The Legacy of Sy Rogers LIves On
Sy Rogers was one of the greatest global communicators evangelizing the span of six continents. He was welcomed to influential platforms in global conferences, seminars, leadership events, and talk shows. He was considered one of the most brilliant, unique and informed communicators best known for his expression of kindness and gift of grace in leading others to sexual and relational freedom.
Sy Rogers’ life exemplified that it does not matter how you are born, it matters how you are reborn. Before starting a family and ministry in 1982, Sy Rogers had been an early leader in the homosexual community and movement. He had begun to identify as a woman and was preparing for a sex reassignment when Johns Hopkins hospital shutdown its gender identity clinic and no longer offered surgeries. It was then that Rogers cried out in desperation and had a radical encounter with God. In his most vulnerable place, he asked God to change him and for the next 40 years of his life, he was a living testimony of that change.
One of Sy Rogers most powerful statements was, “ Sex is a powerful master, but I can also tell you this … God is a more powerful master. You can serve your desires or you can bring your desires to God, admit them and submit them, and experience his mastery over mind and body.”
For the last two decades, Sy Rogers was an apologist for sexual integrity and relationships. Whether he was speaking internationally in an influential pulpit or teaching at his local church or bible college, Sy Rogers’ ministry brought messages of hope, pastoral care and support groups for people who struggled with sexual confusion, abuse, and gender identity issues. He was a proponent of truth to empower people to overcome the challenges of same-sex attraction and used his own testimony to reveal that this change was possible.
Sy Rogers was the perfect picture of transparency as he openly shared his traumatic childhood experiences of being molested as a toddler, the loss of his mother in a car accident at age 4, being abandoned by his father, being bullied at school because of his feminine mannerisms, his lifestyle of promiscuity and prostitution in the homosexual community. These testimonies have been featured on his DVD, “ One of the Boys”, the 700 Club, Reality Magazine, Good Morning Australia and numerous global interviews and articles.
Sy Rogers remarked that he believed in God but didn’t believe that God loved people like him. It wasn’t until that moment of desperation where he realized his greatest need wasn’t a different sexuality, his greatest need was a Savior. In a moment, he was loved and accepted by a loving God, but it took him a lifetime to walk out the transformation.
Sy Rogers once stated, “I find it remarkably ironic that, of all the men in the world, God picked me as His public example of redeemed manhood. How very like God to choose the person that no one else would. But God’s version of public relations is different.”
Isn’t that what being a child of God is all about? Sy Rogers was an incredible man of faith and a friend of God. Sy Rogers lived his life to make God happy, so the legacy doesn’t end with him, it begins with him.
Pastor Dana M. Adams
Awaken Church