GAY TRUTH

You’re standing at your church entrance, greeting folks for morning worship. It’s the usual Sunday morning routine — until you see a pair of men walking up, holding hands. Suddenly your usual Sunday morning has turned unusual. It could go badly, and you know it. You’ll gain an instant impression based on how they’re dressed, how they approach the church, and how they greet others. You’ll mix that together with your own past experiences. If you’ve heard of homosexual activists disrupting church services, your first reaction may be to put your guard up. You don’t know what to expect. They might be there legitimately responding to His call, and you want them to feel welcome for that. Or maybe you’ve seen gays and lesbians mistreated, and you’re thinking you should bend over backward to make sure that doesn’t happen here. It took you a few seconds to read through those scenarios. You’ll form your impressions a whole lot faster than that when it happens for real. You’ll have almost exactly

If you had asked me ten years ago whether evangelicals would ever give up ground on the issue of homosexuality, I would have said “no way!” Sure, the evangelical movement has always had its “progressive wing.”  And yes, even the term “evangelical” has always been notoriously difficult to define. But whatever “evangelical” means, everyone always seemed to understand that it doesn’t include those who would affirm homosexuality as consistent with God’s will.  Everyone always understood that to affirm homosexuality is to affirm your way right out of evangelicalism. That was a clear line that anyone who wished to remain an evangelical was loathed to cross. And there have been levers within the amorphous evangelical movement that informally identified leaders and authors who had crossed that line.  Unfortunately, these checks on false teaching have not always been located in actual church authorities but in publishing houses and magazine editors. So the gauges have been imperf

As followers of Jesus, we seek to pattern ourselves after His example. And in all things, He exemplified grace and truth. Not grace or truth, but grace and truth. How, exactly, do we work this out in practice? And how, precisely, does this apply to the issue of transgender pronouns? Recent teaching by Southern Baptist leader J.D. Greear underscored some of the challenges facing Christians today when confronted with the question of speaking to trans-identified individuals. Pronoun Hospitality On the one hand, Pastor Greear clearly emphasizes the aspect of truth. He references solid conservative Christian books addressing transgender issues written by Ryan T. Anderson and Andrew Walker.  And he states plainly that genetics determines your gender and that, “All told, when it comes to genetic sex, at the DNA level, there really is just male and female.” Then, after addressing the question of “ambiguous Genitalia and the ‘Intersexual,’” Pastor Greear gets to the pronoun questio

Overnight your Gospel-preaching church could change from being “a cool place to worship” to being branded as a church of bigotry and hate. That’s what happened at The Crossing in Columbia, Missouri — and it could happen anywhere. A Sermon on Gender Draws Criticism and National Attention On Sunday, October 13, Pastor Keith Simon preached a message on Genesis 1:27 as part of a new series on Genesis. His topic was gender. The sermon was thoughtful, welcoming, and non-judgmental. In an attempt to speak to the issue of gender confusion, the tone was one of respect and compassion. However, he did affirm the biblical teaching that God created only two genders: male and female. He ended with a series of questions including: “Are we sure that erasing the concept of father and mother and substituting parent 1 and parent 2 — are we sure that this is good for families?” “Are we sure that it is fair for sports to have biological males [who transitioned to female] compete with biological w

Three ethical dilemmas, each of them a true story. What do they have in common, other than the obvious? An analyst working at a major corporate headquarters says, “If I eat lunch at Chick-fil-A, I don’t dare mention it when I return to work. Chick-fil-A is ‘homophobic,’ they say, and they’ll report me to HR for creating a hostile work environment.” All the managers in one corporate department have placed LGBT “Ally” stickers on their office doors. All but one, that is: the one Christian there, who feels caught. By not putting a sticker on his own door, he’s making an unpopular statement — one that could earn him disciplinary action. A manager at another corporation sees his company throwing great public support behind last June’s LGBT “Pride” month. He feels an ethical urgency to talk to his boss about the Christian view being overlooked — if not outright steamrolled — in the process. His boss is homosexual, by the way. I didn’t make up these stories. These are friends of m

There are some things so wrong that we cannot allow ourselves to get used to them. We must always be outraged over them. Always grieved over them. We can never accept them as the new status quo. The drag queen assault on our children is one of those things. I’m talking about the celebration of little children in drag. I’m talking about drag queens dancing for our children (and reading stories to them). I’m talking about children posing with naked (or nearly naked) drag queens. This is unacceptable. This is perverse. This is outrageous. Coming After Our Children It was bad enough when this stuff happened at gay pride parades. It was even worse when it started to happen in our community libraries. Yes, you ought to be outraged. Now it has even entered houses of worship. As a June 24 headline announced , “Drag Queen Reads During Worship Service as Cincinnati Church Celebrates Pride Month.” As reported, “Following the song ‘God Welcomes All’ by the church choir, [Dad] Davidson [who was

Over the past decade, attacks on Canada’s Christian communities by LGBT activists have escalated significantly. In Alberta, Education Minister David Eggen is threatening to defund and possibly shut down religious schools that do not accept Gay-Straight alliance clubs. Canada’s Supreme Court recently ruled against Trinity Western University, a private Christian institution in British Columbia, for having students agree to a lifestyle contract upon enrollment. And of course, attempts to force schools to teach gender ideology are taking place simultaneously in nearly every province across the country. I’ve seen many Canadian Christians post articles describing these events on social media, often accompanied by the million dollar question: “What’s next?” I suspect that I’ve known the answer to that question for some time, but recent events in Ontario indicate that it could happen sooner than I’d thought. The potential catalyst is a story that has been reported on breathlessly by Ca

There’s a terrible problem with the Church when some of its leaders are pushing LGBT propaganda in conflict with Church teachings. God is holy and God is unable to make you sinful. We inherit a sinful nature because of Adam and we choose to sin. Homosexuality is a sin. You can't blame God for sinning. Host Raymond Arroyo asked about the significance of the Church working with the term “LGBT” as part of the Youth Synod. Despite not having surfaced in pre-Synod discussions the term LGBT did get inserted into the Synod’s working document – the first time for such ideologically-driven language to be included in a Vatican document.  “It is a terrible problem for the Church, precisely because some of the leadership is pushing the line that Father James Martin has been pushing in his books and speeches, which is that God made you this way,” Murray said. “And the assertions made: God made me a homosexual, God made me a bisexual, God made me a transgender person – and this is not