Have they lost their minds? Perhaps just lowered their standards? 🙂
Here is an article that published a few weeks ago. It was an honor that they would want to publish an account that I had written about a very powerful and shaping experience in [nlcf]’s life… It is a bit long, sorry, I don’t know what to do with that! 🙂
Ready to Weigh In
After you have been misquoted for a while, don’t you just get to the point where you want to weigh in? Homosexuality is one of those issues where I feel like my personal views as an apprentice of Jesus Christ are often misquoted. People like me don’t tend to write editorials or hold sandwich signs during Gay Rights Day. I stand back and watch as the louder voices on each side of the issue get the press coverage. It seems like all that I get is misunderstood, mischaracterized, and maligned. And there is a growing group of people like me.
During a Fall Semester, the church I help pastor, or [nlcf] at Virginia Tech, decided it was time to get our opinion on the table. When I read about the woman caught in adultery, or how Jesus approached Zaccheaus, or even how he was seen as a friend of sinners, I wondered how he would have dealt with the issue. I neither wish to give up my personal pursuit of holiness and Christ-likeness as I understand the Holy Scriptures call me to; nor do I wish to give up my newfound mercy that I am still learning to wield.
We wrestle with the culture, feeling called to adapt to their message of “acceptance.” We are criticized that we have narrow understanding, and are limited by our own cultural bubble. It brings to the question, “Do our kingdom values not trump culture?” And, “Are we ready to face the mockery from many by exerting our boldness to represent what genuine godliness looks like?” These are very tough issues.
“Most of the time it is easy to determine where our culture departs from kingdom values…However, sometimes the hardest part is trying to determine what our kingdom values are.”
– William Webb, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals
Deciding on this issue seems to come down to either denying civil rights or condoning clear sin.
Our Approach and Our Challenges
Ready to weigh in, our church mailed out powerful invitation mailers to all the apartments in town to come to our “Hate People” series. This would be a dialogue about the accusations against the Christian faith that many have held throughout history. Instead of being known by love, Christians have often been known best as being the hate people. We wanted to weigh in on our misquoted views about God hating people who follow other religions, homosexuals, the environment and women.
“Hate is something we notice. The pictures of it grab our eyes and the stories about it stick in our minds. We don’t like haters. Throughout history the church has been seen as a hateful place, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. Some might even call us “The Hate People.” Maybe we [the church] are just like you have always thought. But what if we aren’t.” – Premise for the Series
In our pursuit, it became clear that much of the evangelical community and the gay community are pretty distinct, rarely even communicating. We wanted to connect with leaders from the gay community in order to try to understand their perspective better. We learned quickly from meeting with a new friend of mine, Jason (name changed), that we can easily and unnecessarily step on toes.
A Kinder, Gentler Tone
Jason shared with me about the difficulty of being a gay teenager. He agreed with statistics I shared about the physical and verbal abuse they face, saying every one of his friends was abused.
He explained to me how the gay community feels misunderstood by the media, just as conservatives do. They feel that people unfairly limit them to their sexual identity. Jason asked me to consider what it might be like to try to go to a church to find out about God only to hear the pastor open up in a tirade about you and hear a whole chorus of “Amen”s from all over the room.
It just made me wonder – can our words be more gentle while not relinquishing our convictions?
The Other Side
I asked him to describe how he – and perhaps the gay community – views the Christian community. He admitted that they have their Christian jokes just like those in the Christian community have gay jokes. He would see us overall as uninformed, overly traditional, holding on to the irrelevant moral high ground for no reason other than we heard that is how we ought to believe. And maybe the hardest thing, we think we understand something that clearly we do not, and we don’t care to learn more. He said overall he found church to be irrelevant in his pursuit of God and seemed to care little about pursuing him.
Now some of his views were skewed and unfair. He made generalizations that could reflect his own misinterpretation of us. He understood little of us and had little desire to understand more. The idea that I could feel that his sexual orientation was wrong and yet not look down on him for it seemed almost foreign.
The reality is that this issue is not new. The Christian community is largely uncomfortable around the gay community and the gay community finds us largely irrelevant in their pursuit of God.
Quite an accomplishment.
Is God pleased with what we have done?
Einstein is noted as saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing you have always done and expecting a different result.” So we set out to try a different approach. Our leadership spent time preparing and seeking God on this issue we felt led to discuss. We wrestled with some tough questions:
Can we show the complexity of this issue and how divisive it can be, point to areas of misunderstanding, while honoring the scriptures that we believe to say homosexuality is not God’s plan? Can we disagree congenially? Is there any room at all for discussion, for connections to be made?
Our sense of God’s leading in this is that if we did things a bit differently, maybe it could work.
“Do You Hate Me?”
Leading up to the event, we found out that the gay community leadership were going to scout out what we would say in the morning gathering, and then show up en-masse in the evening. They would be wearing t-shirts saying, “Do you hate me?” It was the first time I have been really nervous in quite a while before speaking publicly. They came that evening and sat right in the front section. We started with a performance of a speech from the Larime Project, the play written about Matthew Shepard’s murder. It was a scene, where Fred Phelps, the highly publicized pastor was yelling about God hating homosexuals. We asked if this is how the gay community sees the church, to set up that the stereotypes run both ways.
“Do you hate me?”
I stood up and answered for the sins of the Christian community. How we often misunderstand them, can be afraid of them, and how we can make fun of them. Then, to the question posed by the shirts: “Do we hate you?” we answered, “No.” But we were honest that as followers of Christ, and as a leadership team of [nlcf], we do feel that homosexuality is wrong based on the Scriptures. Then we ventured to talk about why it is so much more complicated than just highlighting some Old Testament passages and ignoring others.
Different Perspectives
During the time I spoke, I addressed the issue that people in the room would have different opinions. I wanted to point out that disagreement did not have to be harmful, but could be a place from which to strive to understand each other better.
For discussing the scriptures, I shared our church’s views, and used a format for discussion based on the text I quoted earlier. While some may not agree with all the points made, Webb’s discussion of the gay issue and of the redemptive or progressive hermeneutic is excellent.
I shared that every believer should consider how God would have us reflect His nature in our response to homosexuality. His focus is very much on our hearts.
The Pledge
At the end we closed with a pledge proposal. We acknowledged that both sides have been unnecessarily cruel and ignorant of the other. I first addressed the Christian community, asking them to agree that for ten years they would not allow someone in their midst to make a gay joke, a demeaning generalization. That they might commit to showing Christ-like love to the gay community, protecting them and not allowing harassment; to stand up for the right to be treated with kindness even if we disagree with their views on the gay lifestyle.
I then asked the gay community to reciprocate. As a Christian, I have been made fun of, had my intelligence strongly questioned and have been unfairly categorized myself. This harassment happened because I have chosen to follow and be committed to Jesus Christ. So I asked if they would protect me. I asked if they would put a stop to the Christian jokes and characterizations.
Results
Afterwards, many of the members of the gay community hung around for quite a while and we interacted. The leader of the gay community said that she was shocked, having never experienced someone disagreeing with her and yet publicly stating they would defend her against unfair treatment. She told us that she would refer people exploring their spirituality to our church. I was invited to speak on a panel about morality and culture as a representative of the Christian faith.
Unfortunately, we have had a number of our members leave as a result of our approach. We learned to do even more discussion with our leaders to explain why this issue needs to be discussed and about our approach.
But most of our leaders and members have said they are so glad that [nlcf] deals with these issues. We found it galvanized the faith of many. Several members of the gay community began attending our church or others in the area. Many members of our church who were hiding their struggle with their sexuality have had the courage to declare that struggle and begin to allow God’s love and power and the church’s help to begin to walk through and away from it.
And now Jason comes to a bible study. He doesn’t agree with a lot of it. But it’s a start.
Jim Pace has never been okay with simplistic answers to tough issues. That questioning has led him to come to new and often surprising answers to faith questions. Those conclusions were put on the national spotlight following the Va. Tech shootings on April 16th 2007. An alumnus and pastor of a church of approximately one thousand that hundreds of students attend, (three of the victims had attended) Jim became a key voice for God’s take on the shootings and the horrific aftermath.
Jim is a sought after speaker to regional and national audiences about everything from how should we approach God in the midst of our suffering, to life issues, to church leadership. He assisted in starting , which is a network of innovative churches and church starts that are looking at how to be authentic followers of Jesus in our culture today. He is also the Lead Navigator of New Life Christian Fellowship.
