Garry Ingraham I grew up in a Christian family, but a broken home. My parents were good people, but they also lived under the weight of past burdens and unhealed wounds that were never addressed or brought to Christ for healing. They learned to be silent and emotionally detached from their experiences of abuse and abandonment. As much as they loved us, their unhealed wounds leaked into the lives of their children. My dad and brothers did not take much interest in me. My mother and older sister were my deepest emotional connections. I don’t recall our home being warm or fun. I was fearful, lonely, and insecure.

As a painfully shy and uncoordinated boy, I was often ridiculed, teased, and bullied at school and church. I had no sense of same-gender peer acceptance, so I spent all my time with girls. At 5 or 6 years old, I was invited for the first time to play with some older neighborhood boys. During that visit, I was introduced to pornography and homosexuality. My innocence died that day, replaced by a deep, intense sense of shame and self-hatred. As I got older, I read my Bible, prayed often, and had a stack of memorized verses on 3x5 cards, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get control over my obsession with pornography or attraction to guys. For years, I pleaded with God to take away the same-sex desires, and when that didn’t happen, I began to believe that God actually hated me and I was somehow cursed. As much as I wanted help, church wasn’t a safe place, so I internalized my confusion and pain. I wrestled alone.

When I was 15, I ended the sexual behavior that had been going on between an older boy and I for a few years. At 16, I finished homeschool and enrolled at a local Christian College. I studied diligently, until my fourth semester when I began developing some friendships. They became more important to me than anything else because I was emotionally starved for love and acceptance. I felt depressed and anxious, and I fell behind in my schoolwork. I was eventually told that I had to leave due to concern that I might be suicidal.

I walked away from Bible College with a great deal of shame, bitterness, and hatred toward God and Christianity. I discovered my first gay-bar and felt obsessively drawn. I felt a powerful sense of finally belonging for the first time in my life. It wasn’t long before I moved in with a guy. I never imagined that I could walk away from a gay identity, nor that I would ever want to.

One day while I was driving to New Jersey, I was listening to some new Christian music that God began using to access the pain in my heart. I couldn’t outrun or stuff my emptiness and loneliness any longer. Moved by the lyrics describing God’s grace, I began to weep over the rebellion and wreckage of my young life. I felt old, like my soul was decaying. I stopped on the side of the highway, finally ready to surrender and told Jesus, “If you want what’s left of me, You can have it.” He took me up on that!

Months after my conversion, I began dating a woman and shared my story with her. About a year later, we were married. Tragically, we were only married for four years. The months of separation, followed by divorce, were an agonizing season of life. Old patterns of doubting God and self-pity took root in my heart. I relocated to another State and — quite by accident — heard of a gay-bar. That night, I went back to a familiar sin, which began several years of erratic homosexual involvement and lots of degrading, nameless sexual encounters. I was an emotional and spiritual wreck, in constant turmoil.

Over the years, I kept hearing about a church near where I’d grown up in New York that had earned a reputation of loving and ministering to very broken people. I emailed the pastor, telling him what I was struggling with. He responded that if I moved back to the area, they would walk with me. So I did. Through counseling, being known in a small group, and participating in their men’s group, deep change was occurring. God was at work.

Excited about the freedom I was experiencing, I began a year of training as a lay-pastoral counselor. Not long after that, I left my sales job and was hired as the Business Administrator at my church. Later, I was licensed as the pastor of Soul-Care Ministries, overseeing all counseling, support, and recovery programs.

In September 2007, I married Melissa — an incredible woman who shares my heart for ministry. In May of 2009, Melissa gave birth to our first son. In 2011, God gave us another boy. In 2013, we sensed God’s leading us to start Love & Truth Network, an organization established to equip Christian leaders and churches to develop safe and transformational environments for restoring sexual and relational wholeness (a tremendous need in the Body of Christ).

Garry is an ordained pastor, Executive Director of Love & Truth Network, as well as Director of Transforming Congregations (UMC & GMC denominations).