Gay pastors in the church
He stood just inside my office. He’d pulled the door closed behind him.
“I need to ask you a question,” he told me.
It was 2015. I was a 44-year-old pastor. My desk was cluttered with set lists for the upcoming church series. That weekend, I was to sing “Beautiful Things” by Michael Gungor — a song I worshipped. It promised I could be new. There was nothing I wanted more.
“Are you gay, Matt?”
There it was. It surprised me, but I was strangely calm. It was a question I hadn’t been asked since college. A question I’d been haunted by since junior elevated. The words coursed through my body looking for an answer — an answer I owed only myself.
I was sure his question also lingered in the minds of other colleagues and the people I’d built around myself, even if I had been married to a woman for over 20 years.
Sure, he’s gay. But he’s doing God a solid by living appreciate a straight man — avoiding the “wide path” that leads to everlasting darkness.
Most knew it wasn’t their business to demand, but he wanted to know. He had his reasons.
A list of books I’d purchased from Amazon were visible on my profile. One of the church parishioners had seen it and this communication had got
How a gay St. Louis pastor triggered a war within the Presbyterian Church in America
Greg Johnson describes himself as a “gay atheist teenager” who fell for Jesus — and found himself at the center of evangelical Christianity’s internal battles over sexuality.
For nearly 20 years, Johnson has pastored Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, right across from Forest Park. He says he’s been queer and celibate the entire time. When he came out to his church, he said he received a standing ovation and shouts of “We value you, Greg” from congregants.
But since Johnson went common with his orientation in Christianity Today, pastors in his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, possess tried to banish clergy who identify as lgbtq+, even if they commit to celibacy.
Johnson has fought that. He says orientation is largely fixed — but believes there is still a place for people like him in conservative churches.
“I spent a lot of years convincing myself that I was a straight man with a disease called homosexuality that could be cured,” Johnson said on Wednesday’s St. Louis on the Air. “And, perhaps up to a million of us did that.”
The million Johnson is referring
Is it biblically allowable for a pastor to be gay?
Answer
Some people consider themselves gaybecause they are attracted to members of their own gender, even if they do not execute on those attractions. Their situation is like that of a married person who is attracted to someone besides his or her spouse, but who refuses to act on those adulterous desires. So it may be biblically allowable for a pastor to consider himself gay—that is, he struggles with homosexual attraction—if he is committed to sexual purity, never acts on those desires, and never encourages anyone else to accomplish so (see Romans 1:32). For the purposes of this article, we will define gayas “practicing a homosexual lifestyle.”
This question of whether the Bible warrants a gay pastor was unheard of until the last couple of decades. There was never any question within the churchabout whether a practicing queer could or should pastor a church. The sinfulness of homosexuality has never been up for debate until our sexually exploitive culture decided it should be. God’s Word is as clear on the sin of homosexual deed as it has always been (Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; Romans 1:26–27; 1 Timothy 1:10
An Openly Gay Pastor Leading with Faith and Love
Bob Luiz Botelho is a gay Pentecostal evangelical pastor and activist who works directly with the LGBTIQ community in Brazil. He founded the organization Evangelicals for Diversity, which has created a network for LGBTIQ evangelicals to connect and give experiences.
“So many LGBT people come to me or to my organization to talk,” Botelho said. “They feel guilty, they sense pain, they feel condemned by the Bible, by the church, by Jesus, persons of Jesus. We do our work of pastoral care, studying the Bible with a lgbtq+ perspective and giving tools and instruments to comprehend how to read the Bible without the fundamentalist glass.”
Botelho said that the queer perspective of faith is not just for Christianity, but it was just the Christian perspective he could talk about. The queer perspective of faith is to perceive that we do not have a complete view of God, according to Botelho.
“So to be an image of God is to understand that everybody represents a piece, or a part, or a pixel of the sacred picture, which is God. And I like to think and to envision in a colorful God,” Botelho said.
Botelho talked about the importance of all
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