Tom Christofferson and Darius Gray: Witnesses from the Margins

Today we're sharing a special conversation courtesy of our friends at Lift+Love. This is a conversation recorded at their first ever Gather Conference in 2023, the world’s largest Christ-centered gathering of LGBTQ Latter-day Saints and those who love them. In this session, two men sat down together — Tom Christofferson and Darius Gray. Both are devoted Latter-day Saints who know what it is to love the Church while also having experienced real marginalization within it. Darius Gray is a black Latter-Day Saint who was baptized on December 26th, 1964 — fourteen years before the revelation that lifted the priesthood and temple ban. He entered the waters of baptism knowing he could not hold the priesthood and he built his faith anyway. He helped found the Genesis Group, he waited, he worked. And on a day in June 1978, everything changed. This June, we're sitting with what that means. There is something powerful in Darius's story — his rootedness, his patience, his refusal to let institutional limitation become the ceiling of his faith. Tom Christofferson, as a gay Latter-day Saint, knows something about that too. What you're about to hear is a conversation between two men who have walked, who are walking long roads, who are holding hard questions, and bearing witness to a God whose work continues to unfold in their lives. It is warm and honest and full of hope. We think you'll find, as we did, that it stays with you.