Q Conference Addresses Church’s “Gay Dilemma”

on May 11, 2015

Two Evangelical Left speakers chastened their co-religionists to change the church’s teachings on human sexuality and marriage at an influential gathering of mostly young Evangelicals in Boston April 23-25.

Author Matthew Vines of the Reformation Project and Ethicist David Gushee of Mercer University offered arguments from mission and hermeneutics against biblical prohibitions on sexual acts between persons of the same sex.

Begun as a project of Evangelical Author Gabe Lyons, Q is frequently compared to TED Talks with a format of short, timed presentations and a focus on cultural engagement.

Gushee and Vines’ invitation to speak at Q was not without controversy. At least two high profile millennial Evangelicals voiced concerns before the event that providing Gushee and Vines with a platform to address conference attendees risked legitimizing their arguments as equally valid to the church’s historic teachings and within Christian orthodoxy.

“Bad Fruit”

“The relationship that I formed with Jesus from a very young age, I want other people to be able to experience,” Vines offered as motivation for his advocacy. “I have far, far too many friends who are not interested in Jesus, not interested in Christianity because they love and care for their LGBT friends who are on the margins and the way that the church has treated them has been to silence, to dismiss and humiliate. If someone is not interested in following Jesus because they love people on the margins, that is not how it should be.”

Vines argued that upholding the church’s historic teaching prohibiting sexual contact between people of the same sex was a distortion of the Gospel and has caused “profound devastation” in people’s lives. The author of “God and the Gay Christian” insisted that change was necessary so that people could come into the church and develop relationships with God.

“I simply saw far too many people who saw rejection of their sexuality completely led to very bad fruit, to relational brokenness, much higher occurrence of depression and suicidal thoughts,” Vines recalled.

Addressing the verses in scripture that all portray homosexuality negatively, Vines asserted that none referred to “relationships of long-term commitment that are based upon love and mutuality with the partners who are seeking to live out the vision of marriage that we see in Ephesians [Chapter] 5, that marriage is reflecting God’s covenant with his people through the covenant we make and keep with our spouse.”

Vines offered an argument from hermeneutics, claiming that when the Apostle Paul addresses same-sex relationships, he speaks only of people who are “consumed with lust and passions” — the kind of relationship Vines insisted he did not want.

A Consistent Sexual Ethic

Vines was interviewed by Lyons alongside Julie Rogers of Wheaton College, who explained her own history of same-sex attraction and conviction that God was calling her to remain celibate.

Rogers spent a decade in ex-gay ministries in an attempt to change her orientation.

“In many ways it was a positive experience for me, because I was able to grow in my relationship with Jesus and grow my understanding of scripture. I was loved well by the people in that community, I really was,” Rogers told the audience. The ministry, however, offered a message that there would be a shift in her orientation, something that she and most of her friends in the ministry did not experience. Instead, Rogers began to ask how she could be faithful to God and steward her sexuality.

“I believe that our bodies matter – that gender complementarity matters, that our bodies tell us important things about reality, about ourselves and how we should live,” Rogers explained, noting that those not called to marriage are called to celibacy. “I trust that the boundaries God put around sexual expression are for our flourishing.”

But while she affirmed the church’s historic teaching on sex, Rogers had a sharp critique for how many Evangelicals were failing to apply biblical standards consistently.

“In order to be consistent in our theology, we need to take the sexual ethic seriously across the board – I have way too many gay friends who have been asked to leave their churches, and I don’t know a single straight person who has – but I know way more straight people who have been sexually involved with other people,” Rogers shared. “We need to be consistent with our sexual ethics, this is really important.”

Rogers argued that Christians need to create communities where celibacy is possible.

“We need to find a new definition of love and belonging that includes older single people, the widowed, the elderly. We need to be able to find family in the church. We need to take the call to hospitality as seriously as we take the call to chastity,” Rogers charged, calling for communities where people can experience “deep, live-giving intimacy.”

“I can live without sex, but I cannot live without intimacy,” Rogers summarized.

Reassessing the Church’s Teaching

Like Vines, ethicist Gushee explained his earlier support for Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality, and a more recent conviction that his affirmation of those teachings had been uninformed and ultimately flawed.

“We have been wrong on this [prohibitions on homosexual practice] as we have been wrong on some issues in the past,” Gushee assessed. “The church has to acknowledge the times that we have been wrong, and this is one of them.”

The Mercer University professor determined that ultimately the LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender] issue is one of love, justice and sacredness of life.

“Essentially, we’ve taken the six Bible passages that reference homosexuality and they have trumped core teachings of love, justice and the sacred worth of all human beings,” Gushee insisted, labeling the church’s traditional teaching as “a toxic body of bad tradition that bears bad fruit” that must be reconsidered based on “the core moral traditions of the Christian faith.”

Gushee spoke alongside Evangelical pastor Dan Kimball of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California, who argued that Christians can’t throw out the overwhelming body of Evangelical teaching on sexuality simply because of an emotional response.

Gushee insisted that he was not operating solely on emotion, but that “my heart got broken, so I began to be able to see scripture through the tears of our most oppressed group.”

“When straight people tell gay people ‘your flourishing looks like celibacy by our declaration’ then I have a problem with that,” Gushee stated.

Asked by Lyons if he would say the same thing to a single person who was not gay, Gushee responded that the difference is Christians tell gay persons that there is never a legitimate expression of their sexuality because it is irreparably misdirected, “but we say to straight people ‘ you might find that person someday, but until then, wait.’”

Gushee charged that waiting without hope is “a recipe for despair” and made an appeal to the church’s missiology, arguing the church’s mission is compromised, “because the only thing we are known for is this ongoing bloody fight – that has to stop.”

  1. Comment by Richardson McPhillips on May 11, 2015 at 12:49 pm

    May God continue to bless Julie Rogers.

  2. Comment by MarcoPolo on May 11, 2015 at 2:57 pm

    ‘Sounds like progress to me!
    Wouldn’t it be great if the Church could finally get itself over the “sexual” nature of Love, and embrace the spiritual aspect instead?

  3. Comment by Mark Brooks on May 11, 2015 at 3:25 pm

    Translation:

    “Wouldn’t it be great if the church stopped doing what God says, and does whatever happens to be the morality of the day?”

  4. Comment by MarcoPolo on May 12, 2015 at 8:20 am

    I’m not suggesting that Christians would lose their moral compass if they realized that the Bible was flawed. Any more than I would understand what “Strange-Fire” was… but I’ll find out!

    Since the Bible IS the book used exclusively for Christian worship, I’m only suggesting that its literal interpretation be questioned.

  5. Comment by Mark Brooks on May 12, 2015 at 9:04 am

    As a non-Christian, why do you have an opinion? Aren’t you supposedly a Buddhist?

    What basis would a Christian have for reading the Bible for other than what it plainly says? Cut past the nonsense and it is always about being conformed to the world, and not to God. At the end of the day, there is no Liberal Christianity, just Christians, that is, those who believe God, and those who want to believe God when it suits them, but who profess to be Christian.

    The reference to strange fire refers to the fate of two sons of Aaron the high priest, who offered a sacrifice to God contrary to what God had said. I’ll leave it to you to read the appropriate part of Leviticus, though you will want to read Genesis and Exodus first for context. It isn’t the only instance of that problem. Saul lost his anointing for failing to obey what God said. Israel (Northern Kingdom) ceased to exist as a nation OR a people. There are lots of examples.

    My suggestion is, get a good reasonably literal translation of the Bible and just read it. If you want a study bible, the Henry Morris and Scofield are pretty good, but you don’t have to have a study bible. The NKJV is a good readable English translation. The ASV and NASB are fairly good as well. The Darby translation is good but a little old-fashioned.

    The time and effort you put in here suggest you want to understand Christians. That’s fine, I’m not trying to change your politics or whatever, but you won’t get that understanding by letting yourself be mislead by people who want the name and institutions without the obligations. Put the time in to read what God has said.

  6. Comment by MarcoPolo on May 12, 2015 at 9:45 am

    Thank you Mark Brooks.
    I currently only have the King James, and the NIV Bible, so I’ll have to check out the others that you mentioned.

    You are correct, I’m not a Christian, but not a “card carrying” Buddhist either. However, the Buddha does ‘speak’ more to the logical side of Humanity, as well as the Esoterica that pervades our existence.

    Peace be upon you.

  7. Comment by Mark Brooks on May 11, 2015 at 3:46 pm

    Matthew Vines’ book and arguments have already been directly addressed by Al Mohler and his co-authors:

    http://tiny.cc/uvizxx

    Vines has no biblical, historical, or orthodox theological case to be made. His arguments have been refuted many times in many works. His deceptive and motivated exegesis of key texts certainly can’t be squared with a plain reading of the Bible.

    As for Gushee, this statement:

    “Essentially, we’ve taken the six Bible passages that reference homosexuality and they have trumped core teachings of love, justice and the sacred worth of all human beings”

    is essentially an admission that Vines has no case, and that no case can be made, unless we essentially change Christianity from being God-believing into being something else. That’s what Gushee and the post-modern church want, a re-written Bible and a new definition of Christianity divorced from meaning.

    To tell people pleasant lies that will damn them to eternal separation from God is an act of evil. Love lies in telling people the truth they don’t want to hear, and that truth is that God does not change, we have His Word, and to propagate anything else is to offer strange fire. When you offer strange fire to the Lord, bad things happen. Don’t do it. We must worship God, believe God, listen to God, and do just that, and not pretend that doing anything else is good enough, because that is the road to hellfire.

  8. Comment by brookspj on May 11, 2015 at 6:58 pm

    I don’t think the church has created a safe environment for homosexuals or heterosexuals to remain celibate and single. Show me one church where the congregation gets half as excited when a single man or woman walks through the doors for the first time as they do when a family of three does. I knew someone who applied to be a music director at several churches and kept being told they couldn’t hire him because he was unmarried and that meant he must not be stable. And show me one church that has a singles ministry that isn’t really trying to be a Christian dating service. Somewhere along the way we forget how to minister to people outside a nuclear family unit and we better rediscover it quick.

  9. Comment by Jeff Walton on May 12, 2015 at 11:08 am

    It’s worth noting that Catholicism and Orthodoxy offer paths through life in which singleness and celibacy are affirmed. While some Evangelical churches are better than others in how they accommodate singles, marriage and the nuclear family is a pattern of life that our pastors are better equipped to prepare people for. Rodgers is calling us to better minister to and create community around the increasing number of people who won’t fit into this category.

  10. Comment by Michael Ejercito on May 22, 2015 at 10:26 am

    Maybe we could teach chastity. That homosexuals are forbidden from buggery does not mean they can not have emotionally intimate relationships with other homosexuals of the same sex. In this context, god only prohibited the buggery, not emotional intimacy.

  11. Comment by Carlos on May 16, 2015 at 10:41 pm

    “Gay Christian.”
    Nope, not an option. Never has been, never will be.

    The New Testament is what it is. People who can’t accept it – Jesus did say the path to eternal life is narrow – can simply find another religion, there are thousands out there. Sensitivity to one’s “LGBT friends” cannot override the clear teaching of the Bible.

    Who knows the mind of God better – the apostle Paul, or Matthew Vines?
    That’s a big WELL, DUH, isn’t it?

  12. Comment by Michael Ejercito on September 1, 2015 at 10:22 am

    There is a clear distinction between pro-gay theology and pro-buggery theology.

  13. Comment by Michael Ejercito on May 22, 2015 at 10:24 am

    So, according to Vines and Gushee, buggery is the end all and be all of life. Apparently,. it is oppressing to homosexuals to tell them they can not engage in buggery. (The anti-buggery rule also applies to normal people, and yet I do not hear how normal people are oppressed by rules against buggery.)

    Buggery is filthy, it is nasty, it smells of devils and death. There can be no moral justification for it.

    Billions of people live a buggery-free life.

  14. Comment by Tom on August 29, 2015 at 10:45 am

    That’s not quite what they’re saying

  15. Comment by Uber Genie on May 24, 2015 at 7:44 pm

    Three separate issues fatally combined.

    God’s moral will, how we loving take people through maturing in Christ who are in the church, and how we communicate to the secular world are three very different issues. Rogers expresses the second. The other two individuals convolute all three.

    If the Evangelical church marginalize materialists the way they have woman and homosexuals, they would have been out of business a quarter century ago!

    That said God’s moral will is clear. He has granted complete sexual freedom inside the bounds of a marriage between one man and one wife! You have to destroy hermeneutics and exegesis in order to produce a pro LGBT Gospel.

    Paul didn’t ask if the man he kicked out of the church in Corinth was “commited” to his step-mother only if he was engaged in sex with her.

    Further subjective desires don’t effect God’s moral will. I personally hate the commandments against committing adultery! I can make a case that both as a result of biology (testosterone) and heredity (my dad was a serial adulterer), as well as culture, I am preprogrammed to commit adultery. But do I get a pass? No.

    I have called my local news station but they won’t give me a voice! I fill completely marginalized. Why would God mistreat me like that. Oh wait …he didn’t!

    What makes Christianity different is that Christ died for my sins. Further as a Christian (‘this will offend the Joel Osteen fans I know) I am called to take up my cross, and work out my salvation, and discipline myself to be obedient.

    What? Where is my feel-good message and cotton-candy gospel?

    We should treat all sinners equally as they explore Christianity and struggle to be conformed to the likeness of Christ, we should handle our conversations with those outside outside our with care, salt and light. We should not change the message of God’s grace and exchange it for a lie that strips the Gospel of its power to recreate all sinners.

    God’s morals flow from his character and existed before their was a universe. Subjects feelings of psychological conditions are moot. A case could be made that God no longer is opposed to homosexuality, but that would require much more scriptural support and there is zero data to support that claim.

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