The goal of ministry to gays and lesbians isn’t to make them heterosexual, three speakers said Oct. 28 at a Southern Baptist-sponsored conference on the gospel and homosexuality. It’s to make them holy.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is a former college English professor who described her journey from a liberal, lesbian feminist to a full-time mother and pastor’s wife in her 2013 book “Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.”
She told participants at the Oct. 27–29 conference on The Gospel, Homosexuality, and the Future of Marriage that the Bible’s understanding of sexuality is “the best-kept secret on the planet sadly even among Christians.”
“When we as Christians call one another to sexual holiness, we are not saying that the answer is heterosexual marriage,” Butterfield said. “We acknowledge that marriage is God’s design, but we acknowledge that not everyone is designed for marriage.”
The other speakers on this topic were Christopher Yuan and Jackie Hill Perry.
Yuan, co-author of his own prodigal son-type memoir titled “Out of a Far Country: A Gay Son’s Journey to God. A Broken Mother’s Search for Hope,” recounted bad choices that landed him in prison on drug charges and a diagnosis of HIV-positive.
Perry is a Christian rapper who credits her faith for helping her resist lust for other women and is now married and eight months pregnant. She said during a panel discussion she doesn’t care much for people with same-sex attraction who agree that homosexual activity is a sin and remain celibate self-identifying as a “gay Christian.”
The conference was sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) and attracted more than 1,000 people.
ERLC president Russell D. Moore said evangelicals cannot repeat the “same old mistakes” in which they “slowly adapted to a sexual revolution that is now ravaging our churches and our culture.”
Instead “we contend for marriage and we contend for family and we contend for holiness, but we do this in the context of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said. If evangelicals make the same mistakes, Moore said, then “we won’t just lose a marriage culture, we will lose the gospel itself.”
“If we are responding to those who disagree with us with vented outrage and shock and horror and condemnation, what we are revealing is a lack of confidence in the gospel, in our mission, in our Christ,” Moore added.
Evangelicals did not fare well in the last battle over marriage which resulted in a divorce culture, Moore said. He pointed to four reasons that happened:
- “We unintentionally accepted the view of marriage of the culture without ever even knowing that we were doing so.”
- “We were often cowardly and fearful.”
- “The divorce culture happened because it became normal to us.”
- “The reason we adapted to this is because the preaching on this issue was often so genuinely condemnable,” not calling for repentance and not offering reconciliation through Christ.
Of the church’s cowardice, Moore said, “If we are simply standing up and editing the Word of God when it comes to our own sins, if we are willing to preach the gospel except for the very thing that is ravaging our churches at that moment, we are not preaching the gospel at all; we are simply selling indulgences.” (Baptist News Global, Baptist Press)
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