"We got off talking about the job and started talking about our experience of the last couple years," Allan recalls. When she was ready to leave the position, he took her to lunch to scope out the job. They didn't click at the time, but in 2006 they both applied for the camp director job, and Leeanne got it. "I always joke with her that she was one of the cool kids and I was a raging fundamentalist nerd," he says. "So if Jesus is who he says he is, then we kind of have to believe what he believes."Īllan first met Leeanne when they both worked as teenagers at a Christian summer camp. "I studied different methods of reading the Scripture and it all came down to this: Jesus accepts the rest of the Scripture as divined from God," he says. "I think I made conscious choices along the way to say this is something I experience, but this isn't the thing that defines who I am personally." "I didn't know anyone else who experienced same-sex attractions, so I didn't talk about it much at all," Allan says. He didn't understand how he could resolve his feelings, he says, and had little support from his friends. "It was a pretty immediate realization that it was in conflict with my faith," he says. He and his wife, Leanne Edwards, are joyfully expecting a baby in July.īut let's start earlier, in the mid-'90s, when Allan was in high school, when he found himself thinking about boys more than girls. "So for me, it's not just that the religion was important to me, but communion with a God who loves me, who accepts me right where I am."
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"I think we all have part of our desires that we choose not to act on, right?" he says. Accordingly, Edwards has chosen not to act on it. He's attracted to men, but he considers acting on that attraction a sin. In The Sunday Conversation, Weekend Edition Sunday brings listeners an unexpected side of the news by talking with someone personally affected by the stories making headlines.Īllan Edwards is the pastor of Kiski Valley Presbyterian Church in western Pennsylvania, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America.
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They met at summer camp, but he was a "raging fundamentalist nerd" at the time and they didn't get together until years later. Allan and Leeanne Edwards are expecting a baby in July.