through the Parent Connect Ministry. This is no surprise, as Andy Stanley sets the priorities for his church, as revealed in a private, shocking Q&A where he offered some heretical hot takes on homosexuality.

Parent Connect exists to “inspire parents of LGBTQ+ children to follow Jesus by providing a safe environment where they can experience community and personal growth.” This is done through meetings, get-togethers, mentorship, and curriculum studies with parents and their gay or trans kids so they can work through their issues. Recently, they had Queer Eye for the Straight Guy icon Mama Tammye as a guest speaker and teacher.

Parent Connect is led by Amy Blakeslee, an openly queer woman, and is overseen by Debbie Causey. Causey is a long-tenured pastrix at North Point Community Church and the director of their Care network of ministries. Years ago, after her son came out as gay, she wrote the book The Big Reveal: Loving Your LGBTQ+ Child While Strengthening Your Faith, which details her experiences handling her son’s revelations. Prominent gay activist Justin Lee wrote the forward of her book, and she has his endorsement on her website. Causey speaks at pro-LGBTQ+ events such as Q Christian Fellowships.

One pro-gay organization that North Point leaders highly recommend and refer out-of-state parents to is Embracing the Journey, which we covered in our exclusive article here. That article also details how pastors and church leaders at North Point are board members of another Pro-LGBTQ+ activist and advocacy group called Renovus, including Causey. 

But there are more.

In a conversation about her book with Embracing the Journey leaders, Causey gets asked about recommendations for a “safe” counselors, which is a coded word they use to describe affirming counselors. She recommends an organization called ‘The Christian Closet,’ which she describes as a “great group” specifically designed for children and youth struggling with their identity, and McDonald agrees.

The Christian Closet is a collective of all-LGBTQ+ Christian counselors that offer virtual mental help on topics like depression, coming out, transitioning, starting your first queer relationship, deconstructing, dealing with trauma, and everything in between. It’s “an online therapeutic resource for people who are trying to work out what it means to have a LGBTQI sexual identity, or gender identity within a Christian context.”

This is not to say that some of the counselors are gay or that a majority are gay, but rather that all of them are gay.

Their website reads:

It’s a rare thing to find a therapist who personally understands the intersections of faith with sexual and gender identity. When most people find us they exclaim with relief “In finding TCC, I’ve found a needle-in-a-haystack.” When you choose a Christian Closet therapist, you don’t have to choose between someone who gets your faith or sexual orientation. That is why all of our clinicians identify somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and have done the work of reconciling their faith with that.

By doing the work of reconciling, they mean that they are all affirming in their theology and believe that homosexuality is something to be celebrated. 

Once you are ready to commit, you can peruse through the bios of individual counselors to see who you mesh well with. You can pick Karen Pace Poland, an ex-Southern Baptist who shares: 

“I also began to experience shifts in my beliefs which caused tension in our marriage. When our marriage ended I had become gay affirming and embraced that my gay friends and family members could be both Christian and gay. Since that time I’ve made peace with those two parts in me, which has been a beautiful journey. Today, I am in a loving relationship with my partner, Kim. We are both really late-bloomer lesbians.” 

Or there’s Britt Kesserow.

I identify as queer, lesbian, and genderfluid. I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California, with a specialization in LGBTQ+ Affirmative therapy from Antioch University. I am passionate about working with LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly those of you whose multifaceted identities include an important, central, faith practice, and/or relationship with divinity. My work is relational and client-centered, guided by anti-racist principles, and the belief that we can deconstruct harmful stories and co-author new ones for the betterment of ourselves and our communities.

Or a dozen more options, whose price per session ranges from $130$/h to $245/h

But what if you’re not LGBTQ+ but are a parent or sibling trying to relate to their gay family member? The Christian Closet offers those services through Progressive Christian Counseling, which they describe as their “sister site” with all the same counselors. 

Here we read: “We believe in an inclusive, transformational God who’s more interested in a “soft and open heart” versus a prescriptive way of living.” and “We’ve seen the link between shame and the requirements to work to be like Christ’s perfection. And we’ve seen the damage that comes to someone’s life when prescriptive ways of living lead to feeling worse about one’s humanness.”

We further read that: ‘We believe that you were born into original goodness and that even pain from a focus on purity comes from a beautiful place inside of you,” where “All of our therapists come from Christian backgrounds and now identify as progressive Christians themselves” Then we get this banger:

There is no hope for children struggling with their sexuality if they’re going to these places to get this sort of help. The adults have stacked the deck against them. All the paths to freedom and deliverance have been taken away.

North Point Community Church leaders, when faced with a family who is struggling because their 13-year-old daughter or 10-year-old son says they think they might be gay or non-binary, and is looking for some sound, biblical counseling and resources, directs the parents to pro-LBGTQ+ organization Embracing the Journey, and the kids to pagan pro-LBGTQ+ counselors at The Christian Closet.

My God.

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