GAY TRUTH

I do not want to suggest that Christians who experience same-sex attraction cannot experience some reduction in it over time, as that has been reported by some who have had that as their goal.  Some find that they can marry heterosexually.84  However, the church would do well to expand the vision of the Christian who is navigating sexual identity issues beyond the expectation of complete heterosexuality or the expectation of heterosexual marriage, even if a modest number of believers do experience a more significant shift.  Many others will not experience the same degree of shift, and a Christian’s measure of spiritual depth and maturity does not hinge on the eradication of same-sex attraction or an increase in attraction to the opposite sex.  If a believer does not experience heterosexuality or a significant reduction in homosexual attractions, he or she has much to experience in the life of the church and in a personal walk with God.  For all believers, single...

The Dicastery for Culture and Education reaffirmed a 2019 Vatican document against modern gender theory in education but took no action against the controversial pro-LGBT program. Catholic parents who begged Pope Leo XIV to halt the implementation of pro-LGBT sex education in Hamburg’s Catholic schools received a brief Vatican reply reaffirming Church teaching on gender, but no direct intervention to stop the program. The pro-LGBT diocesan sex-education guidelines remain set to take effect on August 20. According to a report published by Italian outlet La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana , the Dicastery for Culture and Education responded to the parents’ complaint by pointing to a 2019 Vatican document which rejects modern gender ideology in education, but it did not announce any measure to stop the pro-LGBT Hamburg guidelines from being enforced in Catholic schools. The Vatican response was sent to Varinia Arauco, a Peruvian-born mother who wrote to Pope Leo XIV and other Vatican officials to...

In modern cultures like America, every Christian is faced with the problem of homosexuality. Churches are pulled into the tension, too, because “there is no demilitarised zone in the homosexual debate.” Shrugging isn’t an option. The implications are all around us, in schools, in politics, in denominational tensions, and — maybe most importantly — in determining how the Church lives out her faithful witness to a culture in desperate need of Christ. With the marriage amendment on the Minnesota ballot and a growing list of personal questions in my Moleskine notebook, I contacted Dr Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a man who has, for many years, bravely addressed homosexuality from a biblical and theological perspective. He published the 500-page book The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics . A decade later, his work remains the most thoroughly exegetical and hermeneutical book on homosexuality and the Bible ( John Pipe...

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 ha...

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 que...

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...