Getting God's Perspective - Andrew Bunt

We, so our big focuses for the year, well, the key ones, one of them is research.

And we're just really keen to make sure we're speaking into, well, 2026 as we narrow on beyond, not kind of 2020, which is when I started working for Living Out, or just not into the past, just to where the cultural conversation around sexuality changes constantly.

So quickly has changed so much, even in those five, six years.

The church situation is quite different as well.

And also aware that there are ever growing kind of list of related topics of gender, of identity, of things like asexuality, of people identify as queering, all these different kind of things.

And we really wanted to make sure we're addressing the questions, the topics of the day.

and so one of our priorities at the moment is research which has partly been some kind of internal training us kind of engaging with some experts in various areas but also we're looking at doing some more formal research kind of commissioning some research which then hopefully we might be able to release into the world at some point in the future both to kind of shape what we're doing so we can be more accurately kind of hitting the target as it were to equip people but also it might be that research brings things to light which would be helpful for other people to know as well so you might kind of do some of that so that's one of our big kind of focuses at the moment.

Fantastic.

And you mentioned it there, but have you kind of got a summary for us of how things have changed? You mentioned things have changed a lot in the last five or six years, both in the church and outside of the church.

I'd love to know your kind of bird's eye view perspective of how things have shifted.

Yeah, what's a summary of what a lot has happened in a sense? I think one thing is the understandings of sexuality culturally have complexified and broadened, even in kind of five or six years.

And so just much more, whereas people used to very much like you're either gay or straight, and there's the whole kind of born this way narrative, either born gay, born straight kind of narrative.

There's now, especially among young generations, although not only, much more recognition of the reality of sexual fluidity and just to the fact that sexuality is complex.

So for lots of people, their pattern of attraction isn't always to the same sex or always to the opposite sex or across life that can change.

And that's kind of something that's recognised in kind of academic research and shouldn't surprise us as Christians.

The Bible doesn't say we're in a gay box or a straight box.

It says we're desiring beings.

All our desires are impacted by sin.

So in a sense, culture is only catching up with what the Bible says, as is usually the case.

You know, often the case is people realise things.

But that's leading to a much broader range of kind of labels.

People are using them for themselves, different types of experiences.

People are reporting.

So things like asexual, people saying they don't really experience sexual desire.

lots of terms people may or may not have heard of and i find hard to keep up with things like demisexual allosexualist different kind of things or increasingly young people particularly identifying as queer is this kind of overarching umbrella basically meaning not fitting into a pattern of consistent opposite sex attraction and kind of straight as the language would tend to be used and so that's Just kind of a really interesting, complex thing for Christians to think through.