A Pastor’s Journey From Evangelical to Affirming

My Long Hard Road to LGBTQI Ally

Not too long ago, I purchased a rainbow watchband for my Apple Watch. I rarely wore it, though, because… you know… people judge.

But as I looked at it in one of those rare wearings in early June, something clicked.

I decided not to take it off. It was time to stop caring who judged, but more importantly, it was also time to reconcile my beliefs with my actions.

So somehow, in the wearing of a rainbow watchband, I found my resolve to spill this ink. And on this, the last day of Pride Month, I have realized that it is time that I came out—not as a member of the LGBTQI+ community—but as an ally.

I hesitate to use the language of “coming out,” feeling that it should be reserved for the courageous stories of those within the LGBTQI+ community who have valiantly determined that their personhood is more important than the discomfort felt by those who would rather they stay mostly quiet and fully closeted.

And yet, it is truthful to say that for a pastor to come out in support of LGBTQI+ issues or individuals is to some people akin to pastor proclaiming: “I’ll choose eternal hell and damnation for $200, Alex.” Conservative Evangelicals tend to give equal ire to both our LGBTQI+ brothers and sisters and the clergy who support them. In some ways, the hate directed at church leaders is even more venomous. But that is changing, slowly, one courageous person and pastor at a time.

It isn’t safe to be an ally, yet. But it is now one pastor safer than it was.

I wasn’t always an LGBT ally.

Far from it.

I’m pretty sure there are people in my social network who still remember me saying things like “…it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve…”

*shudder*

I was raised to be anti- ….well, pretty much anti-everything. But there was one subject on which I was raised to be especially anti-.

Homosexuality, as they called it.

For my tribe of origin—the “fundamental, bible-believing, soul-winning, King James only” Baptists—the gays were going to hell.1

Case closed.

We were sure of it.

But as a kid, gay people going to hell didn’t seem very novel to me, really. We believed pretty much everyone was going to hell; the Methodists across town were going to hell, the Church of God folks down the street were going to hell, and most other Baptists were going to hell, too.

How did we know?

Easy.

The Good Book was pretty clear who was bad. Bad people go to hell. And all these people were bad.

The Good Book was pretty clear on everything, so I was taught.

Need to know which political candidate to vote for? …It’s in there (the Republicans, as I recall). Want to know what social issues to care about? …That’s in there also (alcohol, dancing, and premarital sex, as I was taught). And if you were really interested in social justice, it’s perfectly clear what social ill to fight against (abortion, of course).

I never really rebelled against any of this in adolescence.

I was the poster-boy for a “Good Christian Guy,” one who people said might even become a pastor someday. I certainly never rejected the indoctrination. I didn’t know that I could reject it, and who was I to argue with god?

Baptists are particularly adept at indoctrination.

But, in a way, I guess I did rebel.

The problem with legalism and classic fundamentalism is that it is fraught with inconsistencies. When we preach the evils of mimosas and the Macarena with as much fervor as the resurrected Christ, people are going to begin asking questions.

And we were taught that asking questions was a gateway drug to all sorts of trouble.

But questions are also a gateway drug to all sorts of trutth.

I was never really satisfied with knowing what I believed, I wanted to know why I believed what I believed.

I started going to the movie theatre (which was also a no-go in my church tradition), I started listening to evil music (Christian Rock), and I even *gasp* purchased a tool of the devil: an NIV Bible.

But it wasn’t until I arrived at a Baptist university with a heart (at the time), Cedarville College, that the inconsistencies between what I had been taught and what the Bible actually said began to unravel.

The Bible professors encouraged me to ask questions of the Bible.

What, the what?

Are we allowed to do that?!

I was shocked when the profs presented not just a single side of contentious doctrinal issues, but both sides …and did so with respect! The showed us the biblical support for each side, pointed out the holes and inconsistencies, and then encouraged us to make our own informed decision.

They encouraged us to be as honest with the limits of what the Bible says as we were with what it clearly states.

Wait, say that again?

There are LIMITS to what the Bible addresses and the depth to which it chooses to address topics??

Yes. And, yes.

This set me on a journey to compare what I had been told the Bible teaches to what it actually says (and, what it doesn’t say). This required care… and time.

Lots of time.

One does not hold their long-held and deeply embedded religious ideologies up to the light and immediately see truth.

Things must first come into focus.

It’s as though you have to let the light fade out the ink of what you’ve been told the Bible says in order to see what is actually written there in indelible ink.

Some of my strongholds came down quickly, like the teachings from my youth that contemporary music was of the devil. Ridiculous!

Some took a few years of study and prayer and an understanding of cultural context in the first century, like the topic of women as clergy. Thank God for them!

But there was one topic that dogged me for the better part of three decades.

Homosexuality.

I did not begin my journey on this topic by trying to reconcile culture to scripture in order to become affirming in spite of the Bible.

I began my journey trying to reconcile God to himself.

The God who loved and accepted me surely would not turn others away. It made no sense that the God who said “Love your neighbor” would then turn and call them an “abomination.”

But the only framework I had ever been taught was “Love the sinner; hate the sin.”

Ugh.

It was my realization in Seminary that this “Love the sinner; hate the sin” crap was heresy (Gnosticism, to be exact) that I was finally forced out of my comfort zone and into the deep waters of critical biblical analysis. So I pressed forward, spending years studying, researching, and reading in order to reconcile the two sides… to little avail.

Finally—thanks to a timely read by Wendy VanderWal-Gritter2—I decided to simply live in the tension between being anti-LGBT and acceptance, just like the church did at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. There they decided to live in the tension of a middle road, a non-answer, choosing instead to wait on the Spirit to bring clarity and unity to all believers in His time.

For years, this unresolved tension of the via media allowed me to live in a liminal space where I could be free to accept both the gay and the anti-gay polar positions.

Except, I wasn’t really free.

Living in the middle was so much worse.

Neither camp saw my position as respectable.

I became an outsider, an island.

But what was I to do?!

You see, I had a foundational issue in my theology: I have always taken something of a high-view of scripture. While I had long since come to understand that the “word” in John 1 was Jesus and not the KJV, I still held strongly to the belief that the Bible (and more importantly, God) could not be divided against itself on this issue. So I dove back into the topic again in hopes of finally getting off the fence.

This time, though, having completed a master’s degree at a respectable (if not highly conservative) seminary and in the process of completion of a doctoral degree. Now, I had a better toolset by which to study the topic.

So I grabbed that razor-thin paper that had all of my non-inclusive ideologies written on it and held it up to the light again… but this time, instead of seeing only the indoctrination of my youth and evangelical tribe, I began to see truth.

There are 6 or so landmark (or, landmine) scriptures on which the anti-LGBT battles rage. And here, I’ll resist mucking through the theological, contextual, and historical nuances that led to my newfound firmly inclusive stance.

One text of the six, I had been straight up lied to about what it said. A second text was easily explained when the fuller context of the passage was considered. In yet another, a lot of grammatical study in the original language was the key. One required a thorough vetting of how the word was used in the culture of the time, which required sourcing of scholarly texts outside of biblical studies.

One by one, the strongholds began to fall.

And then, one day I realized that I was 95% certain—on the basis of my personal study of the Bible itself—that God was open and affirming.

I closed my Bible and cried.

I knew what that realization meant.

It meant that I need no longer sit on the fence, yes.

But I also knew that it meant many of my old friends and colleagues would burn the bridges between us should I ever be open with the scriptural truths I had found.

Ugh… again.

Evangelical Christians tend to be bridge-burners.

I should know. I had spent much of my life carrying a torch.

I had now found spiritual peace, yes, but I found myself yet again on an island in the midst of a raging sea of fiery hatred within the mostly conservative and wholly evangelical waters of my past.

I came to the realization that I could no longer even call myself evangelical.

Not because I had walked away from my evangelical upbringing but because I could now see that evangelicalism had so poisoned the well of the gospel that it was now no longer “good news” to a suffering humanity.

When something is no longer good news, it is no longer of God.

I also realized that I had finally and firmly walked away from my fundamentalist roots.

Thank God.

I had bee4n trying to distance myself from those ideological shackles for most of adulthood.

How strange that it should be the Paper Pope of my Independent Baptist upbringing (the Bible) that had ultimately guided me to being firmly open and affirming.

I had not come to my position IN SPITE OF the biblical text.
I had come to my position BECAUSE of my radical adherence to the text.

I was here BECAUSE I had been raised and trained to walk in step with the text.
I was here BECAUSE I was refusing to blindly follow cultural winds.

I knew that would be no consolation or comfort to a Christian community hell-bent on guarding the gate of Heaven with their “truth.” There is a special kind of hatred that is directed at those clergy and thought-leaders who don’t tow the party line on the subject of sexual identity.

But if other’s could be so courageous, then so could I.

So, it’s time to come out of the closet on this topic.

So, I suppose that all of this isn’t necessarily because I wore a rainbow watchband for a few days during Pride Month but because, for years, I chose to do the hard behind-the-scenes work of confronting religious inconsistencies and false teachings from my past that were embedded deep within. In short, a series of long, hard walks in the same direction.

But the watchband did help me to see the importance of clarity in my public theological position.

I found that wearing the band during Pride Month kind of forced me into conversations in the public square. So I didn’t take it off, 1) in honor of all those I know who still live closeted sexually or theologically because of oppression from Christians, 2) as a reminder to pray and be careful not to harm, and 3) because I really like it and I don’t care what anyone thinks about it.

And maybe there is a metaphor somewhere in there.

Whether it’s my theological inclinations concerning inclusion… or watchbands… it’s time to stop caring so much what anyone thinks.

It’s just finally time to do the right thing.