My story – Katherine Brown

“You’ve clearly fallen in love,” he said. ​“Tell me all about them.”

“OK,” Katherine replied. ​“I’ve actually fallen in love with Jesus.”

He laughed out loud, and she laughs too as she remembers it, ​“because that’s obviously a ridiculous thing to say”. 

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But when she explained she was being serious, and that she had become a Christian, his face fell.

“Your last year of drama school is going to be really hard for you,” he told her. 

Jesus changes everything

When she got into drama school, Katherine was thrilled: ​“It felt like the pinnacle of my life.” But her first year had left her feeling lost. ​“It hadn’t fulfilled me. It wasn’t that fun. Actually it was really hard. I thought, Is this really the life I want?”

During her second year she had an opportunity to study in Philadelphia in the USA. But one evening she got a call from back home to let her know that one of her friends had died. ​“I knew that he had been ill. They’d found a brain tumour, but it had progressed incredibly quickly. Within the space of a few months, he’d gone from being a well man to having died.”

Katherine was shaken. ​“It was the first time I’d had to look death in the eyes,” she says. ​“I had to consider: if I was 22 and on my deathbed, how would I feel? I realised I would feel absolutely terrified.”

Although he hadn’t spoken much about his faith, Katherine learned that her friend had been a Christian. And his mum said later, ​“He was completely at peace before he died because he knew where he was going.”

Katherine had always believed Christianity was just a list of rules. ​“But in his death, he showed it isn’t. It changes even your worst moment.”

She started to investigate online. ​“I thought, If I’m exploring faith, I should probably do what Christians do. And so I prayed for the first time. I asked God for the thing that I wanted most, which was joy – a break in my grieving.”

In that moment she felt ​“a rush of joy”. She tried to convince herself she was imagining it, ​“But I’d tried to make myself happy for a really long time and it hadn’t worked.”

That week a classmate invited her to church. ​“I loved it. They loved me well, they helped me to learn what it means to follow Jesus, and I grew up very quickly in faith.”

When she returned to the UK, lots of her classmates had changed, but Katherine’s transformation was probably the most dramatic. In some ways her lecturer was right, she says – her last year of drama school was hard.

“People pushed back on my faith, and lecturers would really grill me. But I also saw people become Christians, and I saw loads of my friends try church and do Alpha courses. It was the best year of drama school ever!”

The scandal of grace

There were lots of areas where God was inviting Katherine to change her perspective: ​“How I viewed other people, how I spoke about other people, how I was at drama school…” But there was one area she was wrestling with that she didn’t feel she could talk to anyone at church about.

Katherine’s first relationship had been with another girl, and it had lasted for several years. In fact, her girlfriend’s family were Christians. ​“She knew the church taught about marriage being between a man and a woman,” Katherine explains, ​“but she didn’t feel like she could ask why, so she ran a mile from church.”

Before getting to know Jesus for herself, Katherine believed church to be ​“a homophobic, unsafe place for people that are gay”. But when she started to read the Bible for herself, she gradually became convinced that God’s plan for marriage was between one man and one woman: ​“I was asking these questions to God. As I was reading the Bible, as I was starting to pray, the weight and the anger that I had towards that issue just lifted,” she says. ​“I was just enamoured by Jesus.”

After graduating from drama school, she began working in student ministry, and during that time she discovered some videos by the organisation Living Out. There are faithful followers of Jesus who have similar experiences to me, she thought. Katherine began to share her story with trusted friends.

One person she told was Jon, a friend at church.

“My story’s actually quite scandalous,” she began.

But when she told Jon her story, he replied, ​“The scandal isn’t anything you’ve done. The scandal is what God has done.”

Speaking up is worth the cost

As their friendship developed, Katherine and Jon started to talk about dating. ​“It wasn’t that God made me straight. I just realised that my sexuality wasn’t as black and white as I thought when I was a teenager.”

Katherine and Jon have been married for four years now. ​“He’s been my greatest encourager in speaking into the area of sexuality,” Katherine says. 

“Working for the Evangelical Alliance has been great as I’ve had the opportunity to speak into the area of sexuality and create resources like Relationships Matter. A few years ago I couldn’t even imagine telling friends my story and now I speak on sexuality regularly. There is a personal cost to it. It’s deeply vulnerable, but it’s worth it because I’ve seen the impact it’s had on others as they encounter Christ and commit to following Him with their whole lives.”