Bridging the Gap Part Two

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.”