A follow-up to yesterday’s Bridging the Gap post:
Challies has a guest post by John Bell, a friend of mine who is planting a church in downtown Toronto, and who has an active evangelistic ministry in Toronto’s gay village.
I do all this because I love the LGBT community. They are a community comprised of individual eternal souls. Sadly, they are culture that has almost no contact with biblical Christianity in any form. How many drag queens can count a born again Christian amongst their friends? Very few, to our shame.
…I pray for the day when transvestites can walk through our church doors and be greeted with genuinely warm smiles and Christian love. But before that day is likely to happen, they will need a Christian friend whom they have grown to trust; a person they know would never invite them to a place where they are going to be hurt or embarrassed publicly; a place where everyone is on level ground before the cross of Christ because all are sinners; a place where no one person’s sin is made out to be more repugnant than another’s; a place where all sinners can sit under the uncompromised preaching of holy Scripture and hear of the world’s only Savior and salvation in his name alone.
Christianity Today published an article in 1997 on Ed Dobson that’s still worth reading. Dobson has a very conservative pedigree and was an executive with the Moral Majority, and has taken some heat in recent days – this article may explain why. A section from the Christianity Today article:
Today, church families buy Christmas presents for everyone they can identify in the city who is HIV-positive. Calvary has also offered funds and the use of its chapel for any AIDS-related funeral.
In the beginning, a few parishioners worried that their respectable church might be “overrun” with gays. Dobson decided to hit the issue head-on. “If our church gets overrun with homosexuals, that will be terrific,” he proclaimed one Sunday morning. “They can take their place in the pews right next to the liars, gossips, materialists, and the rest of us who entertain sin in our lives.” People quickly got a new picture of outreach in the 1990s.
“We don’t have a separate ministry per se to homosexuals,” Dobson says. “We just make it obvious that they, including people with HIV, are welcome here.”
Dobson said in a sermon, “When I die, if someone stands up and says, ‘Ed Dobson loved homosexuals,’ then I will have accomplished something with my life.”
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
The thing I struggle with is the aspect of homosexual culture that revels in their sin. I am not sure how that would play out. In a world where sin is called not sin, that is a challenge. Yes, I know the church is full of sinners, but not unrepentant ones that insist on flaunting their sin with a pride parade. We don’t have a “Child abuser’s pride parade” every year in Toronto, or anywhere else for that matter.
Now, if a homosexual understood that his lifestyle is, in God’s eyes, sin, and he was sincerely trying to turn away from it, I would have no problem welcoming him into church. But it’s that attitude of unrepentance, of the opposite of repentance – of celebration of sin, that would cause me to question. Yes, there are the unrepentant liars, the lazy, etc in church but if they were out there self-identifying in the body, that would be divisive and discouraging and the subject of church discipline.
I guess that’s the challenge that needs to be faced. Is Sunday morning for the churched or the unchurched? Is it for outreach or the edification of the saints? These questions will answer the question for you.
I struggle with Gay Pride Day: the glorification of sin. I refuse to go down town during Gay Pride day and separate myself from such a concentration of sin and sinners.
I have the privilege of church planting with John Bell in downtown Toronto and am extremely thankful to God for his love for the gospel and for the gay community. I’ve been very encouraged to read all of the supportive comments at Tim’s blog. But I have to say, however, that these two comments here are sad.
Shane: there is no doubt that the Lord’s day service is primarily for the worship of God by his people. This means that the message preached on a Sunday is one that is faithful to the biblical text and storyline and one that is faithful to the gospel. This is so that God may be glorified and his people edified. But this does not mean that we don’t want non-Christians in our midst. Whether homosexuals and homophobes, poor or rich, men and women, old and young, etc.
You are right, there may not be any “child abusers parades” in our society, but I’ll tell you, in this materialistic culture there sure are a lot of “parades” of wealth, greed, selfishness, gossip, lust, etc. And sadly, these parades are in our churches as well as in our streets.
Pride isn’t relegated to one community, it is in all of our hearts. It’s amazing that you, as a Christian who should understand that sin levels the playing field and that the gospel comes to all regardless, would make such distinctions between gay people and any other community that needs the gospel.
Jill: I admit, I’ve never actually gone to the Pride parade itself. But living downtown in Toronto, you can’t escape it. Everywhere you go you are confronted with rainbow flags, drag queens, men kissing men, etc. But I’ll tell ya, what the gay community doesn’t need is Christians vacating the premises. Sure it may be uncomfortable, but there is a person I know somewhere in history who didn’t run from sinners but embraced them. Do you know who I might be thinking of??
If Christians truly love the gospel, truly love Christ and truly love sinners, then how on earth can a Pride parade stop us from demonstrating that love winsomely, unsparingly and carefully? If the person who shared Christ with me ran from me because he knew my sinful heart, where would I be now?
I’m sorry my conscience is violated by viewing the gay pride parade. I saw snippets on the T.V. news once and that was bad enough. Just as there are some things too shameful to speak of there are also some thigns too shameful to see. I don’t need to see it to know it is proudly sinful. I tremble that God has given them over to reprobate minds.
I find myself agreeing with Ian -even though I too find myself repulsed by their flagrant flaunting of their lifestyle, I know without a doubt that if Jesus were walking the streets of Toronto, He wouldn’t be avoiding them, either.
I still have some stretching to do , though….perhaps reading more and more Christ-like attitudes such as Dobson’s…..