APOLOGIAreport

> trac ki n g s p i r i t u a l t r e n d s i n t h e 2 1s t ce n t u r y
v o l u m e 2 0 : 6 ( 1,2 3 5 ) / F e b r u a r y 1 1 , 2 0 1 5

In this issue:
HOMOSEXUALITY - Time magazine

thrills at discovering the evangelical

war over gay marriage

+ why the real problem is not from gays

openly living the gay lifestyle while still
claiming to be Christians
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HOMOSEXUALITY
A Change of Heart: Inside the Evangelical
war over gay marriage by Elizabeth Dias
reports that EastLake Community Church
in Seattle <eastlakecc.com> is quietly coming out as one of the first openly LGBTaffirming evangelical churches in the U.S.
... The churchs first gay wedding took place
last month. Pastor Ryan Meeks, 36, regularly preaches an unusual brand of evangelicalism.... A turning point came when he
realized one of his staffers had been afraid to
tell him she was dating a woman. ...
The overall public has favored gay
marriage for three years. Dias adds that
evangelical churches and their congregations typically remain opposed, though that
opposition is weakening. ... Support among
the oldest evangelicals grew from 1 in 20 in
2003 to 1 in 5 in 2014. But the fastest change
can be found among younger evangelicals,
whose support for gay marriage jumped
from 20% in 2003 to 42% in 2014. And that
is a shift that is uprooting everything. ...
In many evangelical communities, the
Bible itself is on trial. A new generation is
rejecting the culture-warrior tone that gave
evangelicals outsize political power during
the past three decades. ...
Its not surprising that EastLake is an
early adopter. Seattle has a higher percentage
of gay-couple households than SanFrancisco
1 in 17 couples living together in the city
is gay. Nearly all of Meeks 30 staff members
are under the age of 35 and plugged in to cultural shifts. But theologically, it is daring. If
evangelicalism is famous for anything, it is
opposition to homosexuality. ...
Consider the Reformation Project
<www.reformationproject.org>, a Wichita,
Kans.-based effort by 24-year-old gay evangelical activist Matthew Vines to raise up
LGBT-affirming voices in every evangelical
church in the country. To reach that goal, he
is training reformers in batches of 40 to 50
at regional leadership workshops who can
go back to their home churches and serve
as advocates for LGBT inclusion. The Reformation Project has staffers in three states,
representatives in 25 more and plans for a
presence in all 50 states by 2018.

At the groups conference in Washington, D.C., in early November, some 300

people came from some of the countrys
largest megachurches, including McLean
Bible in Virginia, Redeemer Presbyterian in
New York City and North Point Ministries
in Atlanta. His funding has grown from
$300,000 in 2014 to a projected $1.2 million
in 2015, with help from furniture mogul
Mitchell Gold, a secular Jew who is working
toward evangelical change. ...
Evangelicals for Marriage Equality
<www.evangelicals4equality .com>, a group
founded by two millennials in D.C., whose
national spokesperson is a 22-year-old
named Brandan Robertson, is planning to
take its message to Christian college campuses this year, encouraging evangelicals to
support civil marriage if not church-sanctioned marriage. The Gay Christian Networks Justin Lee <www.gaychristian.net>,
37, hosted his 11th annual conference this
month in Portland, Ore., and attendance
swelled to 1,400, double the size of last
years. (Lees friendship with Alan Chambers, former president of the controversial Exodus International ministry, which
claimed to cure gays of homosexuality,
helped prompt Chambers to publicly apologize for the hurt Exodus has caused, and the
group shut down. ...
When Evangelicals for Marriage Equality launched in September, three prominent evangelical magazines Christianity
Today, Relevant, and World did not let
the group buy advertising in their pages. ...
Illinoiss Wheaton College, Billy Grahams alma mater, does not recognize
alumni gay marriages, but this fall it hired
a celibate lesbian to work in its chaplains
office. Last spring, some 100 students protested when the school invited Rosaria Butterfield, a former lesbian now married to a
male pastor, to speak on campus. ...
Much of the action is taking place
behind closed doors. ... Andy Stanley of
Atlantas North Point Community Church
spoke at a conference about how to love
middle-schoolers when they are in the process of coming out. ...
(continued on next page)

homosexuality (continued)

For many evangelicals, the marriage

debate isnt really about marriage or families
or sex it is about the Bible itself. ...
So far no Christian tradition has been
able to embrace the LGBT community without first changing its views about women.
The same reasoning that concludes that
homosexuality is sin is also behind the traditional evangelical view that husbands are
the spiritual leaders of marriages and men
are the leaders in church. It is one reason
gay men have an easier time as evangelical
reformers. ...
And as evangelicals can no longer count
on American culture to support their oneman-one-woman sexual ethic, they are
waging a more heated battle for religious
liberty. ...
Evangelicals are also turning to unusual
partners to strengthen their reserves in the
one-man-one-woman fight: the Vatican and
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. ... LDS president Henry Eyring [who
was invited] to speak at a first-ever interfaith [Vatican] colloquium on the Complementarity of Man and Woman <www.
humanum.it/en/about>....
The risks are high, and rejection has real
consequences. Seattles EastLake has lost
22% of its income and 800 attendees in the
past 18 months, and it anticipates that those
numbers may continue to climb. ...
The evangelical reformers know the fight
is just beginning. ... Even at Vines Reformation Project conference, most of the panelists
advocating change were not evangelical but
from the mainline Protestant traditions.
Dias concludes with a description of
nearly 350 conservative evangelical moms
of gay and lesbian children nation wide [in a
private Facebook group trying] to reconcile
their faith with their love for their children. ...
The group has spawned two other private
support groups, one for moms with transgender kids and one for moms who have
worked through the biblical questions and
are ready to advocate for their child in their
communities. ...
Every positive reforming movement in
church history is first labeled heresy, Meeks
says. Evangelicalism is way behind on this.
We have a debt to pay. Time, Jan 26 15,
pp44-48.2
On the GetReligion blog, Bobby Ross
Jr. concludes his analysis of Times article
(News vs. advocacy) by saying: Anyone
looking for real journalism will figure out in
a hurry that this story isnt it. <www.goo.gl/
FQbb5R>

APOLOGIAreport

v o l u m e 2 0 : 6 ( 1,2 3 5 ) / F e b r u a r y 1 1 , 2 0 1 5

What is the experience of evangelical churches

facing this challenge? What problems arise?
In Gay Christians? The Grave Danger Coming Out Poses to Christian Churches, Brian
Patrick Mitchell <brianpatrickmitchell.com>
begins: Gays count on cowardice when
they come out. They know that announcing
themselves as gay will silence most objections
to gayness. The person who comes out dares
others to disagree with him on the matter,
challenging them to either accept him as gay
or make him their enemy. Not surprisingly,
the closer one is to someone who comes out,
the harder it is to maintain ones disapproval
of homosexuality. ...
The greater danger is not from gays
openly living the gay lifestyle while still
claiming to be Christians. ... The greater danger is from Christians who profess to be both
gay and chaste Christians who openly
identify themselves as gay on account of
their attraction to members of their own sex,
yet who accept their churches condemnation of homosexual relations as sinful. ...
Make no mistake: coming out does
not mean confiding ones struggle against
same-sex attraction in a close friend or pastor; it means openly declaring ones orientation to effect a fundamental change in ones
church. [The] openly gay Christians present
churches with extremely difficult problems
of both faith and discipline problems that
have lately tended to undermine the faithfulness of whole communions.
Mitchell begins by examining the expression gay Christian. He concludes by writing
that Gay Christian makes no more sense
than adulterous Christian. Such terms rankle Christian ears because no one is being a
Christian when he lusts after another man or
someone other than his wife.
After this, Mitchell calls attention to the
attack that heterosexuality has experienced
along with the increased focus on homosexuality. In the process, he notes that Christianitys insistence on heterosexuality and
condemnation of homosexuality as unnatural in all forms was a major change in the
sexual ethics of the ancient world, as Kyle
Harper shows in From Shame to Sin: The
Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality
in Late Antiquity.1
In discussing the right governance of

sexuality, Mitchell argues that heterosexuality is not just the opposite of homosexuality but also the opposite of feminism.
Under the heading The Challenge of
Coming Out, Mitchell writes: Todays gay
Christians defy this biblical and traditional
Christian order when they come out and
publicly profess their homosexuality, as if the
old man were who they really are, as if change
were not possible, as if Christ could not heal
as if they could not still marry and have children, and as if others were wrong to expect
them to conform to heterosexual norms distinguishing the sexes in so many ways. ...
[P]ublic acceptance of the immutability
of their sexual identity is just what many gay
Christians seek from other Christians. ...
The truth is that even adults who have
fully embraced an unchase gay lifestyle can
and do sometimes change enough to live
happy heterosexual lives, but the hope of
such healing gets short shrift in the chastegay narrative.
Mitchell concludes: It takes perhaps a
generation for a compete moral inversion
to take place. You cant keep what you wont
teach. Older members, taught that heterosexuality is normal and that homosexuality is
sinful, will give way in time to younger members, who have never heard homosexuality
condemned in church, who instead have been
taught by the world to hate the haters who
condemn it, and who therefore will think
they do God service when they persecute the
faithful for bearing witnes against wickedness. Touchstone, Jan/Feb 15, pp31-37.3
SOURCES: Monographs

1 - From Shame to Sin: The Christian

Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late
Antiquity, by Kyle Harper (Harvard Univ
Prs, 2013, hardcover, 316 pages) <www.
goo.gl/LRF4KB>
SOURCES: Periodicals

2 - Time, <www.time.com>
3 - Touchstone (conservative ecumenical),
<www.touchstonemag.com>

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