A year ago, gay-rights supporters--including some from churches--marched through the streets of Winston-Salem while anti-gay protesters lined the sidewalks and called for repentance.

Such scenes make Tim Wilkins shake his head.

Wilkins, 43, is an ordained Southern Baptist minister who believes that the homosexual behavior he formerly engaged in is a sin, but that shouting for homosexuals to “repent” will do everything but get them on their knees.

Conservative, evangelical Christians--who typically do the shouting--underestimate the power of sin and the power of God to transform lives, Wilkins says. And he knows of both powers.

As a child, he would play on a hill near his family's home on 25 th Street in Winston-Salem. One day when he was about 7, he recalls, he felt a desire to be held by an older man. The feelings, which he says were not sexual, revealed his unmet needs for protection, love and affirmation. By adolescence, he says, he realized that he was attracted to men instead of women.

“I believe that homosexuality is primarily an issue of identity, before it's an issue of sexuality,” he says. He describes homosexuality as an illegitimate response to a legitimate need for affirmation from same-sex friends and role models.

As a child, Wilkins did not have those.

Isolation, confusion, fear and helplessness engulfed him.

Wilkins says he was 9 when he accepted Jesus as his savior, and though he engaged in homosexual acts with “about five” partners during 10 years, he knew that his feelings were inconsistent with his faith.

At age 22, he decided he no longer could act on his desires. He said he figured that God could make him celibate, but that he did not necessarily believe that God could make him heterosexual.

“I began to reread the Bible and reread the Bible and apply every passage of Scripture that I could to my life,” Wilkins says. “I've looked through the concordances of many Bibles, and the indexes. There is not a section that says, 'Homosexuality: Steps out of ... page 462.' It's not there. But the Bible is replete with principles that I could apply to my life.”

Those principles, he said, did not talk specifically about homosexuality. They called for obedience, implored him to think about those things that are noble and pure, and prompted him to ask God for a mentor. He wanted his mentor, the Holy Spirit, to teach him how to love a woman and how to relate “the right way” to men.

It took 10 years of healing prayer, Bible study and spiritual growth before Wilkins felt passion for a woman. During those years, he says, he faced and resisted “tailor-made temptation.”

Today, he has been married for nearly four years and, after serving as the pastor of two churches, including Southside Baptist in Winston-Salem, is the founder and director of an ex-gay ministry based in Raleigh. It is one of more than 80 such ministries throughout the United States.

His wife, Lisa, was the first person he ever told about his struggles. He told her one night before they were engaged because he wanted her to take some time to think about what he said.

Lisa Wilkins said she was ready to tell people about his transformation before he was. “I thought it was an amazing thing that happened, and I wanted people to know,” she says, adding that she was not repulsed by what he told her, and that she knows that everyone is a sinner who can experience change through God.

Now she assists her husband with the part-time ministry.

Wilkins said that too often Christians keep at arm's length from homosexuals and refuse to welcome them until they repent and become clean. That only exacerbates the problem, he says, because homosexuals need healthy, same-sex, nonsexual relationships. And the church, because of its ability to serve as a family for some people, can offer that.

In the year since Wilkins founded CROSS (CReated for the OppoSite Sex) Ministry, he has discovered that churches often present the biggest roadblocks to his work. He once told a select group of clergy about his past and his thoughts of starting such a ministry to see if he would get support. One pastor commented after the meeting that he just didn't know any homosexuals who wanted to change.

“I thought, ‘Want? Since when do we Southern Baptists minister to people simply because they want it, rather than the fact that they need it?' “ Wilkins said.

He says it's important for evangelical Christians to address the issue now, without getting worked up and taking the same old knee-jerk positions.

'I'm beginning to think that the enemy is us because we cannot even dialogue about an issue that is pivotal,” he says. “It is controversial, yes. It is volatile, yes. But we're sending a mixed message. Whereas we (evangelicals) have fervently and appropriately denounced homosexuality as sin, we have expressed little concern about the eternal welfare of homosexuals or even attempted to understand their plight and provide some type of healing.”

The jokes that come at the expense of others, the quips that fly from the mouths of television evangelists all need to be stopped, Wilkins says. Only then can real dialogue begin, he says, and homosexuals get what they need from the church: unconditional love, undiluted truth and unceasing prayer.

“We are more antagonistic than evangelistic when it comes to the issue of homosexuality,” he says.