Note: This is the final article in a multipart series. Read Part 1, which details how Anne Edward came to the Lord and found freedom from same-sex attraction through a member ministry of Exodus International. In Part 2, Edward and John Paulk marry and the couple became poster children of the movement of ministries seeking to help people facing same-sex attraction. In Part 3, scandal rocked their marriage when Paulk was photographed at a gay bar in 2000. In Part 4, new leadership in Exodus International brings the organization to its demise. In Part 5, the marriage ends in divorce.

Anne Edward, aided by other ministry leaders, wrote to the board of Exodus International in early 2012 about the direction Alan Chambers was taking the organization, recommending they fire him as he moved the organization in the opposite direction of its original mission, but the board dismissed their concerns. So Edward and other concerned leaders formed Restored Hope Network (RHN) that May. Several former Exodus ministries that were faithful to its original Christian values became the founding member ministries of RHN.

The fledgling ministry held its first national conference in September 2012 and elected its board, including Edward and six others. The group also ratified its mission, bylaws, and doctrinal statements, and made Edward the network coordinator.

In June 2013, Exodus International shut its doors for good. But that month, RHN hosted its second annual conference, in which Edward was elected its first executive director. Later that summer, her painful divorce from John Paulk was finalized.

Two deaths and a new birth are a lot of change to handle in a short period of time. Edward says the love of believers who prayed with her helped her get through that season.

Public speaking also helped heal her.

The Healing Effect of Speaking Truth

“I got to talk about God’s design for sexuality with people who wanted to hear it,” Edward says. As RHN’s media representative, a role for which she was uniquely qualified given her prior experiences, “I got to talk about God’s good design over and over and over and over again. It felt really good. It was like a balm to my soul to talk about the fact that people are honest and they’re walking out of homosexuality.

“You don’t have to lie to walk out of homosexuality. In fact … God hates lying. He hates it. It is not a requirement,” she emphasizes.

Rather, walking away from homosexuality is about being honest “about what’s really underneath, what’s going on in one’s life, about the hurts, pains, and assumptions you’ve made that have been wrong. It’s about working through issues and doing it authentically and honestly. And people who do that thrive. I don’t care what they’re walking out of. But if you don’t do that, you’re not going to thrive.”

Preventing a Takeover

Back in 2001, when Edward joined Exodus’s board, she noticed a lack of protections in the bylaws.

“I saw that with the wrong leaders coming into place, they could easily take over the organization,” she says. And since that’s exactly what happened, later, “we fixed that in Restored Hope.”

While Chambers was able to easily change the rules to appoint board members, rather than subjecting them to member nomination and election, RHN set things up so that 60% of the network’s voting members would have to agree to a rule change before that could happen.

“How things are set up really, really matters as far as an organization goes,” Edward says.

The “Loud 12 Percent”

Though Edward personally knows hundreds of people who have left their homosexual urges completely behind and continue to live faithfully to Christian sexual ethics, there are also about a dozen — mostly from Paulk’s circle — who have turned back to their old lives. They’re “the loud 12%” she says, referencing a 2018 survey conducted by First Stone Ministries that revealed about 12% of former clients said they no longer agree with what the Bible says about homosexuality. (About 73% of respondents said they consider themselves free from sexual sin and brokenness, and 88% believe homosexuality is unacceptable to God.)

Despite the many success stories throughout the movement, “the loud 12%” have dominated the mainstream media narrative, which doesn’t seem interested in the majority of people who are at peace with themselves after walking away from homosexuality. Besides Paulk, McKrae Game is another man who had become a face of the change movement, only to return himself to the life he had condemned and take his story to the press. In 2019, Game told The Post and Courier, “Conversion therapy is not only a lie, but it’s very harmful. … I want all ex-gay ministry dismantled.”

Despite research indicating that help of the kind RHN offers is not harmful, Edward finds herself in an uphill battle against the narrative surrounding change-allowing therapy. But the biggest challenge to it, surprisingly, doesn’t come from mainstream media.

Church Compromise

It’s compromise. It’s when churches and Christian ministries promote “gay Christianity.” People who identify with the “gay Christian” label are seeking to hold onto an identity of slavery to sin while also professing Christ, Edward says.

“The big Christian publishers are going with the pro-gay voices now,” she laments. “They’re saying ‘celibate gay Christians,’ but it’s like one sentence away from saying, ‘God made me gay.’ And the next sentence is, ‘Why can’t I act on the way God made me?’ As if the emotional evidence is all there is. There’s a much bigger picture at stake here that’s eternal — the picture of Christ and the Church. There’s a picture of a wedding at the beginning, a wedding at the end, and no endorsement of homosexuality in between.”

When the church promotes the “gay Christian” concept, people seeking help won’t even hear that they can stop identifying with sin and renew their minds to live a fully surrendered life, whatever the outcome may be. They won’t even know to seek the kind of help that therapists and ministries associated with RHN provide.

A Renewed Movement

Despite the challenges, RHN and similar organizations like CHANGED Movement continue to lead the way in fighting for the right to help people who want to achieve spiritual, emotional, and sexual wellbeing. CHANGED Movement’s website features stories of former LGBTQ-identified people who say they’re now walking in freedom — providing evidence that “change is possible,” as the old Exodus slogan proclaimed.

Elizabeth Woning, cofounder of CHANGED Movement, is one of them.   

“I underwent years of LGBTQ-affirming psychotherapy that never led to emotional stability,” she tells The Stream. “I believe the failure to address factors that were formative to my identity, including molestation, rape, and misandry, perpetuated clinical depression. I began seeking Christian spiritual maturity when I turned away from lesbianism, and many wounds were exposed. As those healed through prayer, my same-sex sexual feelings also diminished.

“Among CHANGED, we find that through counseling many have better understood their life experiences so that the feelings are associated correctly with factors of childhood development, temperament, life experiences, self-perception, and family setting etc. We let go of the oversimplified ‘born that way’ narrative to replace it with a more realistic understanding of ‘why we are the way we are.’ Doing that enables you to recognize that life is not about ‘changing’ your sexual feelings, but about better mental and physical health, accurate address of emotional pain, and ongoing relational maturation simply as men and women. This approach diminishes the prioritization of sexual identity and allows for a lifelong process of wholeness to unfold.”

Today’s change movement is different from the days of Exodus. It’s no longer dominated by one organization, and RHN in particular has put protections in place to provide accountability to leadership.

Edward and others still faithful to its biblical roots and teachings continue to offer hope based on their own life experiences.

“I’ve walked through difficulty. I’ve walked through depression. I’ve walked through pain,” Edward says. “And I didn’t go back to the gay life. Why? Because God’s been my ever-present help. I’ve been honest through it, and I’ve been walking forward, and I got the hope that I needed.

“We don’t want to force anyone down [a particular road], but if someone’s seeking to deal with the conflict between their faith and their feelings, there is a pathway where they can align with their faith.”

 

Aliya Kuykendall is a staff writer and proofreader for The Stream. You can follow her on X @AliyaKuykendall and follow The Stream @Streamdotorg.