Why are we LGBTQ+ Affirming?
Introduction
Human sexuality is arguably the most controversial and divisive issue in the Christian church today. Specifically, beliefs about the legitimacy of same-sex unions and affirmation of LGBTQIA individuals as members and leaders in the church has divided denominations, congregations, and even families. There is a clear fork in the interpretive road before us.
We respect and understand why some opt for the traditional view of marriage and sexuality (broadly summed up as “one man; one woman; one lifetime”). However, we hold to an affirming position. The term “affirming” is a loaded word, and, depending on who you are, carries a lot of baggage. What we mean is that we believe LGBTQIA individuals can marry a person of the same sex, transition genders, and occupy any position of leadership in the church. This does not mean that we affirm everything an individual chooses to do with their sexuality, just that sexual orientation is not a barrier to marriage and church leadership.
We have arrived at our convictions humbly and carefully because human sexuality is too important of a subject for flippant or simplistic beliefs. Sexuality and gender are profoundly connected to how humans operate in the world, especially in Christian churches, and Christianity has always been characterized by a sexual ethic that is distinct from the larger culture. If you are wondering how we justify our beliefs, this document is for you. While we acknowledge the complexities of the subject, below is a succinct explanation as to why our church is affirming.
The Evidence of Experience
We find ourselves in a unique cultural moment. Social approval of sexual diversity and legal legitimacy for same-sex unions has shifted dramatically in the past fifty years. While evidence for sexual diversity extends back to the ancient world, it seems that modern Christians are facing new questions related to sex, gender, and marriage within the church.
There are countless testimonies from individuals that their sexual orientation or gender identity is unchangeable, despite painful efforts to conform to the norm. Although the exact mechanisms of sexual and gender variation remain unclear, whether genetic, or environmental, or a combination of both, for many LGBTQIA individuals the choice is not theirs. This is not a matter of the will. It’s a matter of factors that cannot be controlled. On top of this, there are many testimonies from LGBTQIA individuals who have put their faith in Christ and received the Spirit.
While this experiential evidence is not the primary guide in matters of morality and doctrine, it is significant. We do not accept any notion that the LGBTQIA community is collectively deceitful about their experiences, nor is there some sort of sinister global agenda at play. We take the real testimonies from real individuals seriously. We are not capitulating to cultural mores, nor are we simply trying to be “on the right side of history.” We are trying to reconcile our faith in Christ and love for our neighbors within our experience of sexual and gender diversity in human beings.
What About Church Tradition, Though?
It’s true that the traditional Christian view of marriage has been generally defined as a monogamous union between man and woman, and that sex has been relegated to the boundaries of this union—one man; one woman; one lifetime. This view has spanned denominations, cultures, and languages throughout church history. However, church history does not present as simple and clean of a view on marriage as we may think.
For most modern American Christians, marriage is the ideal. Young adults hurry to marry, parents worry that their kids are not going to marry, and single Christians feel alienated in family-centered churches. Marriage conferences are prominent. Marriage books are hot sellers. But there was significant debate over marriage and celibacy in the early church.
Some, like Tertullian, saw marriage as a lesser evil than fornication (i.e. non-married sex). Some, like Augustine, saw marriage as good, but a lesser good than celibacy. Some, like Tatian, Marcion, and Jerome, rejected marriage altogether. In other words, for some church fathers it was like an olympic podium of sexual relationships—celibacy takes gold, marriage takes silver, and fornication takes bronze. For others, it was winner take all—celibacy was the only legitimate option. But the resounding belief that celibacy was the ideal wasn’t a fringe view in the early church—it was the prevailing one.
Objections to the primacy of celibacy were not tolerated. There was a monk in the late 4th century named Jovinian, who was condemned as a heretic by synods at Rome and Milan for his beliefs about marriage. His heresy? Teaching that marriage and celibacy were equal in God’s eyes. Jovinian is quoted by Jerome as saying “Virgins, widows, and married women, once they have been washed in Christ, are of the same merit, as long as they do not differ in other works.” In other words, according to Jovinian, your marital status does not affect your standing before God. He was excommunicated for teaching this because it broke with church tradition. But the irony is that our modern American churches agree with Jovinian now!
Church history has also shown significant diversion on the purpose of marriage. Saint Augustine, the most prolific Christian writer of the patristic era and arguably the most influential Christian theologian next to the Apostle Paul, believed that marriage existed solely for producing offspring. In his work On the Good of Marriage, he says, “Marriage itself, of course, in all nations exists for the same purpose: the procreation of children.”
He was not alone. The belief that marriage existed for the purpose of having babies was ubiquitous. In the eyes of the early church, there was no other legitimate reason to get married than to produce children. Today, we still affirm the goodness of having kids. But we do not teach that the sole purpose of getting married is to procreate. That’s an option, not a mandate. But in early Chrisitanity, that was the only option.
What’s even more interesting is the early church’s beliefs about sex within marriage. Not only was marriage solely for the purpose of procreation—sex was, too. Here are some notable quotes from church fathers in the first few centuries of Christianity on sex within marriage:
Clement (2nd-3rd century): “To have intercourse without intending children is to violate nature.”
Lactantius (3rd-4th century): “We have received that part of the body called the genitals, for no other reason than to generate offspring.”
Augustine (4th-5th century): “[Children] are the one honorable fruit, not of the Union of male and female, but of sexual intercourse.”
Contrast this with modern teaching that not only embraces non-procreative marital sex but prescribes it. While this does not directly challenge the “one man, one woman” aspect, it does show that church history is not entirely uniform, especially on the inherent role of procreation in marriage. If the traditional view is to be held consistently, then any couple who is knowingly incapable of producing progeny should be prohibited from marrying. This would include young couples with known infertility and older couples who are past the age of fertility. Additionally, couples who are capable of producing children but choose to be childless for the duration of marriage would also be departing from the traditional view. Yet these examples are rarely (if ever) challenged in our churches today.
It’s also worth noting that “traditional” Christian marriages have been overwhelmingly patriarchal throughout history. It is only in the past 50 years that there have been significant strides towards gender equality in marriage, too. We take for granted the willing choice of adult females to marry, but this has not always been the case, especially in the first century when the New Testament was written. For example, if the marriage of Mary and Joseph was on par for the culture at the time (and there’s no evidence to indicate that it wasn’t) then Mary would have likely been around 15 years old and Joseph around 30. And their union would have been arranged by their fathers. (There is no way a relationship like this would make it through modern premarital counseling, let alone the law.)
We do not claim to be experts on sexuality throughout church history, but our general conviction is that the traditional view of marriage is not as uniform nor battle-tested as it is often supposed. While the church has consistently taught that marriage is between “one man and one woman”, we do not believe this aspect of marriage has been adequately challenged throughout church history. Evidence for same-sex marriages in the ancient world is sparse and disputed, same-sex unions were never validated under Roman law, and the issue was not debated between Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists during the Protestant Reformation (and they debated many traditional beliefs). There has never been a time in church history where sexual minorities have had the cultural power and advocacy to cause the church to revisit the subject—until recently. It is our current cultural context that has prompted serious and careful conversations about the essence of both gender and sexuality within marriage in ways that haven't happened in the past 2000 years. We find ourselves in uncharted waters, so to speak.
This raises the larger issue of whether or not it’s possible to break with church tradition and remain an orthodox Christian. It’s unfortunate that there are some who consider an affirming position to be heresy. It’s not. There is nothing related to gender, sexuality, or marriage found in the historic creeds that link together wildly divergent traditions within Christianity. While we have revised our beliefs on this subject, we haven’t abandoned the historic faith or divine inspiration of the Bible. As Protestants, we recognize the importance and weight of tradition. However, we believe there are times where church tradition needs to be challenged. Traditional beliefs on other important subjects have been adjusted by branches of the church, notably justification by faith alone, “sola scriptura”, and credo-baptism (or at least the refusal to baptize infants). As has been the case with numerous doctrines throughout church history, we believe that the traditional view of marriage is in need of reformation. But, as Darrin W. Snyder Belousek says, “If the doctrine of marriage is to be reformed, it must be reformed in accord with Scripture.” That is where we will go next.
What Does the Bible Say?
While affirming Christians often get accused of rejecting or ignoring the Bible, we affirm the divine inspiration of Scripture. The biblical texts are meant to be read, meditated upon, evaluated, and applied because God works through the text in supernatural ways. We didn’t come to an LGBTQIA affirming position by rejecting Scripture, but, rather, by studying it more closely. For several of us, this was a long and arduous process of evaluation. Yet we believe there is biblical justification for the affirming view.
A preliminary point needs to be made—the Bible doesn’t function like a constitution. It is a community library written over the span of nearly 1500 years by numerous authors, editors, and compilers. On numerous occasions, these authors diverge on details and even disagree with each other. The biblical writers do not offer a tidy systematic theology detached from their immediate cultural contexts. They were human, and God worked through and even accommodated their human limitations and worldviews to reveal himself. Because of the complexity of the Bible, as evidenced by the wide range of interpretations of virtually every passage, we approach it with humility and careful study.
Below, we’ll address several larger contextual issues, themes, and trajectories in the Bible that lead us to our affirming position. Then we will give a brief summary of our interpretation of several key biblical texts.
Crossing the Cultural Bridge
The Bible was written by specific people at specific points in history within specific cultures and languages. And there are plenty of perplexing behaviors that are affirmed in Scripture that modern Christians do not practice today. As scholar Michael Bird points out, “The Bible is a sacred text that commands genocide, sanctions slavery, permits the sexual exploitation of slaves, and enables patriarchy and polygamy.“
The culturally-bound nature of the Bible shows us how much God accommodates our human limitations and worldviews to reveal his truth. For example, the creation accounts in Genesis 1-2 were written within the paradigm of Ancient Near Eastern cosmology. The Torah was written from a patriarchal cultural perspective. (Even the supposedly universal Ten Commandments are patriarchal. Commandment #10 instructs against coveting the neighbors’ wife). Chattel slavery was a ubiquitous practice that is regulated in the Bible, but not denounced as an institution. We, as modern Westerners, occupy vastly different cultures than the biblical authors. On the topic of marriage and sexuality specifically, there are several important cultural differences between us and them:
The concept of an autonomous nuclear family (husband, wife, 2.5 kids) was foreign to the biblical authors
The concept of an intentionally childless marriage was unthinkable then
The concept of marriage as a decision made primarily between the couple was likewise abnormal (marriage was usually arranged by fathers)
Marriages in the ancient world were entirely patriarchal. Women were not just submitted to their husbands—they were their possessions
It is within our respective cultures that God’s redemptive work happens, and the Bible does not reveal some sort of universal and abstract marriage formula. While this does not automatically equate to an affirmation of same-sex unions, it is nevertheless true that God continues to work through our culture rather than prescribe a universal culture from the top down.
The bottom line is that all of the timeless truths of the Bible are culturally bound. So, as Karen R. Keen rightfully says, “One of the challenges of using the Bible for ethics is determining when a value is culturally bound and when it’s enduring.” We must understand the various cultures of the biblical authors and look at the trajectories in their writings to adequately apply the Bible’s teachings to our lives today. On this issue, the cultural view of homosexuality in both Jewish and Roman culture was one of honor/shame, a subversion of gender roles that brought shame upon the penetrated. Our culture, generally speaking, does not see same-sex behavior that way today. In our culture, it is no longer odd to encounter a same-sex couple with children or transgender individuals leading healthy lives. This is not an area where our culture needs to be outright rejected. Rather, it is an area where God’s redemptive work can be displayed without prompting individuals to become heterosexual or permanently celibate. Why? Because the Bible presents a trajectory of inclusion.
A trajectory of inclusion
The storyline of the Bible displays an ethic of radical inclusion. Those on the outside, including women, the poor, the diseased, Gentiles, Samaritans, and eunuchs are consistently offered inclusion into God’s covenant community because every human bears the image of God and every human is included within God’s salvation project. This theme of inclusion continues on today.
The validation of the inclusion of those on the outside rests on their faith in Christ and the presence of the Spirit in their lives. The Ethiopian eunuch, once barred from inclusion in temple worship because of his sexual ambiguity (eunuchs were castrated males), has a seat at the table in Christ’s church (Acts 8). The conversion of the Gentiles was scandalous to the early Jewish Christians, yet Peter says “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right . . . Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water. They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.” (Acts 10:34-35, 47) The evidence of faith and the Spirit in LGBTQIA individuals, including those in same-sex marriages, leads us to align with Peter that God shows no favoritism but accepts from every sexual orientation. This is a surprise twist in God’s eternal plans to unite all things through Christ.
But what about the passages that condemn homosexuality?
We understand that the reasons we’ve articulated so far are not very convincing to many who hold to the traditional view of marriage and sexuality because of seemingly clear prohibitions found in the Bible. There are seven passages that reference same sex sexual activity of any kind. Each of these instances is negative. Here is a brief summary of our interpretation of the relevant passages. (The brevity of these summaries should not be taken as a sign of ignorance of the exegetical details).
Genesis 19 and Judges 22
Genesis 19 is a story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Judges 22 is an account of an horrific gang rape and murder that triggers a civil war. In both of these passages, wicked men demand to have sex with a male (two males in the case of Sodom).
These two passages, while involving same sex sexual activity, hardly involve anything even remotely considered consensual. The demands to have sex with men are rape demands which display the patriarchal honor/shame culture (in both stories, women are offered in place of the men). Plus, the prophet Ezekiel defines Sodom’s sin as arrogance, overconsumption, and neglect of the poor (Ezekiel 16:49). The sexual proclivities of the city are not mentioned in his indictment.
Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13
The texts read, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.” (18:22) And “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” (20:13)
These texts exhibit Israel’s patriarchal honor/shame society, where being penetrated was considered shameful. There is also a possible inference to the pagan sexual rituals of Israel’s neighbors, which would link the condemnations of Leviticus to religious behaviors found in the Ancient Near Eastern world.
Regardless of the context, these verses in Leviticus cannot be detached and extracted from the entirety of the Mosaic law, which includes prohobitions and extreme penalties for other sexual activities that are not often considered sinful today (such as having sex while menstruating). The Torah, in its entirety, was God’s instruction to his covenant people. Jesus fulfilled the Torah (Matthew 5:17). Because of this, these commandments are not universally binding on Christians today.
Romans 1:24-27
But even though the Mosaic law is not binding on Christians today, don’t the New Testament authors reiterate the condemnation of same-sex sexual activity? Yes, this is true. (Well, specifically, Paul does.) Romans 1 provides his most substantial discussion of the subject. The text reads:
“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
This passage is easily the most significant text involving same-sex sexual activity and there are numerous arguments from both affirming and non-affirming scholars that are worth consideration. We are not convinced that the same-sex behavior Paul is describing is only gross expressions like rape or pederasty (sexual activity involving a man and a boy). Based on the grammar, he seems to be referring to same-sex sexual activity in general for both males and females (this is the only passage in the Bible where lesbian activity is addressed).
However, focusing on the terms causes us to lose the forest for the trees. The verses speaking negatively about same-sex sexual activity are situated in a larger section where Paul highlights the worst of Gentile behavior from a Jewish perspective. It is a section meant to provoke ire for the behavior of the Gentiles—they are filled with all kinds of wicked behavior. They have been handed over. They have received their due penalty. They, they, they.
But then Paul turns it on his audience. After building up a heinous picture of the gentile world, Paul says to his Jewish audience, “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”
What this means is that Romans 1 is not a systematic account of sinful behavior. Romans 1 is a rhetorical setup to elicit repulsion from Paul’s Jewish audience to then turn it on them—how can you judge when you do the same things? So Paul’s point, in Romans 1:24-27, is not to teach that same-sex sexual behavior is wrong. His audience already believed that. Paul assumed it. Paul’s point is to squash the inner judge that likes to shun the sins of others while hypocritically engaging in the same behavior (and all of us need to listen to this warning).
Paul’s dismissal of same-sex sexual behavior reveals his cultural lens, a belief on sexuality that was the default Jewish view of the time. This brings us back to the concept of divine accommodation we mentioned above. The Bible is human composed and God’s inspiration of Scripture works through human limitations and worldviews. There is no sky canopy, as the author of Genesis thought. The institution of slavery is contrary to the gospel, which no biblical authors argue. So it seems that when it comes to same-sex activity, Paul has not applied the gospel to the phenomenon of same-sex marriages. While there is evidence for mutual romantic same-sex relationships in Greco-Roman culture, and it’s possible that Paul would be aware of these at some level, we do not have any evidence of Paul addressing the subject of a same-sex couple directly.
Let us illustrate this point with another situation found in the Bible—slavery. Paul does not condemn the practice of slavery and even commands Christian masters to treat their slaves better, rather than advocate for freeing them. But in the letter of Philemon, Paul urges the slave holder to welcome back his runaway slave as a brother in Christ, thus subverting the institution of slavery. If there were, say, a book like Philemon addressing a same-sex marriage, what would Paul have written? Would he have offered a theological explanation and applied the gospel to the union? Would he have spoken of it pragmatically like he does with marriage in 1 Corinthians 7?
We can’t know for sure, but we can apply Paul’s theological logic from his other letters. The revelation of Christ changed everything for Paul. If he saw evidence of faith and the Spirit in same-sex couples, if he had seen the good works in an LGBTQIA individual, if he had experienced their love, then this would likely be yet another area of his Jewish worldview that would be reconstructed because of Christ. It seems inconsistent with Paul’s revealed apostolic and pastoral ministry that he would deny the evidence of faith and the Spirit in favor of his traditional beliefs.
1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-11
1 Cor. 6:9-10 reads, “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
1 Tim. 1:9-11 reads, “We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.”
These prohibitions hinge on definitions. Behind the English of these passages are two Greek terms, arsenokoites and malakos (although only arsenokoites appears in the 1 Timothy text).
The uncertainty of how to translate these terms is exemplified by the wide range of renderings in English Bibles throughout the centuries. There is no evidence for arsenokoites in the Greek language prior to 1 Corinthians, leading some to believe that Paul coined the term (it likely derives from a mashup of the root words “male” and “bed”, presenting a crude translation of “male-bedder”). Malakos is a flexible term that means “soft” in other contexts. When coupled together, it seems reasonable that the terms are referring to the active and passive partners in a male-male sexual relationship.
However, this is far from clear. When he uses arsenokoites, it’s likely that Paul would be harkening back to the Leviticus passages (see above), which would then transfer the uncertainty of those texts to 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy. Are monogamous same-sex relationships in view here? Possibly, but it’s hard to say for certain.
It seems unwise to base a whole doctrine that affects real people on the meaning of two ambiguous terms. Plus, any non-affirming person who even agrees that those in same-sex relationships can even be called Christians disagrees with the implications of these passages, because Paul excludes the practicers of these behaviors from the kingdom. (This is evident in the book Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church, edited by Preston Sprinkle, where affirming arguments are acknowledged as Christian arguments).
To sum it all up, the biblical texts that condemn homosexual activity are not as clear as they may seem at first. In the face of uncertainty, we faced the question “why opt for condemnation rather than affirmation?” We have chosen to opt for affirmation.
So What Exactly is a Biblical Marriage Then?
All of the discussion so far (and thank you for making it this far) leaves a lingering question—what exactly is a biblical marriage then?
The Bible does not give a definition of marriage. Anyone who says “the Bible defines marriage as…” is automatically doing some level of theological interpretation because there is no spot in the Bible where marriage is directly defined. Jacob and David’s polygamous marriages are “biblical” marriages, after all.
So to understand what a truly biblical marriage is, we must look at the trajectory of marriage in the Bible.
The early chapters of Genesis are crucial for understanding marriage. Genesis 1 includes several groupings of “opposites”—night and day, earth and sky, land animals and sea animals, male and female. But this is more poetic than historical, and doesn’t include creatures that don’t fit cleanly in the binary (like amphibians, which are both land and water animals). Genesis offers a general picture of humanity—male and female, joining together to produce offspring. The details can’t be pressed too much. That’s not the point.
Likewise, Adam and Eve represent far more than themselves. They are the man and the woman, representatives of the species as a whole. Even their names indicate they are more than themselves. “Adam” means “humanity,” and Eve is first referred to as “the woman,” who completes humanity. As Megan DeFranza says, “Adam and Eve can be understood as the majority story rather than the exclusive model for what it means to be human. By extension, heterosexual marriage can be seen as the majority story, not the exclusive model.”
This leads us to Jesus. When Jesus teaches on marriage, his emphasis is on the permanency of it in this life (Matthew 19:4-6). Jesus does this by harkening back to Genesis. He quotes Genesis’ statements that “God created them male and female,” and that husband and wife are joined into “one flesh”. But gender complementarity is not the emphasis of his overall argument. The male/female aspect of marriage was assumed, and as much as we would love for Jesus to elaborate on what to do about sexual diversity, he doesn’t. That wasn’t the objective of his teaching on divorce.
And it is important to note that the biblical story is not about going back to the original creation depicted in Genesis anyway. We are not returning to being a global collection of vegetarian nudists. We are being led by God forward into the new creation, one that displays a diversity and complexity of humanity that is not presented in Genesis 1-2. We are on a trajectory from garden to city, from the beginning of human civilization to the fullness and richness of diverse human cultures. God is writing a story where his continually diversifying creation reaches its ultimate goal in union with him.
And that’s what marriage is really about. Marriage is a picture of God’s relationship to his people. But this picture does not require “one man and one woman” to be realized. God likens himself to a husband of “the Fathers” (the 12 tribes of Israel) in Jeremiah 31:32. Israel is a male gendered term, Israel the patriarch was male, and Israel as a nation was a patriarchal society. Sexual difference is not necessary for the metaphor to work. The point of the metaphor is that even though Israel exhibited idolatrous polygamy by worshiping other gods, God remains loyal. (The prophets Ezekiel and Hosea graphically depict the infidelity of Israel by comparing the nation to an adulterous wife.)
And Paul’s analogy in Ephesians 5 of Christ and the church as husband and wife also emphasizes the commitment of God. His point is not to give a universal mandate for marriage as one man and one woman. The word for church is ekklesia, which means an assembly of individuals. This complicates the “one woman” part. (In other New Testament passages, Christ is called our “brother,” which really complicates the marriage analogy). Instead, within an assumed patriarchal marriage structure, Paul advocates for mutual submission and love based on the relationship between Christ and the church. This all culminates on heaven and earth being joined like a husband and bride forever (Revelation 21:1-2).
The overarching point is that God accommodates culturally-dependent human marriages to reveal his character. Marriage looks different in different times and cultures. In the world we know, where same-sex marriages exist, God’s character can still be modeled in the union. So we believe that a “biblical” marriage includes at least three important characteristics:
Marriage is a covenant commitment. It is a picture of God’s relationship to the church in terms of loyal commitment anchored by promises.
Marriage is transformative. It is a sanctifying union that can spur our faith and devotion to Christ.
Marriage is a shadow of what’s to come. Marriage is meant to be a life-long commitment that foreshadows something greater—the return of Christ and full union of heaven and earth. Because of this, it is not meant to be either glorified or disregarded. It is good in its proper place.
To sum it up, marriage is a culturally-dependent institution. But what’s timeless is the call for love, commitment, and faithfulness. Same-sex couples can exhibit this like opposite-sex couples can.
Conclusion—What if we’re wrong?
There is so much more that can be said, so many details that could be filled in, so many rebuttals and counter arguments that could be offered. We do not intend to argue our position in ways that further the divide within Christian churches. There’s been enough of that recently. We understand and respect why some opt for the traditional view. Each of us did at one time, too. From our experience, it takes a while to go through a theological paradigm shift. We also affirm LGBTQIA individuals who choose to live celibate lives because of their faith in Christ. We do not intend to shame those who choose to remain single.
We have arrived at our beliefs about marriage and sexuality, beliefs that shape the practices of our church, but we do not claim to have an unswerving certainty. We humbly admit that we could be wrong.
If we are wrong, it is not because we rejected the Bible or capitulated to culture. We have intensely prayed, studied, conversed, and agonized about this subject. Because of our beliefs, we have faced rejection from friends, the loss of respect from fellow Christians, and even the loss of employment. Yet it is our conviction, regardless, that an affirming position is the most loving belief that leads to greater human flourishing and Christlikeness.
This document may have raised further questions for you. If so, continue to pursue understanding. We are all searching for truth in conjunction with brothers and sisters in Christ throughout history. We are not the final word. We are, as image-bearers, flawed and transforming, on a collective journey to reflect God’s love and character to the world. That is our ultimate goal. And, hopefully, we find ourselves at the beginning of a new era in God’s redemptive movement where the historically marginalized LGBTQIA community is able to join us in this journey in a profound new way.