My Revoice22 Conference Talk

Thank you to all those who gave me encouraging feedback about my Revoice22 talk. Here is the link to my manuscript: "Ashamed of the Gospel."

The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender publishes my Revoice21 talk

You might be familiar with The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender, a ministry headed up by Preston Sprinkle and Greg Coles. They have kindly offered to publish the manuscript of my Revoice21 talk (only slightly edited for publishing purposes). You can find it here.

My Revoice21 Talk

If you have come here looking for my Revoice21 talk, "The Church and the Gay Christian - A View from the Pew," here is the link.

By your measure it will be measured to you

The relationship between the evangelical church and the LGBT community has changed dramatically over the last two decades. The church used to be far more public in their condemnations of gay and lesbian people, failing to distinguish between biblical teaching and false and ignorant claims. For instance evangelical leaders used to say that people chose to be gay, that gay people were capable of becoming straight, that gays were child molesters, that they recruited children into homosexuality, and on and on.

Nowadays, you don't hear such talk dominating the airwaves, partly because many straight Christians have caught up on the learning curve. Christian kids started coming out to their parents, forcing parents to rethink everything they've been taught from the pulpit. Gay parents even started coming out to their kids, and friends came out to their Christian friends. It used to be too costly to risk these relationships by coming out, but once it started happening, people became emboldened by the examples of those who went before them. And once pastors became aware that they were accountable for what they said about gay people who were sitting right there in their pews (along with their family members), they started toning it down.

Society has also put the squeeze on. The more progress LGBT rights have made, the more politically incorrect it has become to fall back on the rhetoric of 1995. And now with social media passing on information so quickly, no one can be certain that what they say publicly will only be contained to a sympathetic audience. Maybe your congregation will be on board with a traditional interpretation of Romans 1, but you risk catching heat from outsiders if your sermon ends up getting passed along on YouTube or Facebook.

What that leaves is a certain population of the conservative Christian community who are holed up in trenches, who still buy into the old-school view of homosexuality but have been forced into a defensive posture. What some call compassion, they call cowardice. What some hail as enlightenment, they condemn as compromising the truth. Not long ago they were a dominant force in shaping the values of society, yet now they are suddenly ignored, ridiculed and shouted down. And pretty soon, they predict, they will be persecuted.

You do not have to be very old to remember a day when the tables were turned the other way; when it was the other odd-ball, strong-willed minority group in society that was ignored, ridiculed, shouted down, and very much persecuted. I have always thought it strange that the LGBT community and the evangelical community seem to have so much in common. And now that the tables are turned, and the one-time persecutors now fear that they will become the persecuted, I find myself having mixed feelings that often leave me staring at a blank screen when I think about what to say on this blog.

The Bible is full of verses that say, essentially, what goes around comes around. The merciful will be shown mercy, but for those who fail to show mercy . . . alas, that bad boomerang is guaranteed to circle back eventually. It's going to hit all of us, myself included, because I continue to be a part of the conservative church that is historically guilty of lacking mercy and compassion.

The scary thing is that even though more Christians than ever come up to me lamenting bitterly about how "you can't have a biblical view of homosexuality anymore without risking persecution," they seem to think that those of us who have been trying to love the LGBT community have caused the problem. Sort of implying that if only we had persecuted the gay community more we wouldn't be in this mess of letting them get the upper hand.

I never have the heart to suggest to these Christians that, actually, we may very well be reaping what we have sown. That maybe God has heard the cries of LGBT people of faith (I know that many, many prayers have been lifted up over the years), and he is finally giving them relief. If indeed it is God that we have to contend with, the question is whether we are spiritually sensitive enough to 1) recognize what is happening, and 2) respond in a way that spares us the full measure of his indignation.

It begins with having the humility to recognize that we have done wrong in the first place, and sadly I don't see that we're even close to taking that first step. But if we do get there by some miracle, I would suggest that we humbly ask God for forgiveness for our past sins in persecuting the LGBT community, and for grace to bear fruit in keeping with repentance. We need to ask for the kind of mercy for our sins that we should have given to them for theirs, and to be spared the kind of suffering that we caused them as we hardened our hearts to their needs and turned a deaf ear to their voices.

We do not want to find ourselves in a situation where God hardens his heart to us and turns a deaf ear to our prayers, but it is exactly what we ought to expect if we do not take a long look at ourselves in the mirror of his Word. Soon.

Welcome new followers

It's been awhile since I've done this, my apologies. Here are the newest followers, though some of you have been hanging around for awhile:

Fokke Pathuis
David
frank Fisher
Garrett Biehle
Harold Oberheide
Jill Hurley
turtlejeeps
Julia Smith
Reloaded
pj clutterbuck
Lauryn Farris

Thanks for coming aboard!

Narcissism in the church

"I may not have handled it perfectly, but this is really all your fault."

"I'm sorry if I hurt you, but you should have known I'd react that way."

"It's true I may have some faults, but your sin is really the problem here."

Jesus called it "look[ing] at the speck in your brother's eye, but [failing to] consider the log in your own eye." We sometimes refer to it as "Pharisaism." The secular psychologist more accurately calls it "narcissism."

You see it in the church, just as Jesus saw it prevalent in the synagogues of his day. The "Christian" narcissist is a spiritually bankrupt person who covers up for his or her false spirituality by presenting him- or herself as morally superior to everyone else. These people flock like vultures to the spiritually vulnerable, anyone who is susceptible to being condemned by public opinion or even their own sensitive conscience. They might even build up a righteous reputation for themselves at the expense of the people they've broken and condemned, and launch themselves into positions of church leadership so that they have power to do even further damage.

You know them. You've met them. You wonder why they rise higher and higher while you struggle to wake up every morning and face a new day in this crazy, broken world.

Amazingly there is a blog--an entire blog--dedicated to investigating what the Bible has to say about narcissism. The author chooses to remain anonymous, but you can tell from their reflections and interactions with the Scriptures that this person is a very mature Christian.

The blog is called Biblical Perspectives On Narcissism--Recognizing and Dealing with the Evil of Insolent Pride. Read carefully, ponder soberly and enjoy.

Quote for the day

"I did not learn my theology all at once, but I had to search deeper for it, where my temptations took me . . . Not understanding, reading, or speculation, but living--nay, dying and being damned--make a theologian."

--Martin Luther

Unsafety zone

In the summer of 2000 I made my first trip to West Hollywood to go to a LGBT bookstore called A Different Light. Those were the days before Amazon.com, when we had to drive to bookstores to browse for available publications. I was just starting to read coming-out stories and wanted to follow up on certain gay authors whom I found to be accessible. Barnes & Noble bookstore had a dismal gay and lesbian selection so, like a good cross-cultural missionary, I decided I would go out of my comfort zone to gain access to points of view different from what I was used to. I just wanted to understand.

A Different Light bookstore was located on a busy main street that ran through the heart of West Hollywood. I found plenty of interesting volumes to browse: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, history. As I was flipping through a theology book, three young men entered the store. They walked in together, laughing and talking loudly, and it was clear they had come in to harass the customers, not buy books. Tension filled the entire store as the cashier ordered them out. I was standing about twenty feet from the entrance and watched them walk almost past me before they turned around and exited.

It was my first time at a LGBT bookstore and that happened. It never occurred to me that by being there I'd have to worry about my safety. Those three guys didn't care who I was, a straight pastor's wife doing a bit of cross-cultural research. If they had brought guns I would have been one among many casualties of another hate crime in West Hollywood. That's when it dawned on me: LGBT people have to worry about their safety all the time. The incident gave me the barest glimpse into that reality.

That didn't stop me from making return visits to the bookstore or, later on, attending LGBT conferences and events. But I'm aware now that safety is something I can take for granted in a way that my LGBT friends cannot. And what happened in Orlando yesterday morning has done untold damage to what little sense of safety and security they have fought so hard to achieve. Until you've been on the receiving end of anti-gay hostility, it's hard to explain how frightening it is.

My 2016 GCN keynote transcript now available in Spanish

Muchas gracias, Jacob Pintle, for translating my 2016 GCN keynote speech into Spanish! You can find the link to it on Jacob's blog here.