10 July2026
By Loren Seibold | 10 July 2026 |
Back in the late 1980s, I was a new pastor in the San Francisco Bay Area. At a church event I met sociologist Ron Lawson, who was researching a book on Seventh-day Adventists. Ron told us of a still relatively new organization called Kinship, a gathering for gay and lesbian Seventh-day Adventists. (Bisexual, transexual, and intersex people weren’t yet on the category list, though they were surely present in the church.) Kinship’s Kampmeeting (always spelled with a K) was at the Monte Toyon Retreat Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains the next week, Ron said, and would I come and speak to the group?
I did—and I should admit that I was well out of my depth. I tried. But I had just come from being a pastor in rural South Dakota, and though I was liberal in my beliefs, I was inexperienced and unconfident. I wasn’t fully comfortable in my own pastoral role. I was addressing a group of people who I sympathized with, but didn’t really understand.
Although everyone was kind to me, I do remember it as a tense and occasionally angry gathering—and for good reason. Back then, most were young. (The group is older now.) Then there was little Christian fellowship for people who openly identified as L, G, B, T, I, or otherwise Q. Some hoped that they could “come out” and still be Seventh-day Adventists. But most had, by that time, realized that wasn’t going to happen quickly—or possibly ever. A few were church workers who desperately needed reassurance, but were terrified they might be exposed.
The Colin Cook affair—denominational leaders’ continuing support of a gay ex-pastor who sexually abused young men under the cover of changing them into straight people—was very much on their minds. AIDS had emerged just a few years earlier; there had already been fatalities, and everyone knew there were going to be more.
