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 Boston,
we guilelessly tried to follow Wimber’s centered-set approach and we’ve noticed
some surprising things as a result. I’ve
talked with the head of a regional evangelical association recently who told me
that the average strong, evangelical church in our region sees about 3%
non-transfer growth, growth that comes from people exploring or re-exploring
faith. We see about twelve times that number. We see lots and lots of folks freshly
experience faith.
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.
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