After 30 years of ministry, here’s what we’ve learned about the future of our faith
Who gets to belong to God?
That question has echoed through pews and pulpits for centuries.
Too often, the answer thrown at LGBTQ+ people has been cruel, conditional, and cold. Whosoever was born to answer differently. To answer with grace. To answer with truth. To answer with a resounding, unshakable and thunderous yes.
Thirty years on, that answer matters more than ever.
Picture 1996. There was no easy place to turn if you were queer and Christian. The internet was barely crawling, and print was no kinder. Magazines like Christianity Today and Moody took regular potshots at LGBTQ+ people, dressing up rejection as righteousness. If you were gay and faithful, you were told to choose. Your soul or your truth. Your church or yourself.
Into that silence stepped Rev. Candace Chellew, a journalist with more than 20 years of media experience and a fire in her soul. She founded Whosoever as a print magazine and a bold declaration that LGBTQ+ Christians deserved a voice and a resource of their own. After four print editions, Whosoever took a chance on the internet and moved online for good — and something remarkable happened.
People found it. Hundreds of thousands of them.
A lifesaving ministry
At its peak, Whosoever.org drew more than 500,000 web hits a year. It grew a podcast. It built message boards where strangers became family. And the letters poured in, letter after letter from readers who said the magazine had changed their lives. Some said it had saved their lives.
Read that again: Saved their lives.
Why does this magazine matter that much? Soulforce founder Rev. Mel White put it plainly:
Every time I open Whosoever I am amazed at the quality and quantity of work that goes into this magazine for GLBT Christians, their friends and families. I am especially grateful for the information Whosoever provides for that closeted Christian who after being rejected by his or her church and family has nowhere to go but the Internet to find someone who understands.
Nowhere to go. Think about the weight of those words.
Picture the young person locked out of the only community they have ever known, scrolling alone at midnight, desperate for one signal that God has not abandoned them. Since 1996, Whosoever has been that signal. A light left on in the window. A hand reaching back across the dark. A touch for the untouchables.
Rev. Candace never stopped growing, and she never stopped equipping others to grow. She earned her master of theological studies from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in 2002. The next year my congregation, Gentle Spirit Christian Church, ordained her and she stepped into ministry.
In 2008, she gave the movement a gift that still endures: Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians. The book teaches a holy kind of resilience. Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu praised it this way:
In Bulletproof Faith, Candace Chellew-Hodge reassures gays and lesbians that God loves them just as they were created and teaches them how to stand strong, with compassion and gentleness, against those who condemn them.
Loved just as they were created. That has always been the heart of it.
“You Don’t Gotta Do Nuthin!” By NakedPastor, a.k.a. David Hayward. In celebration of Whosoever’s 30th anniversary, enjoy 10% off the NakedPastor store during the month of July 2026 using the promo code WHOSOEVER30. Click the image above to get started.
A changing of the guard, a widening of the mission
In 2019, after taking a brief break after 18 years of running Whosoever by hand, Candace agreed to hand over the reins to Gentle Spirit Christian Church, with me serving as editor-in-chief and her as editor emeritus. Along with two of the best editors in the country, Dr. Robert N. Minor and Lance Helms, we have spent the last eight years widening even further the doorway she originally walked through.
Since then, our mission has grown beyond defending the place of LGBTQ+ people at God’s table. It’s become about reaching everyone who longs to know a truly loving God, the one whose unconditional love is felt as boundless grace.
Boundless. No fences. No fine print. No one left outside.
You might hope that after 30 years the battle had been won. Hell, in 2015 the U.S. Supreme court finally gave our relationships the legal equality they deserve. Americans, and many others in the world, couldn’t get fired because of who they were sleeping with. Many armed forces came to understand they shouldn’t throw us out — not if they wanted to keep winning.
And then the last decade happened.
Why the work isn’t finished
Anti-LGBTQ+ hostility is rising again, not fading. Laws targeting trans youth multiply. Books vanish from library shelves. Pulpits still ring with condemnation dressed as concern. And the cost falls hardest on the young.
LGBTQ+ youth of faith carry a brutal weight, and the mental health crisis among them is real, measured in anxiety, depression, and lives lost far too soon.
When a child is taught that their very being offends their Creator, something inside them begins to break. When the place that should hold them instead casts them out, the wound goes deep. This is not abstract. This is evil. This is a matter of survival.
So no, the work is not finished. If anything, it burns hotter than ever.
Whosoever still does what we have always done. We tell the rejected they are beloved. We tell the closeted they are not alone. We hand tired and weary people a faith strong enough to carry them through the storm. For someone tonight with nowhere else to turn, that message is not a luxury. It is oxygen.
Thirty years of letters. Thirty years of lives pulled back from the edge. Thirty years of families finding their way back to each other, of souls learning — sometimes for the very first time — that they are worthy of breath, of love, of God. That is not a small thing, nor is it a soap opera. It is a holy thing. And it demands more than a celebration. It demands a reckoning — and a recommitment.
I (We) have always known the answer. Who gets to belong to God?
Whosoever. That was the covenant in 1996 — not a tagline, not a slogan, but a sacred promise carved into the soul of this work.
It still stands today. Unbroken. Unbowed. And it will stand tomorrow. Because the child weeping in the dark still needs to hear it. The believer cast out of their congregation still needs to feel it. The ones told they are too much, too wrong, too broken to be loved — they are exactly who this promise was made for. As long as that cruelty exists, so do we.
So stand up. Speak out. Share this story like a life depends on it — because one does.
Support this voice. Defend this space. And refuse, absolutely refuse, to let the light go out for the ones still crawling toward it in the dark.
Because God never said “whosoever” with an asterisk — and neither do we.
Editor-in-Chief of Whosoever and Founding and Senior Pastor of Gentle Spirit Christian Church of Atlanta, Rev. Paul M. Turner (he/him) grew up in suburban Chicago and was ordained by the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches in 1989. He and his husband Bill have lived in metro Atlanta since 1994, have been in a committed partnership since the early 1980s and have been legally married since 2015.