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When a Loved One Comes Out offers parents, family members, friends, and those serving in local ward ministry a compassionate, gospel-centered guide to understanding and supporting Latter-day Saint sexual and gender minorities. Drawing on his personal journey, professional experience as a marriage and family therapist, years of ministry, and contemporary research, Ty Mansfield explores how to respond with both doctrinal conviction and Christlike love. The book’s first part offers practical guidance for listening with empathy, strengthening trust, honoring agency, and cultivating emotional safety and belonging in families and congregations—including when loved ones’ choices lead them along a different path than we had envisioned.

The second part explores the doctrinal vision that gives this support direction and hope: our eternal identity, the purposes of mortality, the power of agency, and the possibility of lasting joy in Jesus Christ. Mansfield invites readers to help loved ones discover a “sacred yes”—a meaningful life of covenant commitment, growth, love, and connection—while learning to trust God through uncertainty themselves. Throughout, the book emphasizes that supporting loved ones involves both encouraging faith and helping build the relationships and communities in which faith can flourish. It calls readers to become the Savior’s hands, creating homes, friendships, and wards where individuals are loved, known, and needed.