Centered-Set Thinking and Homosexuality
Thanks all you music-lovers out there who commented on the Warren Zevon post. I suppose I'm working out what it is about this messed-up musician that grabs me as much as it does recently, and you all gave me food for thought on that front.
Some of you will remember that maybe six weeks ago we were in a discussion of churchgoing-and-homosexuality, inspired by reading a powerful new book by Andrew Marin called Love is an Orientation. I mentioned then that I'd written an article on how some of the thinking in this blog might intereract with those questions. The article didn't work out in the original setting--but it's found a home elsewhere (and it's nice to have a home...). I briefly reprinted it here, before pulling it for reasons too complicated to mention here. But I mentioned that, like Frosty the Snowman, it would return again someday. And you'll be happy to know that that day seems to be today.
It's on the long side for this blog (it will be about twice as long as any other entry) so if you want to take a look at it, grab a cup of coffee and pull up a favorite chair.
Many of you have already seen it in its brief run here previously. But, as always, I'd love all of your thoughts. Here's the article.
A friend—I’ll call her Tara—had a noteworthy experience at her work. A lesbian co-worker started to read a hotel Bible on a business trip. Upon her return, she asked Tara if Tara could get her a Bible, because she wanted to continue reading. Then she talked to Tara about answered prayer: had Tara experienced that God sometimes would answer our prayers? Because—who knew?—apparently God would.
It sounds, Tara said to her co-worker, as if this is all new for you. Have you ever explored faith in God before? No, the woman said, it had never crossed her mind. Because everyone knew God wasn’t a god for gay people, only for straight people.
Then there was the conversation my wife had earlier this week. A woman—also a lesbian—had been exploring Buddhism last summer. I’ll call her Amanda. She was on a summer project in England and she and a co-worker there had gotten into a casual conversation about faith. She talked about her incipient Buddhism and the co-worker talked about prayer to Jesus. That night, Amanda tried this crazy new idea of praying to Jesus. Good things happened. She asked for more advice from her co-worker, and her co-worker encouraged her to find a church to explore when she got back to the States.
I met Amanda when she joined in with a class we run called Seek. It’s a course for people exploring faith that’s similar to Alpha, except, perhaps, that it focuses more on how to experience God than how to think about God.
Every week was better for Amanda than the one before, topped off by our Holy Spirit Day, when she was robustly filled with the Spirit. She told my wife that she’d never considered looking into a church or into Jesus, because the word on the street was that Jesus and churches didn’t like her. But her experience in Seek had been entirely great. But now, as she was considering being baptized, she wanted to ask whether, contrary to everything she’d understood for so much of her life, it was actually wise for her to follow Jesus.
Like many of yours, our church is in a very secular city—Boston. And one thing we’ve noticed that perhaps you’ve experienced as well is that homosexuality is a major, major topic of conversation for people exploring faith here. I was talking a few years back with a Hispanic pastor who was leading a statewide fight opposing gay marriage. I asked him if that cost him at all with the secular Latinos he was trying to reach. Did they also oppose gay marriage? Indeed they did. He estimated about 95% of secular Latinos in Boston would oppose gay marriage and would be repelled by homosexuality in general. I said I guessed that the percentages of secularists I talked to would be the inverse of his—almost all the secularists I talk with regard gay rights as basic human rights.
And then, of course, there are the gay people themselves I meet who are eager to explore Jesus but, as with the two women above, can’t imagine how that would be possible.
I wonder if John Wimber offered us some help here. He taught a concept he learned from his colleague at Fuller Seminary, Paul Hiebert. Perhaps there are two different sorts of churches: one you might call “bounded set” and one you might call “centered set.”
A bounded set is like a circle: you’re either inside it or outside it. You’re a liberal or you’re a conservative, but not both. You’re a Midwesterner or you’re a Southerner or you’re whatever. But let’s think about bounded-set faith. On these terms, faith—and whatever any given church regards as going along with faith—is either/or and to a great degree is about what opinions or beliefs you hold. What are the boundary lines to what we regard as true faith? How do we know if someone is in or out? What are the rules?
By contrast, a centered set is like a central dot surrounded by endless other dots. The center dot is whatever holds the set together—Jesus, for our purposes. The other dots are everyone else on earth. And the question of a centered set isn’t about being inside or outside of something. It’s about whether the other dots are moving towards Jesus or veering away from him. Wherever they might be on the page, the only real issue is their direction. And so the job of the spiritual leader is to help folks point their arrows, as it were, towards Jesus.
So, to oversimplify, perhaps the central encouragement from a bounded-set church perspective would be “believe in Jesus!” or “accept Jesus!” And the central encouragement from a centered-set church perspective might be “start following Jesus!” and course-correct as needed as you go. The thought is that Jesus, then, will personally provide feedback and direction along the journey of faith, even as spiritual leaders, of course, do their best to help out as well. So Tara’s co-worker starts praying to a God no one has ever talked with her about; she gets quick answers and encouragement, and she wants to learn more to keep this good thing going.
This seems to me to offer at the very least arresting thoughts about the conversations I so often find myself in on this subject. As I talk with my proudly bounded-set church-leader friends—the Latino pastor for instance—they’ll encourage me that the most important thing to tell gay people I meet is that they need to repent of their homosexuality, that it’s an abomination to God. I sometimes push back: does my church-leader friend feel that this is the most important message of the Bible? That, if we were to strip the Bible to its biggest theme, what we’d find is “homosexuals need to repent”? Wouldn’t we find something about, like, God? Or, better yet, Jesus?
No, they tell me, courageous Christians realize they need to deal with first things first. First things first?! I ask incredulously. Homosexuals needing to repent is the single most important message of the Bible? First things first, they respond, nodding sternly. On occasion I ask if they ever actually do talk with gay people. I have yet to meet the church leader with this message who’s told me yes.
One of our pastors not long ago was encouraging a group of Christians to do something non-controversial: think of six friends you have in your area who, best as you can discern, are not experiencing much from God. Then pray for them daily for a few months and see what happens. He opened the time up for Q&A. But, one questioner asked, what if my friend is gay? Our pastor was flummoxed. Was this questioner asking… whether gay people are worth praying for? Yes the questioner was. After a moment’s reflection, our pastor answered: …Of course.
As we
started up in
We have a simple take on why this is so. Jesus is astoundingly awesome and people who try out following him will love him and love the experience. This strikes us as a centered-set point of view. Again, there is endless feedback Jesus will offer anyone who moves his way—as the two women I’ve mentioned so powerfully experienced. There, of course, will be a lot of learning about which choices will veer our arrow away from Jesus and which will veer us towards him. But this is Jesus we’ll be taking this journey with, which pretty much guarantees it will be a good one.
So what am I proposing with all of this? On the face of it, not much. I suppose I’m starting by asking whether the two women whose stories I started with are right: is, in fact, the God of the universe not a God for gay people? Or were they misinformed? It strikes me that your answer to that, which I’m hoping doesn’t take you much time to arrive at, carries some immediate challenges with it. If this God is their God, most likely they (or some conservative Christian who is feeling you out when they realize you’ve invited a gay person to follow God) will ask you a question or two that is fraught with danger on all sides.
Most likely they’ll start with this one: Could a gay person ever lead in your church? I have a pitch to make about how you might answer which I’d expect to rankle you. But hang with me a minute.
Namely, if you answer their question either way you’re abandoning Wimber’s centered-set idea.
People are asking you that question, from either side, because they want to figure out what sort of bounded set you’re in. These are identity-politics questions and I’ve yet to experience an answer to them that has helped point anyone towards Jesus in a centered-set way. By contrast, I’ve experienced countless instances where an answer to that question has hardened someone against following Jesus—or has confirmed a longtime Christian in heart attitudes that haven’t served them.
But what of not answering the questions as expected? Particularly for conservative Christians, this can seem like evasion. “Hey, I asked you a direct question and I want a direct answer.” But perhaps you can take comfort that this was how Jesus responded to similar, bounded-set questions.
I have two recommendations, one easier than the other (though they’re both plenty hard). First, I might suggest saying something like, “Oh, our absolute commitment here is to following Jesus with everything we have. We do that through a few things. Learning more about and wholeheartedly following the teachings of the Bible. Learning to hear and obey God’s voice as best as we can. Learning to love people inside and outside of our congregation. And trying to do all of those things in the context of vibrant community. We’d be excited for anyone to lead who gave themselves wholeheartedly to those things and found that they had people eager to follow their leadership into more of the same.”
The expected follow-up: “Just to clarify. Even if they’re gay.”
And your reply: “Any leaders who are on board with what we’re doing, committed to learning more about and wholeheartedly following the teachings of the Bible, learning and growing in hearing and following God’s voice…you bet. We can’t find enough leaders like that.” I’m presuming you have no argument with that statement.
Except for this one: you may find yourself thinking in profound frustration, what the questioner is driving at is if you regard that as possible for a non-celibate gay person! My response on the occasions when that does get blurted out is usually along the lines of, “Oh, anyone who’s at that point in their journey with us will be at a great place to have that sort of conversation with us when the time comes where they’re figuring out if they should lead.”
So that imagined dialogue was the easier of my recommendations! Here’s the harder one: believe what you’re saying. Realize that this isn’t a tactic at all. That the heart of the Bible is to encourage people to follow Jesus with their whole hearts and then to have whatever conversations you need to have as you go, that nothing preempts this. If you catch me off-line and ask me what I really think about these questions, what I’ve just said is what I will tell you. (If this has actually happened and I’ve said anything different, I repent.) There is no chink in my armor. I’m all-in on this way of thinking. I think you will see endless good things happen in your life and church with GLBT (and secular) folks if you do this. That said, if, in the end, you understandably feel the need to draw boundaries up front, fair enough.
But, for me, it’s centered-set or bust. Jesus is the only God in town, for straights or gays. I’m rooting for all my friends to follow him. I think they’ll be pleased with what happens if they do.
