Finding Faith

In news that may come as a surprise to some, I have been in touch with a local church in Montpellier with the prospect of joining the church. I say that this may come as a surprise to some because I am sure that no one would think of me as a religious person and I would agree. I'm not a religious person nor have I ever been but I've always maintained, privately, that I do believe there may be a God and I have never felt comfortable denying the existence of  'a God'.

The primary purpose of me reaching out to this church is to finally explore my beliefs. As I said, I've always had some belief but I've never really thought about it because it's never been a priority. I have also been put off looking into religion because of the many examples of negative news stories of various religions and for the very strict beliefs that some religions have which are totally incompatible with me or my beliefs.

So, why now? While I've held some limited beliefs for as long as I can remember, I've also struggled with self-esteem issues so for me there was never a good time to explore faith when I didn't really know myself all that well. Now that I live in France, however, I can honestly say that I've never been happier and for probably the first time I can say with some confidence that I know who I am and religion/faith is the long missing puzzle piece that I need to further complete the jigsaw that is me.

I'm not diving into this at the deep end, this certainly isn't an all or nothing approach, I'm going into this with my eyes open and with no bias. I'm looking only to discover whether I can move away from agnosticism to a more sure belief. In this sense I have literally nothing to lose but potentially a lot to gain.

When I decided to look into this I was obviously concerned about a number of things, most notably my sexuality. Traditionally, Christianity hasn't been very kind or very accepting of the LGBT community and that has been a major obstacle to me exploring my faith so it was paramount that I find a church that is LGBT affirming. My surest belief is that all people should be treated equally, there shouldn't and mustn't be any discrimination based on sex, sexuality, race, nationality, language, etc so it was also important for me to find a church that treated women equally and that welcomed anyone and everyone regardless of their background and I'm really happy to say that I think I've found such a church.

L'église protestante unie de France (the United Protestant Church of France) is the largest protestant church in France and is both Calvinist and Lutheran - honestly, my knowledge of those is very limited but I know enough to be encouraged to look into them further. The church also allows the ordination of women and blesses same-sex marriage, both huge ticks for me. The contact I've had with the church has been wholly positive thus far and I'm looking forward to getting more involved and to learning more about this church.

I'm very interested to know if there are others out there who feel the same way I do and have either already explored their faith or those who are still hesitant to do so. I'm also very interested to hear about the experiences with religion from others in the LGBT community so do get in touch if any of that applies to you.