Presbyterian Pastor: LGBTQIA+ ‘Saved the Church’

Persons within the church identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex or asexual (LGBTQIA) have “saved the church” according to a South Carolina pastor with a group advancing same-sex and transgender affirmation within the Presbyterian Church (USA).

“To our LGBTQIA siblings, your faith may have saved you… but your faith has also saved the church, our church—our beautiful, broken, stumbling, imperfect church—because you reached out, and you held on,” preached the Rev. Jenny McDevitt in a sermon series offered by the Covenant Network of Presbyterians (CNP). “You held on to God and the church, and along the way, your faithful grip on both has brought them closer together.”

McDevitt’s sermon, titled “Don’t Hold Back,” was made available through the 350 PC(USA) congregations in CNP’s network for churches to share on Sunday, June 27 as part of an observance of Pride Month.

The CNP describes its purpose as educating, equipping, and engaging with people across the church “to help the church be more inclusive and affirming of all God’s people, including God’s LGBTQIA+ people.”

In the past decade the PC(USA) suffered a significant decline in membership and attendance that coincided with decisions to both remove clergy expectations of fidelity in marriage or chastity in the single life from Presbyterian ordination vows (2010) and redefine marriage as between any two persons (2015). The denomination reported 2,016,091 members in 2010, and 1,572,660 in 2015, down to 1,245,354 in 2020, a loss of 770,737 active members across the decade (38%).

McDevitt, pastor of Shandon Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, presented the message on Mark 5:21-43. She serves as co-moderator of the CNP Board of Directors. In the passage, Jesus heals an unnamed woman who had suffered from twelve years of bleeding and raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead—two remarkable miracles.

“Maybe there are two more miracles in this story, miracles that I see more clearly when I read this story remembering that it is Pride Month,” McDevitt preached. “Miracles three and four… are that a man of great status and a woman of no status whatsoever each muster up the faith to approach Jesus in the first place… The honest truth is this: there is no reason—there is no reasonable reason, at least—that either that man or that woman should have had that kind of faith.”

Jairus had much to risk as a ruler of the synagogue, and the unnamed woman had faced years of ostracism and disappointment. In the same way, McDevitt assessed, Christians identifying as LGBTQIA+ risked and faced ostracism in the church and had no “reasonable reason” to stay. McDevitt praised them for “remarkable faithfulness to the church.”

“Your faith in the redemptive power of Jesus Christ has been so strong, you have endured the church at its worst to you. And you have trusted that eventually the institution would catch up with the one it claimed to follow… That sort of faith, to me, it is a miracle.” McDevitt said she laments places in the church where “this truth of the Gospel is still silenced.”

The Church has fallen short of Jesus’ example and there is reckoning and repentance to be done when it comes to the treatment some LGBTQIA+ identifying people have described. However, nowhere in the Bible does Jesus affirm homosexual practices. To say that two millennia of Christian teaching and millions of churches today are deliberately silencing this “truth of the Gospel” is perhaps too uncharitable of an interpretation of what the vast majority of global Christians hold to out of sincere conviction.

The LGBTQIA+ movement has taught the church to make room for those who have historically been marginalized by exposing double standards in deciding for whom the church doors are open. Rejection of homosexual practices is within orthodox Christianity, but rejecting homosexual persons is self-righteous hypocrisy.

Churches are filled with sinners, not saints. However, to say that LGBTQIA+ believers “saved the church” is an overreach in affirming the individual. The merit for churches becoming more inclusive—in a Biblically-sound way—should not be attributed to the strength of LGBTQIA+ believers’ faith, but rather to the strength of God’s faithfulness in bringing broken people together to form a beautiful mosaic that testifies to the unifying power of God’s love.

McDevitt concluded the sermon with a prayer: “God of grace and God of glory, we were taught that pride goeth before a fall. And today we are bold enough to say please let that be true. Please God, where pride goes, let so much fall in its wake. Where pride goes, may homophobia fall… Where pride goes, may unfair standards be eased, may unjust policies be defeated, may injustice of every sort fall forever… Where pride goes, may your kingdom come and your will be done. Where pride goes, O God, may your church follow.”

The sermon can be viewed in its entirety on the CNP Vimeo channel here.

“Don’t Hold Back” – June 27, 2021 from CovenantNetworkOfPresbyterians on Vimeo.