Candace Chellew-Hodge says for years she heard the call to serve God, but she kept running away. As the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, she knew what the church — and her family — would say about her homosexuality.

“Even though I knew I was a lesbian by the age of sixteen, I stayed in the closet into my twenties,” Chellew-Hodge writes in her new book, Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians. “I knew, with every fiber of my being, that I was something God loathed.”

Chellew-Hodge pursued a career in journalism, but she never found it satisfying. She knew she was being called to do something more. Eventually she walked away from it to attend seminary training.

Today, Chellew-Hodge, associate pastor at Garden of Grace United Church of Christ in Columbia, no longer worries about what she calls “human distortions of true Christian faith.” After years of study, prayer and meditation, she has come to accept that there is no contradiction in being both a Christian and a lesbian.

“We aren’t born bad, with an original stain on our souls,” she says. “God tells us we are good — created in God’s image and proclaimed a good creation.”

In her book, Chellew-Hodge outlines what she calls “spiritual self-defense.” She says it is important to discuss spirituality, but no one should feel the obligation to suffer insults, what she calls “verbal hit-and-runs.”

“We must be able to discern between the well-meaning person who hasn’t yet been educated in how to speak to us lovingly and the hateful bigot who doesn’t care about speaking lovingly,” she says.

She has gained a lot of practice in knowing one from the other. In 1996, Chellew-Hodge founded Whosoever, an online magazine for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Christians. She has been getting a lot of mail ever since. Some letters have been sent with genuine care and concern. Others have been sent with death threats.

“They tell me I am a false Christian and am inevitably bound for hell because they object, for whatever reason, to one portion of my life — my sexual orientation,” Chellew-Hodge says. But, she says, ultimately sexual orientation is just a small facet of a person’s life. “I can’t see how it matters,” she says.

And yes, she is familiar with Leviticus and Corinthians, which contain anti-gay passages. She has studied them. But she says Jesus “spent his entire ministry showing us that God does not want us to follow old, soul-killing laws, but instead … showed us new ways to reinterpret the scriptures.”

Chellew-Hodge says for a long time she replied to angry letters with angry letters of her own.

“I defended myself by lashing back,” she says, “by calling them names, by questioning the sincerity of their faith, by lowering myself to their level.”

Then she came upon the admonition in 1 Peter 3:15: “Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is within you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.”

She made gentleness and reverence her guiding principles. She also decided that there were times when it was best to practice detachment.

“Ever since I realized the Delete key exists for a reason, I use it often when I receive odious emails,” she writes in the book.

Although Bulletproof Faith is primarily intended for a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender audience, there is something more within its pages. Chellew-Hodge’s words will ring true with anyone who feels embarrassed and alienated by Bible-beating, platitude-bleating fundamentalists who try to keep the word of God in a stranglehold. She offers hope to those who wonder how Jesus du jour became a registered trademark of war machines and political parties, and what has become of the Jesus who counts himself among the least of us and urges us to turn the other cheek. 

Candace Chellew-Hodge will talk about her book during a signing at The Happy Bookseller on Oct. 15 at 5 p.m.