Happy, clappy, and out of the closet: Evangelicals who say being gay is OK In the late 1980s he set up a group which he hoped would "heal" homosexual men and women on their way to becoming straight. Then something remarkable happened. He began to change his mind. "However much support we gave people it didn't result in a change in their orientation at all," the 60-year-old explains. Many lost their faith altogether. The only ones that did well accepted they were gay, found a partner and accepted it was right. It made me begin to realise that what I was doing was wrong, not them. The ongoing theological debates surrounding women bishops and same-sex marriages has often been framed as one where liberal Christians are battling against a rising tide of highly organised evangelical zealots. Evangelicalism, the fastest growing form of Christianity in Britain today, is often seen as a byword for social conservatism. Yet evangelicals are by no means a unified group. And there are even signs that a small number are finally beginning to shift on the crucial question of same-sex relationships. To many, the word evangelical summons up images of Bible Belt America. Mega-churches run by charismatic firebrand preachers, backed by Christian rock bands and zealous congregants who speak in tongues. They're not exactly known for being welcoming to gays. But slowly and quietly, a revolution is taking place. A growing number of prominent evangelical theologians and pastors are beginning to speak in favour, not just of tolerating gay men and woman, but of welcoming them and recognising them as good moral Christians. In Britain today, behind closed doors, a handful of evangelical churches are quietly welcoming gay congregants in a way that might have been unthinkable ten years ago. James Holland, 45, an openly gay IT consultant, attends an evangelical church in London. "They're very coy about it and they don't want to advertise it," he explains, requesting that The Independent does not publish the church's name for fear of a backlash. For Mr Holland, being able to worship as an openly gay man in an evangelical church without judgement or castigation is deeply important. "Evangelicalism in my background," he says. It's my people and my culture. That's who I want to be with and how I want to worship. There are signs of a similar theological change in the United States, where evangelists such as Tony Campolo, his wife Peggy and the up-and-coming urban preacher Jay Bakker have gone back to the scriptures to argue for a theological embrace of homosexuality. In Britain the prime mover in promoting pro-gay evangelicalism is Accepting Evangelicals, a group that was started by the Anglican priest Benny Hazlehurst. Like Jeremy Marks, Rev Hazlehurst spent much of his life fervently convinced that homosexuality was wrong. And his conversion was no less dramatic. Sitting in a café in Dorchester, where he now works as a prison chaplain, he charts his dramatic volte face. Throughout theological college and his early working life he believed the scriptures insisted that all forms of homosexuality were sinful. Over time he began to describe himself as an affirming evangelical - someone who tolerates and welcomes homosexuals but nonetheless believes that scripture clearly forbids same-sex relationships. Then, in early 2003, he had a revelation - one that came from the depths of personal tragedy. One April morning his wife Mel was hit by an articulated lorry while cycling near their home in South London. She survived, but had a long and horrendous recovery in hospital. Rev Hazlehurst's faith was shaken and, he says, he might have lost it altogether were in not for one man: the now Dean of St Albans, Jeffrey John. At the time, Dr John was being forced by conservative evangelicals to step down as Bishop of Reading because he was one of the few clerics brave enough to admit that he was gay. "Two months after the accident it looked like Mel was dying and I was in pieces," Rev Hazlehurst explained. Jeffrey was there for me at that time, even though that was exactly the same time he couldn't go home at night because of all the press camped out on his lawn and he was being torn apart by one half of the Church. He added: "It felt to me that the fruit of his life was so profound and he was being Christ to me in such a profound way that I needed to go back to the Bible and re-examine what it said. It didn't feel right that God said this person was being sinful. And when I went back, the blinkers were gone: I suddenly saw things in a new way. Reinterpreting the Bible to allow for same-sex relationships is crucial for evangelicals because they place such a profound importance on scriptural purity. What pastors like Bakker and Hazlehurst believe is that the Bible's references to homosexuality have to be seen in the context of when they were written. The Old Testament, for example, tends to condemn homosexuality as a form of cultic or temple prostitution while Paul's writings in the New Testament are aimed at a Roman audience, one which encouraged same-sex relationships outside of marriage for largely pleasurable reasons. "There is nothing in the Bible which condemns consensual, loving, committed gay relationships," Rev Hazlehurst concludes. Although conservative evangelicals balk at this sort of scriptural revisionism, it has happened before. Evangelicals have reinterpreted scripture to come out against slavery, racial segregation and male-only leadership. Where pro-gay evangelicals draw hope for the future is among younger congregants, who tend to be much less implacably opposed to same-sex partnerships. "There's a long way to go but the hardest work has been done," Mr Marks says. There's a younger generation of evangelicals growing up now who don't have an issue with same-sex relationships and can't understand why others do. And Church leaders are beginning to realise that if they don't soften their attitude soon, their churches will become irrelevant.