At 13 years of age, Michael Myrand’s father committed suicide without embracing or affirming him. Then a kid at school blamed Michael for his father’s death, telling him, “Your dad killed himself because you’re a {gay slur}.”
Abuse and rejection by boys from kindergarten through high school only reinforced Myrand’s pain and feelings of abandonment growing up without his dad in Michigan, where he lived with his praying mother.
In high school, Myrand became friends with a girl who identified as bisexual. She introduced him to people who, for the first time, accepted him. “I’m getting attention from men. Boys are flirting with me, and I’m liking it. I concluded that I must be gay,” Myrand told a crowd in Oregon on Saturday.
Rejecting LGBTQ identities to follow Jesus, men and women from across the nation gathered in Portland to evangelize, worship, pray and testify at the 14th annual Freedom March, organized by Rainbow Revival.
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A large stage and sound system amplified Myrand’s confident voice, telling his story in a public park near Portland’s waterfront park.
Desperate for love at 18, he looked in gay clubs for a boyfriend who, Myrand thought, would fill his needs. Instead, he experienced more rejection.
That is, until he began working out, started his career, and moved to a certain neighborhood in Detroit. “The attention turned out to be a hook-up culture, you know like guys pursuing you, really showing a lot of interest in you, then leaving you,” Myrand said.
Thinking relocation was the answer, he moved to Georgia, where rejection followed him. It led to depression and heavy drug use in his new environment void of family or friends.
While working at a restaurant in Atlanta, a coworker invited him to church. “I came out of church and started praying for my needs like a place to live and work,” said Myrand, who remembered his mother’s faithful intercession.
“I had an encounter with Jesus who said to me, ‘Michael, this isn’t the life I have for you,'” said Myrand. He continued going to church and support groups to get sober.
Even while he pursued God, Myrand desired a relationship with a man, knowing Jesus was the better choice.
“Jesus kept saying, ‘Michael, I love you.’ All my brokenness is being filled up hearing God say, ‘You’re my son,'” Myrand said.
At the same time, the coworker encouraged Myrand to focus on his relationship with Jesus – not his boyfriend.
Reading 1 Corinthians 6 where Paul writes about people who won’t inherit the kingdom of God, including homosexuals, Myrand was broken. He cried out to Jesus for transformation and to meet his need for love.
“I’m standing before you today free, with peace in my heart… Jesus provided grace for me to walk away from that relationship,” said Myrand, who had lived as a gay man for 13 years.
More LGBTQ-Identifiers Set Free by Jesus
Other Rainbow Revival members told about being welcomed to Mt. Olivet Baptist and by a ministry called Portland Fellowship. It offers discipleship programs for people pursuing freedom from unwanted same-sex attraction and gender confusion, and support for family whose sons or daughters identify as LGBTQ.
“Portland Fellowship changed my life,” Patrick Silvis told a crowd gathered at a rally for Freedom March.
Silvis grew up in a stereotypical Christian home where everything looked great but, secretly, he was struggling with homosexuality. “I knew it was a sin but I couldn’t reconcile my feelings. I had this desire to connect with men. I didn’t know why it was there or what to do with it,” said Silvis.
His turmoil was compounded when he had a sexually defiling experience with an older boy in middle school. His insecurity was sexualized to include fantasy, masturbation, and men.
Considering himself a Christian, Silvis couldn’t reconcile being gay with the Bible. “In high school I did what a lot of us have done, which is to suppress it: ‘I’m not going to talk about this, think about it, and maybe it will go away,'” said Silvis.
While loving and serving God, and doing what he thought were right things, Silvis followed the Lord to an overseas mission field where he performed discipleship, evangelism, and community tasks. Then his struggle reared its head.
“I found myself in a situation with another man, and I almost had a sexual fall with him,” said Silvis.
In the realization that his struggle followed him in serving God overseas, Silvis was desperate. “For me it was the first time I heard the audible voice of the Holy Spirit,” Silvis said. “In the moment of temptation, the Holy Spirit said, ‘You can choose life or death.’ I want life with Jesus, a wife and kids someday,” Silvis said.
Repentance was huge for Silvis who committed himself to pursuing Jesus in sexual brokenness – not only serving him as a missionary.
Scripture came alive during this season when Silvis read John 8:32 where Jesus states, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
As he found freedom, peace and hope in telling people about his struggle, Silvis was surprised to learn Christian leaders didn’t know how to help, other than to pray, recommend counselors, and offer listening ears.
“In that season of pursuing the Lord, I stumbled across 1 Cor. 6: 9-11 which talks about types of sinners – adulterers, swindlers, homosexuals and others – that will not inherit the kingdom of God. But I had never read verse 11, which states “and that is what some of you were,'” said Silvis.
He realized that if this was true in Corinth, then God restores people in the modern era too. Silvis then discovered Portland Fellowship, where he found freedom and is the program director today.
Elizabeth Woning is a leader in the ex-LGBTQ community who left an openly gay and gay-affirming church to follow Jesus. She told Freedom March her goal is to inspire them. “I’m here to invite you to become Jesus people,” said Woning, executive director of advocacy and government affairs for CHANGED Movement.
“I’m here to raise up a Jesus movement that knows God and Jesus Christ, that doesn’t dilute the name of God, nor diminish the authority of Christ – people who walk in His authority, love, righteousness, purity and glory,” said Woning.
She graduated from seminary to do youth ministry, moving from a metropolitan area to a rural community, Woning told Freedom March. Trying to get to know pastors in her area, she accepted an invitation to a big, local youth outreach.
“I didn’t know but this was a Spirit-filled church. The night I showed up the Holy Spirit came very powerfully. I like to say it was a Presbyterian’s worst nightmare – expressive, contemporary music, jumping, dancing, falling, laughter, weeping, kids filled with the Spirit and speaking in tongues,” said Woning.
A 17-year-old boy approached Woning to tell her he had a word from the Lord. With a master’s degree in theology, Woning and her peers had never heard from anybody who claimed to have heard directly from the Lord.
He proceeded to tell Woning something she had been praying about for years, unrelated to her sexuality.
“I remember thinking, ‘if God knows me specifically, then I don’t know who He is.’ I was convicted of unbelief,” she recalled.
“I did not know God. The terror of understanding the implications of that marked me. Sometime later I reread the Bible to get a hold of what I had experienced,” Woning said.
Reading the Bible again, Woning began to reevaluate what she had understood from seminary. “I repented without any idea of what that would mean. I didn’t have any vision for becoming straight,” said Woning.
At the time, she was unaware of ministries like Portland Fellowship, Freedom March, and Rainbow Revival.
“We have the most unlikely testimonies of our generation. We’re the ones who are the most outcast, the one nobody wants to hear. We are like the lepers. No church wants us or knows what to do with us,” said Woning who, with her husband, now attends Bethel Church in Redding, CA, where she teaches at its School of Supernatural Ministry.
Rainbow Revival Leader MJ Nixon announced the 2026 Freedom March is scheduled for New York.
