Many churches are affirming all kinds of things that the Bible says are sin. But there's this whole wide swath of churches that do believe the truth. They just don't know what to do with it. They don't know how to handle sexuality, they don't know how to. And it's not just LGBT. They don't know how to handle men's or women's struggles with general sexuality. And yet, because it's such a common core issue amongst adults and teens...we have to the one place on the planet that is not saying much about sexuality is the one place that actually has the answers. Great. My guest today is Garry Ingram. And Garry, you've got quite a ministry going and love to hear your background, your story, how God led you to this ministry. You mind sharing that with our with our listeners. It's kind of a train wreck of a story but redeemed by God. So Christian home and still dealt with some early sexualization at the age of 5 or 6. Pornography. Some older neighborhood boys introduced me to their dads hardcore porn. That was very devastating. There were a lot of other relational things kind of going on as well, and I bounced around from public school to Christian school to public school to homeschooling, and then later on to a local Bible college, all the while wrestling through as far back as I can remember, because I was introduced so early to really a pornography addiction and and just wrestled tremendously with that, dealt with some identity issues as well. And, and when I went to Bible college, I eventually I was there for a year and a half and left and just felt like, God, I am so fed up with all this. There's no answers for me in the church. I don't feel like you're doing anything for me to deal with either the the porn issues or of course I'm still engaging in them, but. Or as well as all this kind of same-sex attraction that was developing too. And I was just completely frustrated by it. Walked away from the faith entirely. And I just found the LGBT world. Found my first gay bar at the age of 19. It felt like this is what I've been looking for my whole life, and my life finally made sense. I was always pushed out of the world of boys and men as a as a kid and as a teenager, and just hung out through all of my developmental years of childhood, hung out with the with my mom, my sister, really, not with my older brothers much, and solely not with boys or men much, either at school or at church. And so I was kind of prime for some of the things the enemy had in mind for me. And but eventually, at probably about after four years or so, that I just began to dwindle and just feel like my inside was kind of decaying. My. I remember Paul writing in 1 Corinthians 6, verse 18,“Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin that a man commences outside the body, but the one who sends sexually sins against their own body.” And as I reflect on that, I realized that this decay I was feeling this kind of rot within. I mean, I was in the prime of my life 20, 21, 22 and I would stare at myself in the mirror and just think, I just feel like some an old used, used person. And so anyway, the that led to a crisis of faith at the age of 23, coming to a genuine faith and surrender for the first time in my life to Christ. And and so that really led into coming into the kingdom in a way that was beyond just a acknowledgment of Christian things, but now new life within. And that changed everything. Then, through a series of events, I wound up some major, major disappointments. I wound up turning kind of embittered toward God again in my later 20s, and wound up back in the LGBT world by my own choice, but kind of stumbled back into that again, immediately. Addicted. And and that went on for a number of years, back and forth. One foot in the church, one foot in, in that space. And again, pornography was a big part of all of that. That was kind of glued me to a lot of the brokenness I was dealing with and eventually came to the Lord, brought me to a church in upstate New York that was really dealing with very broken people in a very open way, and wanting to walk with them, kind of touching people that most churches wouldn't want to have anywhere near them. And it was through that support, and those men in that church that God really rescued my life in many ways. Me in my 30s. And I wound up on staff at that church for 12 years after all of that, and then 12 years after that, being on staff with them, we start my wife and I started Love and Truth Network, the ministry that we now lead. Wow, that's kind of a long way. It is condensed, but a long way of kind of getting to the point of how did Love and Truth Network come about? Yeah, yeah. No, that's. Thank you for sharing that story. It's I'm sure there's so much more to that around that. But. And now you're ordained minister. Is that correct? I am I gained, yes, a pastor. And I was on pastoral staff for nearly 12 years at the church and in a pastoral role, and then later licensed and then later ordained as a pastor. And I don't pastor a church now, but a lot of the work I'm doing in terms of pastoring churches all around the country and pastors and leaders around issues of restoring relational and sexual wholeness. Of course, I don't need to tell you guys as covenant eyes. There's lots of pastors that are using pornography on a regular basis, and so helping them get free, helping them learn how to walk with others in a way that is open and vulnerable, appropriately so, you know, appropriate spaces as a pastor. But really anyone men, women, you you also know that this is not just a men's issue. It's a women's issue too. Absolutely. Yeah. I think 44% of women still are struggling with pornography. Yes. So tell us a little bit about Love and Truth Network first, how did God to lead you or when did you really figure out I'm going to do ministry around this area? What's kind of a funny story? I was coming up on my 12th year of being at the church, and I felt like I couldn't believe that I got to do what I, what I did. My final role is as the Pastor of Soul Care Ministries, overseeing the very support groups, the counseling program that helped me. Yeah, exactly. And so what a gift that was. I thought, I just want to do this. I'll die doing this. That's great. But at one point, about 12 years in, I began to really feel this discomfort. Our church went through some really kind of challenging transitions. I was the last of seven senior staff members left at the church. And so it was it was a really hard time. We brought somebody else in as the lead pastor. And I realized certainly after that, for the first time ever, the thought came to me, I wonder if God's kicking me out of my comfortable nest, you know, which I wasn't very happy about at the time. But Melissa and I realized, yeah, we do believe she's a licensed Christian counselor. And we we see how we love the church, and we know that the church is God's plan A, I mean, there is no substitute for the church at all. And we want to be a part of strengthening the church, not like running parallel to the church. And and so we really felt like God called us to speak into the lives of pastors and leaders. If we can equip more pastors and leaders to do the work that we're doing, we're going to help many, many more individuals than we can directly. Yeah, yeah. So we do that a lot. I do a lot of weekend ministry events all around the country in churches, and we'll do live training on online as well for leadership teams and things of that nature. I have a weekly podcast I've been doing for about two and a half years, and interview style podcasts as well. That runs about 60 minutes or so, interviewing all kinds of people and pastors with past pornography issues and things like that, all kinds of things. And we have some books out and putting more content out all the time. Excellent, excellent. Yeah. If I can talk about the church a little bit more, because certainly a Covenant Eyes, one of the big emphasis we have right now is trying to come alongside the church, specifically to this area of pornography. We've seen so many churches just are afraid of dealing with this issue, let alone all of the the, the issues. People struggle with, the trauma, the heart. But we're all broken. Everyone coming into church has all of these habits and hangups in past trauma and abuse in their life. Maybe. And if our churches aren't dealing with them, then, as you found, where do I go? Where do I where do I heal from these things? And so so I'm really encouraged that you're building back into the church, into pastors, really dealing with so many of these issues. Are you finding much reluctance from churches around this or. It depends. I mean, I find that there's the churches kind of in three large buckets from what I and of course there's variation. Sure. What I find is that many churches are similar to ones that I grew up in, which were full of people that did love Jesus but didn't know how to show much love or compassion. They were heavy on truth and very light on any kind of love, and they would use the phrase love the sinner, hate the sin. But the truth is, you kind of hate. Them. Connected to right? Because you wouldn't want to spend one second with them. So stop saying that you love them. The truth is, we should be repenting of our lack of love in our own. Our own hidden is so. We believe that most Christians are posturing and putting just their best foot forward. And that's a nice way of saying we're deceiving one another. And so there's churches that are in that kind of original bucket of a lot of truth thumping, and I'm grateful for the truth. But we need some love and compassion now. The pendulum swung so far in the other direction. Many churches are affirming all kinds of things that Bible says are sin. But there's this whole wide swath of churches that do believe the truth. They just don't know what to do with it. They don't know how to handle sexuality. They don't know how to. It's not just LGBT, they don't know how to get men's or women's struggles with general sexuality. And yet, because it's such a common core issue amongst adults and teens, we have to the one place on the planet that is not saying much about sexuality is the one place that actually isn't right. So it's it's frustrating in that sense. But I believe once I see churches, what I preach and teach on Sundays, I mean, the lights just go on, you know, I see people that in tears, I mean, people that are hearing for the first time something that they connect with, that they've been struggling with for decades, coming to the same church and loving the church and loving the people, but not knowing how to get the help and support that they need, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And again, we're certainly not down on the church. I know you are either. You said it earlier, the church is God's plan A, and. When you said earlier also you mentioned about not being really equipped. And I think it's a Barna study and you guys have been better than I, but a Barna study that says that 93% of pastors say that pornography is a much bigger issue than it's ever been historically, and only 7% of those 93 have anything in their church to support anybody going through those issues. That's a massive disparity. It is. It is. Yeah. And so it really does come down to just helping or equipping the churches and helping pastors because like I said, many just really they have a heart for it. They just don't know what to do. And they really haven't built any ministry or help around that issue. So many people feel like this is kind of an icky, awkward issue to deal with. The truth is when when people are helped in this area and they and it becomes a normalized conversation, we're not normalizing. Sin means sin is. It's a part of us. But we don't want to normalize behavior as if it's not a big deal. But we do want to normalize the conversation. And when I see churches get ahold of this, like the the entire DNA of the church shifts in a really positive way, and they become a place where they are known in the community as a go to place. Like that church. I moved from Chicago back to upstate New York because I heard about this church. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. We've run into we know a lot of them, and that's so true. I mean, you when you start raising the awareness of these issues and talking about them, it frees everyone to come forward, step out of that shame and out of that darkness to begin to to get help. And they know it's safe. That's the big thing. You know, it's safe to come forward, not going to be condemned. Terrified of being rejected, and they're terrified of being gossiped about. And the church has done a lousy job historically on both of those fronts. And there's so much more we can do to improve in those areas and create a sense of safety. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, good. Well, I know Melissa, your wife started this, and she is a trained counselor. Yeah, she's a licensed counselor. Counselor? Yeah. So what other pieces of your ministry have you not talked about yet? Or maybe some things that you're planning to do next? What's what's happening in. Melissa and I were part...We first met at a Living Waters training and Living Waters is a program that's put out by Desert Street Ministries, and we were regional coordinators for them, probably for close to 20 years. Love that ministry. But we've rewritten a our own inner healing program that we just came up with about 8 or 9 months ago. I just completed our our first pilot, and we ran it as a men's group, and we want to have it as a women's and men's group. But we ran that first pilot that way. It's a 13 week inner healing program. And so I would say that that's another piece is we're oftentimes looking for great theology and discipleship, and we should look for that. That's foundational for sure. But one of the things that helped me tremendously was, honestly, when I came to that church in upstate New York and I met with some of their counselors I needed. They weren't licensed counselors, but they had a really good biblical basis for what they were doing, and I had some critters to deal with. I had some demonic strongholds in my life through my behavior that I had allowed in. And so the spiritual warfare was a big piece. And it was later, after I got on staff, that I realized when I went to this conference, this Living Waters conference, is that the third leg of the stool we were really missing? Good to ship theology, spiritual warfare. But the other leg was healing of wounds. And I had no idea, as a pastor going to this conference, not sure what it was I needed there, but knowing I needed something, I had no idea the infection and the woundedness that was still just sitting within me that the Lord wanted to bring freedom to. So that would be another huge area that I think the church doesn't address effectively enough. But it it has huge win when we can sit together with some some other brothers walking through their own things, some sisters for women walking through their own issues and being prayed for and and dealing with some of these issues that are long standing, going all the way back again when I was five, six years old. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's fascinating. That's amazing. Do you find two that many people don't even realize that those, those old wounds are doing causing the natives that they are? I was clueless. I just thought most of us believe, you know, like Paul says, forgetting what lies behind and pressing on to what lies before. But Paul was not talking about woundedness or brokenness. He was talking about all of his accomplishments. Right? And so he so quickly misapplied that. And we don't. And none of us want to go back and deal with the pain. We've been we've been pushing it down for years. Right. So, yeah, I think it's most Christians do not even know that that's an avenue that the Lord could bring greater healing. And my parents didn't realize that my mom and dad passed away, my dad at 88, my mom at 92, and our relationship was deeply restored. They lived with me for 10 or 12 years before they passed away, and my wife and I got married while they were still alive and living with me. She moved in with us and and it was it was an incredible time, though, of a lot of healing that happened. But even in their older years, they began to realize, my mom especially, that there was some deeper healing she could do in praying through some of these things that had happened, or even as a little girl, and I saw the effects of that. It was really powerful. Yeah. That's excellent. Well, I'm glad you guys are really pouring into that area for sure. By the way, I want to say something. I have two teenage boys, so my boys are 14 and 16, and I'm just every day. I'm so grateful we've had covenant eyes. This is good. You haven't paid me to say this, but we use Covenant Eyes on all their devices because every every evening I get a report, you know, and I'm able there's a couple of times that it'll it's always green. Once in a blue moon, there will be like a yellow. And I'll look up what they're looking at and I'll sit and talk with them about it a little bit. It's never it really because of that. And they know my story. They know how pornography wrecked my life and they're aware of that. And, and and they know to stay away from that. But they are also curious boys and they have testosterone pumping through them. And and one of the things that Covenant Eyes has helped me do is allowed my 14 to 16 year old to have not even seen pornography at this point, which in our day and age, that's pretty shocking to get to that, to that age without having seen all that garbage. Oh, good. Well, we're glad that we can come alongside. It's so important. I've got grandkids that age now and we've got it on their devices and yeah, it's it's it's a tough struggle nowadays. It is. It is. But it's possible to get through it without a complete train wreck. Yep. Absolutely. Well good. Well, Garry, tell if you would, our listeners, where do they connect with you in, in your, your ministry and resources? Yeah. Anybody can get on our website at LoveAndTruthNetwork.com . We do a weekly podcast. So that's LoveAndTruthNetwork.com/podcast on all the major platforms like Spotify and YouTube, both in audio and video. And but the best way of getting a hold of us is through the website. We'd be happy to have conversations with pastors, leaders, others that are looking for help or support as well. Excellent. Well, we will put all of that in the show notes. So you have that. But Garry, thank you so much for your ministry and thank you for joining us today. It was a great conversation. I wish we had. Time for more. Yeah, definitely. Thank you I appreciate you. Well, great. And to our listeners again, thanks for watching. I hope. I hope this was encouraging and helpful. Do check out the resources. Like and share this. But again we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks again. God bless my life.