Recently, The Christian Chronicle published an interview with Rubel Shelly, the author of “Male and Female God Created Them: A Biblical Review of LGBTQ+ Claims.” One question and answer stood out to me. Shelly is a Church of Christ preacher
B.T. Irwin asked:
Your book introduced me to a phrase I’ve never heard before in reference to Christian congregations, and that phrase is “welcoming, but not affirming.” Is that just a nicer way of saying hate the sin, love the sinner? How can congregations really be welcoming of people who identify as LGBTQ+ without affirming their behaviors?
Shelly replied:
I welcome my friends who are alcoholics. I welcome my friends who are drug addicts. I welcome my friends who have addictions of various sorts. In fact, a church that I served for 27 years here in Nashville at one point had 41 groups — accountability, reorientation sessions — going for people with all sorts of addictions, most of them around alcohol and drugs.
We welcomed every one of them, but not in a single case did we ever affirm the addiction, the alcoholism, the meth, gambling, whatever it was that was their addiction. We welcomed them because that’s what the church is — the church is a recovering community of sinners.
Here’s my point: If a church creates an atmosphere of redemption through the grace of God … we feel safe to admit, “Yes, I do need redemption, and I must throw myself on the grace of God for my gambling addiction, my alcohol addiction, my pathological lying, whatever it may be,” and that church welcomes them. Not to encourage them to continue the behavior, but they are welcomed into a penitent community where there is acceptance, accountability and nurture into spiritual health and recovery.
Let’s follow that through with sexual issues in particular. Let’s talk about the teenager who is caught up in what now has the name “gender dysphoria.”
Men have cooked and done needlework a long time. Women have been truck drivers and farmers.
Gender dysphoria is one set of issues, but let’s suppose a teenager is dealing with what this culture is telling them: You may need to consider puberty blockers. You may need to consider dressing differently. You may need to consider surgery and changing your genitalia because you’re probably a woman trapped in the man’s body or vice versa.
Most teenagers — if they feel those things — don’t have a safe place to go to deal with it.
Back in the 1980s, there was this new disease that was called AIDS. I had people asking me, “Do you think it’s safe to drink from a water fountain at church?” A neighbor warned my wife against going to a laundromat with some of the big bedding that she was going to dry in one of the big dryers. People were terrified.
So what Dr. Roy Hamley and I did was set up an accountability group, not for alcoholics or drug users or people caught up with gambling or pornography, but for people who were HIV-infected. We didn’t know if anybody would show up, but we had established a community of grace and healing. And sure enough, probably four or five the first night we met showed up, and before long the group grew large enough that we had to divide it into two different groups.
We welcomed people who had AIDS. We welcomed people who were gay into the context of the call of Christ, to purity and repentance.
So this is not new territory for me. This is not abstract and academic. This is also pastoral for me. I think what people are looking for is not so much sex as intimacy, and by intimacy: safe people, safe places, acceptance, love.
Where love is defined in the Christian sense, it’s the self-giving interest in one another. And yet in this culture, we don’t know how to do intimacy apart from groping or viewing or having intercourse with a woman, a man or both or a group.
Intimacy doesn’t mean having sex. Intimacy means having a deep, meaningful connection within this male-female community that God has created to be the human race in his own image and likeness and, in that context, serving the kingdom of God. The point of life is not to have sex. The point of life is not romantic fulfillment. The point of life, if we are Christian, is the kingdom of God.
Our churches have to be welcoming, but not affirming, to people from all kinds of backgrounds, so that the church really is a Christ-focused place where acceptance with accountability — not simply acceptance to affirm, but acceptance with accountability to truth — can take place. We’re not centers to dispense judgment. We are centers to dispense grace within the context of the truth of the Gospel.
Shelly states: Our churches have to be welcoming, but not affirming. Many mainline Christian churches are welcome and affirming. Shelly will have none of that, saying that everyone is welcome, but they must conform to the church’s teachings to be truly accepted by the church. This is little more than a novel take on “loving the sinner, but hating the sin.” As readers of this site know, Evangelicals rarely hate sin without hating sinners too. Preachers are fond of saying that Christians should love what God loves and hate what God hates. God certainly hates sin, but the Bible says he hates sinners too. Thus, honesty demands that Evangelical preachers tell the truth to those whom they are “welcoming.”
LGBTQ people need to know before entering the doors of the church that they will be loved and welcomed, but an ulterior motive lies behind the kindness. LGBTQ people will be accepted for a time, but they will be expected to conform and change (by the grace of God, of course). These deviants will be permitted to attend services and fellowship with God’s chosen ones, but they will not be allowed to be members or serve in the church in any meaningful way. If LGBTQ attendees refuse to conform, pressure will be put on them to do so, and if they refuse to comply, they will be encouraged to move on. After all, you can’t paint LGBTQ people as perverts and pedophiles and be okay with them being around church children. Once word gets out that someone is gay, bisexual, or transgender, church members will not be comfortable having such people in their midst. LGBTQ people will be tolerated for a time, but only if they eventually repent of their sins, forsake their perversion, and live according to the teachings of the heterosexual Bible.
Churches are free to believe whatever they want regarding LGBTQ people. Churches are essentially membership clubs. They have every right to set membership rules. However, it is deceitful to feign love and kindness in the hope that the “mark” will repent of their sins and get saved. But, Bruce, we really do love LGBTQ people. We want what’s best for them. Sure, you do. Ask LGBTQ people if they feel your love, preacher. Maybe the LGBTQ people who read this blog will let you know what they think of your “welcoming, but not affirming” con.
Anthony Venn-Brown was right when he said:
Whilst some Christian leaders have preached hatred and the media given oxygen to the fringe lunatics of Christendom, many others hoped if they just closed their eyes or buried their head in the sand, eventually the issue would go away. I’ve often said that the problem is not so much homophobia but subjectaphobia; they would rather just not go into the volatile space of the faith and sexuality ‘debate’. It’s such a divisive issue.
But now churches are having to come to terms with the fact that in a growing number of western countries marriage equality has or is becoming a reality. This means that gay and lesbian couples may come into their churches who have a nationally or state recognised, legal marriage. Some will be parents. They are no longer gay, lesbians or “homosexuals” they are believers, committed church members and families.
The longer churches put this issue on the back burner the further behind they become. Considering the progress made in scientific research, changes in the law, acceptance of diversity in the corporate world and that since 1973 homosexuality has not been considered a mental disorder; some churches are 40 years out of date on the issue of homosexuality. Church, you must catch up and make this a priority. Every day delayed means that LGBT people are harmed and lives lost.
If churches continue to hold on to the outdated Christian belief that homosexuality is a sin then it makes them increasingly irrelevant to those who have gay and lesbian friends, family members and work colleagues. The previous Christian labels of unnatural, perverse, evil and even abomination not only do not fit, they are offensive to LGBT people and their friends and family.
My hope and prayer is that this will be an ongoing conversation that takes ALL churches to a place where LGBT people are treated with respect and equality. Not just welcoming churches, or accepting churches but truly affirming churches.
Welcoming = you’re welcome BUT…….
Accepting = we accept you BUT……..
Affirming = we love you FULL STOP.
It’s a journey we MUST go on if we profess to serve humanity with unconditional love.
People of colour were once told to go to the back of the bus. Women were once told their place was in the home. The paradigm shift in understanding that happened in the western world regarding people of colour and women’s equality, is now happening in regard to sexual orientation and gender identity.
It’s important to remind churches that having a conversation about us without us will usually be nothing more than a recycling of preconceived ideas and misconceptions. Imagine a group of male church leaders discussing the role of women in the church without females present? We would call that misogyny. Or church leadership discussing indigenous issues without consulting indigenous people themselves. How could they have any insight into what their life experience is really all about? We would call that white supremacy/racism/elitism. The church has done a great deal of talking about us but rarely has spoken with us. So when church leaders discuss LGBT people, relationships and the community without speaking with or spending time getting to know LGBT people it does beg the question why. What is there to fear? Why the exclusion? Is this further evidence of homophobia that is regularly denied?
It’s time for the church to invite LGBT people into the conversation. For some this is a conversation about their thoughts and beliefs but for us it is about who we are.
My therapist asked me today how my view of LGBTQ changed over the years. I recounted to her the story I shared in the post Bruce, What was Your View on Homosexuality When You Were a Pastor?
My view of LGBTQ people began to change in 1995. I was between pastorates, so I took a job with Charley’s Steakery as the general manager of their Zanesville, Ohio location. Located in Colony Square Mall, we offered mall employees free refills on their soft drinks. Several times a week, a gay man would come to the restaurant to get a free refill. The first time he handed me his cup, I panicked, thinking, I am going to get AIDS! For the first few times, after I refilled his cup, I would vigorously wash my hands after doing so. Had to wash off the cooties, I thought at the time. After a few weeks of this, I began being more comfortable around this man. He and I would chat about all sorts of things. I found out that he was quite “normal.” This, of course, messed with my view of the world.
While I am sure numerous LGBTQ people came through my life before I refilled this man’s drink cup, he was the first gay man I had really engaged in friendly, meaningful discussion. And it was at this point in my life that my view about homosexuality began to change. I didn’t stop being a homophobe overnight, but step by step over the next decade, I stumbled away from the homophobic rhetoric that had dominated my life for many years.
Accepting LGBTQ people as they are is the first step in changing our minds about them. They are not the problem, we are.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I have friends and family that are gay, lesbian, and trans. All of them are being themselves. One friend came out and talked about how she was glad to finally go on estrogen. She has a super conservative Catholic mom, and that mom is going to end up living in Poland because the US is going to hell. sigh
In my experience, “welcoming but not affirming” was good enough for a while. But I realised that not being heterosexual and married is still very much a social handicap. At least among Evangelicals in my ethnic group.
Single people are often regarded as “spares” amongst “pairs”; something must be wrong in your private life or with your personality if you’re not married; Are you even a good Christian? Christian leaders like Shelley can state however they want that marriage and sex life are not “necessary” for a Christian life. But the reality is, at least where I come from, it is.
The loneliness of being gay in the church mainly comes not from being single – at least in my case – but from being made to feel defective, alien, and “different”.
Where all the discussion about love revolves around families, what about gay people who are required to be single? It’s like watching families have potluck together whilst standing behind a glass door, never being permitted to join. How many popular songs are composed on some other subject apart from romantic love? Barely any, and many Evangelical Christians would sing along, and dance joyfully (unless they’re Baptists), to these tunes, too.
Again, Shelley can say whatever he wants, but even the so-called celibate same-sex-attracted voices (or rather, “tokens”) in the Evangelical world admit that they feel broken and lonely. And the Christians don’t even care about these people, who are technically their allies in fighting “the LGBTQ+”. John Piper even said that the higher one’s position in church leadership, the more heterosexuality is expected of him (always a him, of course).
Say what you want, Christians, but you definitely think gay people, even celibate ones, are somehow defective. And this is supposed to be love. I am so tired of having to listen to all these things and yet, I am the entitled one if I say that this doesn’t feel like love.
I am sure my opinion on this topic is very clear, especially after recent posts. So I will keep it simple and not launch into another Tirade from Sage.
I think churches that are “accepting” are simply responding to the reality that gay, queer, and trans people exist, and they know that being openly anti-LGBTQIA+ is bigoted and bad, and will keep people out of their church. By claiming they are “accepting” they mean they will tolerate LGBTQ people,in their church. As long as they are celibate or not too gender nonconforming.
Tolerate, not accept. They will tolerate you until you finally see the truth and god saves you from your perversion and you can go on to be a good Christian by marrying the proper gender, or finally stop pretending and live in the proper gender.
Sadly this is a very dangerous and harmful system. They put people into impossible situations, and guilt and browbeat them into submission using methods that can be debilitating and even deadly.
Little Richard is a good example of a person who struggled with the horrific practices and teachings of Christianity. He was a preachers kid, guilted by his father at a young age for not being properly manly. And in spite of being openly queer, he kept turning back to Christianity, even preaching against the “gay and trans lifestyle”, only to leave the church again. The cycle repeated through his life and he was never able to break it. The documentary “Little Richard: I am everything” reveals the struggles he faced. I encourage you to watch if you have time.
All of these requirements to be accepted in church seem odd because I don’t recall reading the part of the Bible where Jesus talked about the requirements you had to meet in order to be loved and accepted. I guess it was up to Paul to add those later because Jesus just wasn’t detailed enough and was basically just roaming the countryside forgiving people and healing people with little regard for rules and requirements.
Sage—Your description of Little Richard’s shuttling in and out of church reminds me of some of my behavior before I started my gender affirmation process. I would buy feminine clothes, accessories and such for “sister” or “cousin.” I’d wear them at home and, eventually, venture out.
Although I felt normal and even happy in my skirts and scarves, at some point I would tell myself , “This can’t continue .” I would the bundle all of my “lady stuff “ into bag and leave it on a corner in another neighborhood.
A few weeks or months later, I’d go shopping again and—well, you know how this story goes.
My fundy friend was pleased to change UK churches and find one she liked a lot initially. It had an american pastor as it was dyed-in-the-wool-fundy, kind of IFB. This pastor got ‘called back to the USA’ unexpectedly but my friend found out it was cos his wife, leading a women’s group, quoted from a poet whom she didn’t know was – shock horror – a lesbian. Then a gay couple with a child started attending. They were told they could come, but not have any role in the church, not even being on the coffee rota. One was a music teacher who wanted to use her talent in the worship group. Friend resigned her membership and is sad she can only find a home locally in an inclusive Quaker Meeting……whilst I’m personally hoping she’s on her way out of religion altogether.
There’s a huge difference between being an alcoholic and being gay. An alcoholic realises, even if they’re not prepared to admit it, that their addiction is harmful, but that it’s not an integral part of their nature (albeit many people are more predisposed to some addictions than others). Being gay (or gender non conforming) is part of a person’s nature in a very different way. What a load of nonsense it is, therefore, to be ‘accepting but not affirming’ towards LGBT.
I might also say that the purpose of life, the only purpose in fact, is having sex. Life is a result of evolution and the sole driver of evolution is reproduction. Now it will be pointed out that people who are gay aren’t able to reproduce via their sexual behaviours. That’s true, but it doesn’t in any way diminish (necessarily) the sexual drive of the individual. That means that pressures that serve to inhibit these instincts are actually running contrary to the purpose of life. The phrase ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ sounds like a profound way of addressing the problem but, in reality, is just a bigot covering soundbite.
as usual, the cult depends on having an “us” and a “them”.
He lost me when he got to the canard equating LGBTQ love with addiction to alcohol, gambling and drugs.
Oh, and his (mis)understanding of addiction may have been acceptable when he began his mystery. But modern S and M (science and medicine: I couldn’t resist that one) shows us that addictions are not failures of morality or will; rather, they have biochemical and neurological origins—just like sexual attraction and gender identity.
Oh, and does he hold his God ( whom he believes to be the creator of everything ,
or so I would guess) responsible for those biochemical and neurological structures?
The southern baptist convention did not apologize for its support of slavery until 1995, so I don’t expect Evangelicals of any stripe to be affirming any time soon; certainly not in my lifetime, but not even in the lifetimes of my great-great grandchildren.
In the words of Jimmy Durante, “Why can’t everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?”
A response to “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is “Hate the belief, love the believer.”
That’s absolutely brilliant!
My daughter grew up in NJ just outside NYC, went to college in Nashville, and is now permanently residing there. Not being raised religious, she doesn’t understand why people are so into religion, and she definitely doesn’t have tolerance for religious people who weaponize religion to oppress others. She said it’s been particularly meaningful to attend Pride events in Nashville as the state government has been so openly ANTI-LGBTQ. She noted that a handful of churches set up booths at Pride declaring that they were openly affirming, and people were crying and sharing heartbreaking stories of ostracism from their own families and churches. She noted that Pride NYC is about the history whereas at Pride Nashville there was so much more open display of personal pain.
There are so many meaningful, expressive, amazing comments on this post. ❤️🤎💛💚💙💜
Obstacle—Your daughter’s observations about Pride remind me of something I’ve heard from LGBT people who come from small towns and rural areas in the Midwest and South. They say, in effect, the (few) queer people they knew were more open and vulnerable with, and supportive of, each other because they had only each other. Here in NYC we don’t really have a “community:” trans, bi, lesbian and gay basically go their separate ways. Also, we are fragmented racially and ethnically: white gay men, for example, are as unlikely to spend any time with Latina lesbian or Black trans people except, perhaps, at Pride events—which are organized mainly by older LGBT people, hence the emphasis on the history. Actually , that’s not quite right: the emphasis is on Stonewall, as if there were no LGBT history before it.
Oh, and plenty of LGBT people don’t believe intersex people exist.
MJ – You are right, there is a tendency to see Stonewall as the start of everything, but in reality there were many people and organizations that set the groundwork for Stonewall Inn, where they claim to have “launched the gay rights movement” and their web site proclaims “Where Pride Began”.
There is no doubt Stonewall had a major impact and ignited, or perhaps brought to public attention, the need for gay rights. But there would be no Stonewall Inn, and no uprising, if those who came before had not taken the risk to be public and to create groups and organizations that called for rights, and suffered for their stand.
Groups like the Mattachine Society, and Daughters of Bilitis were already working for rights in the 50’s and 60’s as part of the “homophile” movement. And even they were built on the work of other group and individuals working to gain rights. People like Rudy Gernreich (who was also an amazing fashion designer), Henry Gerber, and Ernestine Eckstein some to mind, but there are many, many others who were striving for equality before Stonewall. And many events predated Stonewall. Dewy’s Restaurant and Julius Tavern are two I recall, but there were many events that impacted rights before Stonewall.
I think it is important for people to remember the early pioneers. They faced very serious consequences for simply being gay or trans, but still persevered. Without their struggle, Stonewall could not have happened.
Sage—You are absolutely right about the activists, organizations and uprisings that preceded Stonewall. I think the reason why it is claimed as the “birthplace of Pride” is that it was a cataclysmic, cathartic event that took place on Christopher Street, which was called the “Main Street of Gay America.”
Speaking of which: While its neighborhood, Greenwich Village (a.k.a. “The Village”) was seen as the epicenter of gay American life for much of the 20th Century, another “gayborhood,”’arguably even more vibrant, existed a few miles uptown. I am referring to Harlem which, during its “Renaissance” (roughly the interwar period) was known as much for its gay life as for its throbbing arts community. I think that the Village got more attention because it was closer to the media centers of Midtown and Downtown and because of something rarely mentioned: Nearly all of its artists and LGBT people (who, of course, overlapped in the Venn Diagram)’were White. Also, I think the non-heterosexual creatives who lived and worked in Harlem downplayed their identities for the same reason Martin Luther King urged Bayard Rustin not to mention his homosexuality: Given the morés of their time, they didn’t want to further stigmatize the Black community.
I work in the fragrance industry which has attracts a large number of LGBTQ people, so I have a lot of coworkers and friends who are LGBTQ. They’re diverse, actually, and don’t typically overlap with their social groups. The gay men don’t have anything to do socially with the transwoman and vice versa. One of the white gay men I know is vocally anti-trans (he has never worked for my company, he is the partner of a former employee but I see his social media posts). I asked a close friend who is a gay man if LGBTQ is actually a community or if it’s segmented. He said, in his opinion, that they’re a community in the sense of being targeted by bigots, but not cohesive socially. He supports the rights of lesbians, bisexual, trans, etc people to be treated with equality, but being LGBTQ doesn’t mean that you’re going to hang out with people just because they’re LGBTQ. That’s fair. I don’t hang out with straight people just because they’re straight – some are a$$holes or have nothing in common with me lol.
So I wonder how the Baptist church explains that fact people like me who are intersex formerly known as hermaphrodites exist? I have xx/xy chromosomes. How do they explain our existence and gee which gender am I suppose to marry since neither male nor female is opposite of me? I did once pose this question to a rabbi that said I should not ever have a relationship of any kind. But that’s really harsh to say someone should never be allowed to be in a loving relationship because they were basically born with a birth defect. BTW I grew up in the Southern Baptist church while they had no clue this ‘freak’ was attending their church. And I haven’t been back since I turned 18.
Thankful! Very informative comments throughout this thread…. as I read along and got to Sage’s comment, I decided to chime in as a fellow preacher’s kid. I’ve been reading a bit of Calvin lately, after a bit of a wander in a local secondhand bookstore nearby. Calvin became a tool for certain ‘Christian’ perspectives that had a pragmatic political purpose, that being in a very general sense, to conform humanity to the government of faith, first and foremost under God as revealed in scripture but secondarily under the good government of man. Reading Calvin as a prelude to Gerencser and commenters has an interesting effect. The centuries pass along and we do too. Churches try out the flavour of the week to stay popular and pay the mortgage. But really, hard as I try, I feel numb in the midst of so-called faith discussion: The focus on LGBetc. is only the popularism of the day being tooled by preachers to flog the ‘Christian message’. And what is the Christian message for each of us, whether we are bald or hairy, tall, fat, skinny, bisexual or asexual, trans or troubled, hobbled or hopping? The message is the same shit in different clothes. You are born bad and God was such a great dad that he offered his only son as a sacrifice for what you are, filth, dirt, unworthy of his unfathomable, unspeakably unspellable mercy. For fuck sake. I can’t get up that stair to enter your stain glass torture chamber anymore at all. What kind of daddy would do such a thing? Certanly not a human one. Keep your alien God, Christianity! You choose to despise ALL who enter into your churches and you call it love. I see no difference in your ‘Special this Week Love (Disgust!!) for boozers and crackheads or your next-week billboard inviting same-sex couples for couselling sessions. It’s all the self-same harm done from the get-go. People like Dr. T. align themselves with ‘God’ to avoid the pain of being simply human and caring for their own children, for themselves. There is no way around the abandonment of chldren except to hate the self. Human connection is so basic and churches harm basic, loving human connection by insisting on self-hatred at the doorway. I have a feeling Dog is love. Dog gave his whole life for me.
I measure my own father’s love for me by how he failed to follow the Bible. He failed to beat us as most of the Baptists were using the rod on their kids. He failed to mount the sidewalks and holler verbal punishments at sinners. He failed to threaten churchgoers with hell if they did not empty their pockets. He was an okay guy who chose preaching to get off the farm, I think. Whether his ‘choice’ to feed the heads of men rather than their bellies was a good choice was for him to make, I think, and not me. He did not abandon his kids like some preachers do to serve God, I know that… Did you Doctor T? If you did, it’s not too late to be saved, you know, to go back and be a father. We must, all of us, work with what remains. Can the Church ever be saved? Can it ever become a place where human love is honored as the foundation, where the concept/reality of God is human love? Shucks, I’ll never know, I’d guess. But it is possible for some truth to be told in a church. I’ve seen it before. It happens sometimes. Also in a grocery. I try to listen.
Brian-Your father’s story really isn’t that unusual. Other men became preachers to “get away from the farm” (or factory, or wherever). Also, some women became nuns because it was just about the only way to get an education, or simply to be anything besides an incubator. (One example: Sor Inez de la Cruz, arguably the first major Spanish-language poet of Mexico.) Although I am not a believer, I can’t really fault people for making such choices, given their circumstances, any more than I, a 99 percent pacifist, can fault someone for joining the military to get out of the projects—or, for that matter, for breaking the law to get away from a place ravaged by gang wars and climate disasters and into a country where they and their children might have a chance at a better life.
There used to be valley called “queer holler” where they would go and park and just sick 🤢. The sheriff put up surveillance and watched the footage and puked his guts out.
I assume he saw you on video?
It doesn’t surprise me. Christian are always sneaking around like that.
I recall the news reporting that Pornhub said they have more viewings of gay porn in the South and also Utah than any other area. Two prominent bible belt areas.
I knew someone who was a professional dominatrix in the South. She told me that some of her most frequent customers were clergy and other prominent church members, along with other “pillars “ of the community.
Hmm…Could it be that they wore loose pants so no one would see their “pillars”—or to imply that they were lengthier than they actually were?
I’ll repeat something I’ve quoted in other comments simply because its author, William Blake, got it right 200 years ago:
Prisons are built from stones of law
Brothels from bricks of religion.
Violent, disgusting comment deleted