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, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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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