In response to Soulforce’s American Family Outing initiative to open dialogue on the issue of homosexuality at six megachurches, Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink is advising churches on how it thinks they should respond. At first glance, FotF’s advice may seem reasonable:
Jeff Buchanan, director of church equipping at Exodus International, said each church needs to assess whether a meeting would be helpful.
“I would be completely open to having a meaningful conversation, if both parties were humbly submitted in that conversation,” he said. “I would not enter into a conversation if I knew there was not a sincere openness to the truth.”
Inevitably, however, when Focus on the Family and Exodus refer to “the truth,” no room is left for the possibility that their own interpretation of the Bible could be anything less than infallible. Buchanan continues by recommending that “churches — and all Christians — embrace the issue ‘with compassion, not compromise.'”
In other words, a conservative church should only enter into dialogue when the other party is completely open to admitting that they may be wrong – but the church must be adamantly committed to the absolute rightness of its own position before a single word has been spoken by either side.
Sorry, Focus, but there’s nothing meaningful about such a one-sided conversation.
Compassion? What is there to be compassionate about when in self-conceited pride they continue to show their utter stubborness to not recognize and respect LGBT’s choices to have faith while assuming their correct roles in society? Since when is Christ owned by religious right groups? Since when truth means just listening to one side of the story?
And what are they compromising? Their failure to build bridges in due respect to LGBTs personal relationship with Christ Jesus? How about compromising individual’s faith?
Eugene,
I think you pretty much nail it. These people actually believe they speak for God on the topic of gays and sex. To compromise means to deny God. It never seems to occur to them that they might be wrong, that there might be something lost in the translation.
the inerrant truth of God’s word regarding sexual behavior
Except when it comes to Luke 16:18:
Or Matthew 5:32, or Matthew 19:9, or Mark 10:11-12.
Apparently if you’re a heterosexual, God blesses your hypocrisy.
Gosh… this is such a tough situation. I know Jeff. He is a good man. And I know the mindset because I used to be there. And I really thought I was being open. And now things have changed and I realize how narrow my view of “truth” was. But thats taken an act of God to get me in the place. No one could convince me to be here. So how can both sides really have dialogue? I hope for reconciliation. But it is such a huge divide that needs to be crossed.
Oye…
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There is nothing “humbly submitted” about proceeding from a position of infalibility. This communique from FOF is self-contradictory and probably is intended as another PR piece rather than advice for churches.
Last year I had the chance to meet with a visiting Pastor from America.
He said he had been in dialog for 20 years with the major churches and found that there is no value to talk anymore. He has tried. He recounted the number of young gays he had to bury last year who took their lives because of condemnation and rejection by the church.
Lamb
Aren’t both parties — FoTF and Soulforce — equally one-sided? Neither would come to a conversation vulnerable to the perspectives of the other. It’s not ‘conversation’ — it’s an attempt to change the other — on both sides.
I see problems in the framework of the discourse itself — polarized and alienating. Sexuality, and spirituality for that matter, are so much more complicated than current discourse acknowledges.
Their response is the same as Bush’s approach to “diplomacy.” The other side has to completely capitulate before any talks can begin.
Aren’t both parties — FoTF and Soulforce — equally one-sided?
I can’t speak for Soulforce, but I doubt they are asking Focus to give up their theology. What would be helpful is if they were willing to acknowledge that people with a different biblical perspective on homosexual relations come by that perspective honestly. The rhetorical conceit of groups like Focus is that they are simply abiding by the rules and everyone else is trying to cheat. Asking them to question their own theological infallibility before any discussions isn’t likely to produce results, but if they can at least admit that other people hold their own views in good faith then maybe there can be a start. Understand, that’s going to be hard enough.
But are people operating in good faith when they continue to hold their own views despite being proven wrong?
The staffers of FOTF know their statements about the Bible and about same-sex-attracted persons have been proven materially false (and immoral) on countless occasions. I don’t believe their views are held in good faith; their reinterpretations of the Bible and their lies about gay people and their parents and families are held through vain self-interest.
Furthermore, while FOTF declares all same-sex behavior to be sinful, Soulforce does not declare the opposite to be the case: Soulforce adopts an ethical view based on intent — just like rabbis and philosophers across the millennia — rather FOTF’s heretical literalism.
So no, I don’t believe the two organizations are equally one-sided.
I was listening to Elissa Wall today. She was one of the young women caught up in the Warren Jeffs case. Her book is called “Stolen Innocence”. I read another book years ago by another woman who escaped the polygamist societies they were raised in.
The reason I bring it up is this young lady’s experience parallels that of ex gays. She said that she lived in fear her whole life of displeasing God or never seeing heaven. The same line fed gay children.
In her case of course, she’s made to believe that marrying a cousin she loathed against her will, and being a mother at fourteen was her highest calling.
For gay kids it’s never socializing with gay people, let alone having sex ever in one’s life or forming a romantic bond with a gay person ever.
The pattern here? Such mind control over a human being (always females and homosexuals respectively), that they will NEVER challenge or demand autonomy for what they choose to do FOR God and in what way.
Why is what their higher calling have so much to do with SEX? And with WHO they have it?
And so often, the approach to how these young people feel about LOVE, isn’t even part of how they are treated.
How they have sex isn’t equated with LOVE for another human being, but duty to God.
This obviously has tragic consequences because it is in fact, MERE MORTALS who are invading the girls, and leaving gay children with so little human intimacy that their ideas of love and sex ARE clearly distorted in the worst way.
This young lady sounded so much like the way gay kids are treated they were interchangeable.
Females and homosexuals get their feelings DICTATED to them and in the name of a powerful, but intangible image of what heaven and hell are, and all the while are threatened with the most powerful incentive of all.
Abandonment by those on whom they depend the most.
There has got to be a LAW against all this involuntary emotional blackmail on the young.
It makes people do truly irrational and cruel things….
And scarier than any autonomous woman or homosexual person could ever be.
Religious groups do put people more at risk than save them.
The hard part is getting them to admit it.