Local pastor pens book to help navigate LGBTQ+ conversations

For about 18 years of Family Church pastor Angel Garcia III’s life, an idea had been forming in the back of his head through countless conversations about the LGBTQ+ community.

Fellow church members, co-workers, parents and even members of the community itself approached Garcia with the same question: How does one discuss this topic with a foundation in biblical truth and Christ-like compassion?

That idea now has manifested in Garcia’s first book, “Balancing Truth and Love: Five Biblical Filters for LGBTQ+ Conversations.”

“The concept of the book was born out of very real scenarios and conversations ... spanning across about 18 years of every ministry I’ve ever worked in, every kind of non-ministry job,” Garcia said. “It’s felt like God’s always found a way of gravitating this topic to me. 

“But what really pushed it over the edge for me was when I led a parent training that had close to 100 parents attend after we did just one announcement about it,” he said. “At this parent training is where I originally rolled out the five filters that are laid out in my book about helping Christians balance both truth and love. At the end of that training, maybe a dozen or more parents came up to me saying they need more resources like this.”

Moreover, Garcia said the existing resources were too basic for a subject matter that changes rapidly.

“The thing with that approach regarding LGBTQ+ is that it’s constantly morphing and the conversations around it are constantly about something new,” he said. “The reality is that every single letter identifier brings its own unique set of conversations and struggles. They’re all different, and so what I wanted to create was a resource for Christians that is flexible enough to approach any situation, and to help people really balance truth and love in a way that Christ would — regardless of what the person is dealing with, regardless of what the topic is. And so that’s what kind of just led to me saying, ‘OK, I’m just going to write this book’ and proceed to drown myself in this.”

Balancing writing and responsibility

At times, drowning is exactly how Garcia felt during the writing process. With a full-time job in ministry as the teaching pastor at Family Church’s Lakeside campus and father of three boys, he struggled to find the time to dedicate to this endeavor.

“What made writing this book challenging in a lot of ways was time,” he said. “The only feasible open slot of time that I had to work on my book was from 4:30 to 7 a.m. So for a little over a year, I would wake up maybe five mornings a week at that time and just start writing about one of the toughest topics imaginable.”

After writing what ended up being a little more than half of the book, Garcia began to hit a wall as he was trying to push through the physical, emotional, and spiritual weight that came with this additional workload he was partially financing as an Uber driver.

“Along the way, it was becoming extremely taxing on me to put in that kind of time into writing the book,” he said. “At one point, about 60% into it, I was getting to that point where I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I remember laying in bed, and just praying, ‘Lord, if you want me to do this, please make it very clear, because I’m really tired and I feel like I’m putting a lot of work into something that’s going to only create a lot of very hard work.’”

The next morning, instead of getting up to write, he decided to jump on the rowing machine and get in a workout. 

“Often when I work out, I just throw on a random podcast episode, and on that day, right after I asked God to make this clear to me, the guys on the show were talking about LGBTQ+, and the exact words in the podcast were, ‘If only there was a resource that could help Christians know how to stand in and balance truth and love in a way that would be helpful,’” Garcia said. “When I heard him say that, I just dropped the rowing oar, took my headphones off and said, ‘Lord, I’ll do it.’ That was enough to push me to fully going in on it.”

That moment was more than just the push that Garcia needed; it ended up being the start of God opening doors and sending him the help he needed to reach the finish line. 

“I just felt like a lemon that was completely squeezed at that point,” he said. “I kept asking myself, ‘Why am I even doing this? Who’s even going to want to read this?’ In many ways, this is a hobby for me; I’m not trying to start a career as an author. I also didn’t want to take money from my family’s budget to finance it, and I didn’t want to take time from the church, because the church wasn’t paying me to write a book. That moment was a bit of a challenge. But, when I heard that podcast, that was what I needed, and since then, God has just started rolling out all the things I needed to get this project done. From helping fund the book through a friend, from sending more than 35 people to read the book and give me feedback — which to ask people to read a 270-page book is not a small ask — it was special.”

The five filters

“Balancing Truth and Love: Five Biblical Filters for LGBTQ+ Conversations” is framed by five biblical filters that believers must see through, understand and believe in to balance truth and love in difficult conversations about gender and sexual identity in a manner that is helpful and mirrors how Jesus approached difficult conversations in the Gospels. Garcia made it a point to not only make this into a book that was entrenched in the Scriptures — making more than 400 references to biblical texts — but to go even further and highlight Jesus’ approach directly.

“I wanted the book to be so submerged in the Gospel that one of the thoughts I kept having while writing was that if somebody was to rip out any single page of the book and hand it out that it was so Gospel-centered, that no matter the page it would bring you back to what Jesus has done for you,” Garcia said. “I wanted every page to bring the reader back to the reality that what Jesus has done for us not only transforms us and causes us to live different, but also gives us hope and grace.”

Through his analysis of Jesus’ approach to difficult conversations, Garcia asserts in his book that the Scriptures and the Gospel specifically show that for believers to be able to be both founded in what is biblically true and demonstrate the boundless love Christ has for humanity, there are five filters that need to be applied.

Those five filters are: God’s truth, God’s design, God’s love, God’s standards and God’s power. According to Garcia, Christians cannot pick and choose the filters. They cannot be separated from one another but instead need to be stacked to balance truth and love the way Jesus did.

“Using these filters during these conversations allow you to start in what God says is true,” Garcia said. “So you start by dealing with the reality, asking questions like, ‘What is God’s foundation? What’s the foundational truth of Scripture?’ From there, you go into His design, His plan. Then, we dive into His love and get a breakdown on understanding how God defines love, before we look at God’s standards and how we all fall short. That filter is huge because it brings us to a posture of humility. 

“And last, we talk about something that I think a lot of people are misunderstanding or not paying attention to and that’s the last filter: God’s power,” Garcia said. “Jesus literally changes lives, and I think the reason why so many Christians struggle with this topic is because they’re not grounded in God’s truth. They’re not grounded in His design. They’re not fully aware of His love. They don’t see how they fall short of meeting His standards, and they’ve lost sight of God’s truly transformative power.”

Garcia hopes this book helps readers love Jesus more and helps them speak God’s truth and display His love in a way that’s helpful and not harmful. “Balancing Truth and Love: Five Biblical Filters for LGBTQ+ Conversations” is available to purchase on Amazon.