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The church’s engagement with the culture involves a host of issues, controversies, and decisions, but no issue defines our current cultural crisis as clearly as the LGBTQ revolution. Many churches, denominations, and schools have capitulated to the demands of the LGBTQ-rights movement and now accept the full range of claimed sexual orientations as fully valid lifestyles.
Other denominations are tottering on the brink, and without a massive conservative resistance, they are almost certain to abandon biblical truth and bless what the Bible condemns. Within a few short years, a major dividing line has become evident, with those churches that endorse homosexuality and the sexual-rights revolution on one side and those that are stubbornly resisting the cultural tide on the other. Even within some conservative denominations, the momentum is clearly on the revolutionary side. The LGBTQ-rights movement understands that the evangelical church is one of the last resistance movements committed to a biblical morality. As a matter of fact, Christians who are committed to biblical orthodoxy are the only community that still believes in an objective morality based in revealed truth. Because of this, the LGBTQ movement has adopted a strategy of isolating Christian opposition and forcing change through political action and cultural pressure. Its other major tool is cultural embarrassment.
Can we count on evangelicals to remain steadfastly biblical on this issue? Scientific surveys and informal observation reveal that we have experienced a significant loss of conviction among youth and young adults. No moral revolution can succeed without shaping and changing the minds of young people and children. Across the board, the revolutionaries reign on prestigious academic campuses, in the realm of digital technology, and in the world of the cultural creatives. It is decidedly uncool to believe that any objective morality applies to claims related to gender and sexuality.
Inevitably, the schools have become crucial battlegrounds for the culture war. The Christian worldview has been undermined by pervasive curricula that teach moral relativism, reduce moral commandments to personal values, and promote LGBTQ identity as a legitimate and attractive lifestyle option. Among younger Americans, it is increasingly unthinkable that anyone would deny the “fact” of fluid gender identities or resist a basic stance of nonjudgmentalism when it comes to sexual relationships.
Our churches must teach the basics of biblical morality to Christians who will otherwise never know that the Bible prescribes a model for sexual relationships. Young people must be told the truth about sexuality and gender—and taught to esteem marriage as God’s intention for human sexual relations.
Furthermore, we face an urgent need to remind our own young people what it means that God created us male and female—as determinative categories. We should be grateful that a good bit of common sense and at least the residue of Christian conviction remain sufficiently intact. The average American still does not buy into the radical claims of the transgender ideologues, and a vast majority of Americans still think it is wrong for a boy or man to compete in female athletic competitions. As Christians, we need to push hard against the ideologies of the age and to make clear that God created each one of us for His glory, that God alone has the right to assign our sex or gender, and that biological sex is thus a divine gift revealed in our bodies at birth.
The times demand Christian courage. For Christians, that’s not really new. But these days, Christian courage demands that preachers and Christian leaders set an agenda for biblical confrontation and not shrink from dealing with the full range of issues related to the confusions and corruptions of the sexual revolutionaries. We must talk about what the Bible teaches about gender—what it means to be a man or a woman. We must talk about God’s gift of sex and the covenant of marriage. And we must talk honestly about sexual sin and why it is so deadly. We must speak honestly about the reality of sexual confusion, sexual temptation, and sexual sin. But we must also press on to affirm the glory of God in making us male and female, in marriage as the God-ordained institution of covenant love between a man and a woman, and in the conjugal relationship of marriage as rightly directed toward the gift of children.
Courage is far too rare in many Christian circles. This explains the surrender of so many denominations, colleges, seminaries, and churches to the homosexual agenda. But no surrender on this issue would have been possible if the authority of Scripture had not already been undermined. And yet, even as courage is required, the times call for another Christian virtue as well: compassion. The tragic fact is that every congregation is almost certain to include individuals who are struggling with LGBTQ impulses or even involved in unbiblical relationships or the acting out of unbiblical desires. Outside the walls of the church, sinners are waiting to see whether the Christian church has anything more to say after we declare that the entire range of LGBTQ realities is sin.
Liberal churches have redefined compassion to mean that the church changes its message to meet modern demands. They argue that to tell anyone, for any reason, that he is a sinner is uncompassionate and intolerant. This is like arguing that a physician is intolerant because he tells a patient that she has cancer. But in the dominant culture of our times, this argument holds a powerful attraction. Biblical Christians know that compassion requires telling the truth and the refusal to call sin something that is sinless. To hide or deny the sinfulness of sin is to lie, and there is no compassion in such a deadly deception.
True compassion demands speaking the truth in love—and there is the problem. Far too often, our courage is more evident than our compassion. In far too many cases, the options seem reduced to these: liberal churches preaching love without truth, and conservative churches preaching truth without love.
A century ago, conservatives and liberals were engaged in a great theological struggle known as the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy. Even then, the theological liberals were arguing that the church can survive in the modern age only if we throw overboard all doctrines, moral principles, and church teachings that are out of step with the times. Even a century ago, the beginnings of what would become known as the sexual revolution were evident. In our own times, we can see the total collapse of liberal Protestantism into a postmodern paganism. Are conservative Christians just going liberal more slowly? Time will tell.
Evangelical Christians must ask ourselves some very hard questions, but the hardest may be this: Why is it that we have been so ineffective in reaching individuals who are trapped in this particular pattern of sin? The gospel is for sinners—and for homosexual sinners just as much as for heterosexual sinners. As Paul explained to the Corinthian church, “Such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). I believe that we are failing the true test of compassion. If the first requirement of compassion is that we tell the truth, the second requirement must surely be that we reach out to all people with the gospel of Jesus Christ. This means that we must develop caring ministries to make our gospel concern concrete and learn how to help those who are struggling with LGBTQ desires escape the powerful bonds of that sin—even as we help others to escape their own sin by God’s grace.
If we are really a gospel people, if we really want to reach sinners, then we must reach out to them with a sincerity that makes that love tangible. We have not even approached that requirement until we are ready to say to all sinners: “We want you to know the fullness of God’s plan for you, to know the forgiveness of sins and the mercy of God, to receive the salvation that comes by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to know the healing that God works in sinners saved by grace, and to join us as fellow disciples of Jesus Christ, living out our obedience and growing in grace together.” Such were some of you, the Apostle Paul said. Note carefully that Paul was speaking of the past. The church is not a place where sinners are welcomed to remain in their sin. To the contrary, it is the body of Christ, made up of sinners transformed by grace. Not one of us, in and of ourselves, deserves to be accepted within this body. The good news of the gospel is all of grace, and each one of us has come out of our own pattern of sin.
We sin if we call sexual sin something other than sin. We also sin if we act as if this sin cannot be forgiven. We cannot settle for truth without love nor love without truth. The gospel settles the issue once and for all. This great moral crisis is a gospel crisis. The authentic body of Christ will reveal itself by courageous compassion and compassionate courage. We will see this realized only when men and women freed by God’s grace from bondage to sin feel free to stand up in our churches and declare their testimony—and when we are ready to welcome them as fellow disciples. Millions of hurting people are waiting to see whether we mean what we preach. Do we?