Church Parents

Questions about what the Bible says about the LGBT community abound in Christian circles. Pastors and ministry leaders are flooded with inquiries. Parents and loved ones ask how to respond to a son or daughter asking about reassignment surgery or struggling with same-sex attraction. And many individuals question their own LGBT lifestyle choices.

Frances Mathews doesn’t get out much since her husband died, but that doesn’t stop her from jump-starting a campaign to create a hedgehog highway in Hilltop Place—feeding stations, holes at the bottoms of gates and fences, and wild garden areas for hibernation. To Frances’s delight, her neighbours are on board. Mostly.

This book is about the various places and ways that uncertainty shows up for parents who, having left or altered the faith they once knew, now must decide what to give their kids. It’s about church attendance, Bible memorization, school choices, and sex talks. It’s about forging new paths in racial justice and creation care while the intractable voices in your head call you a pagan Marxist for doing so.

Sylvia lives in a flat on a council estate with her not-quite-husband Obe and their two young children. She dreams of buying a house on a leafy street like the one she grew up in. If she closes her eyes, she can see it all so clearly: the stripped floorboards, the wisteria growing around the door.... It's not ideal that she's about to be made redundant, or that Obe, a playworker, is never going to earn more than the minimum wage. As sleep deprivation sets in, and the RnB downstairs gets ever louder, Sylvia's life starts to unravel.

Ned is in IKEA with his wife when she breaks the news that it’s over. For Gemma, it happens on the way to get fish and chips, when she opens the glove compartment of her husband’s car to find a pair of women’s sunglasses that aren’t hers. For both, it’s a bolt from the blue that rocks their faith in the world, relationships, and themselves. But you can’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself, especially when there are children involved, so both—for very different reasons—join a support group for single parents. It’s fair to say they don’t exactly hit it off.