On Human Sexuality

In 2019 I pastored a church that spent several months discerning her position on two questions: 1. would clergy employed by the church be permitted to perform weddings for same-sex couples? and 2. could the church building be used for same-sex weddings? As for my part, my responsibility was to shepherd the process without explicitly offering my opinion on the matter. The church’s polity called for a leadership team, which functioned as a kind of representative democracy, to vote after a period of congregational discernment and feedback. The leadership team and pastors spent four months speaking to and surveying congregants about their opinions.  I only mention that detail because we collectively kept an excel sheet documenting everyone’s opinions (anonymously) so that we could get a sense of where the congregation was at.  The data showed that 72% of the congregation (that we spoke with) favored answering yes to both of those questions.  The votes taken by the leadership team of 9 members came out 6-3 in affirmation of both questions.  In this way then, perhaps accidentally, the process worked.  That 72% congregational opinion was reflected as closely as it could have been in 66% affirming vote from the leadership team.  

Those familiar with Baptist distinctives and polity might sniff something odd here.  What I did not say is that this issue was resolved with a congregational vote.  A leadership team is a unique, but nonetheless legitimate derivative, of the principle of the autonomy of the local church.  The data we collected makes me confident that a congregational vote would have come out similarly, except for one small detail.  The Baptist church I was pastoring did not have membership; consequently, there was no way to decide who would get to vote on the issue.  

As for my responsibility to shepherd the process, I did what I could.  We held congregational wide education moments in which I interviewed experts on both the hermeneutics and exegesis of pertinent biblical texts.  We brought in someone to address conversations had with care.  I preached about ecclesiology impacted by polity.  And I listened.  What became evident to me and other clergy on staff was that when the process was said and done, we’d have to do our own work and decide if the church had become a place we could continue to pastor.  As for me, the affirmative votes aligned with my own convictions, which I announced to the congregation after the process was over.  

What I did not get the opportunity to do was walk the congregation through my own journey and conversation on the questions at hand.  I’d like to do that here.  

The internet is a vast and messy place which plays host to both invaluable data & ideas & is simultaneously a cesspool of misinformation.  But let me reemphasize vast.  I acknowledge that to humbly raise the question “Is one more person’s opinion on the matter of human sexuality worth publishing?”  A few years ago I might have said no, but two relatively recent happenings have changed my mind, both making the same point.  

In 2021 Baylor history professor Dr. Beth Allison Barr published her successful and formidable book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.  As a resident of Waco, TX I had heard rumblings of Dr. Barr’s book through sheer proximity.  What caught my attention was hearing her voice on Morning Edition a few days before the book’s publication.  Morning Edition, a national radio program hosted by NPR, would be indicative of the kind of reach and success Dr. Barr’s book would have.  I was surprised.  In my mind we weren’t a decade past the publication of Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Sarah Bessey’s Jesus Feminist.  And while every book is unique and addresses an ongoing conversation, I wasn’t convinced Dr. Barr’s material was different enough to warrant this kind of audience.  Puzzled, I began asking others about their experience with the book.  One conversation caught my attention.  A female friend noted that the book seemed to be particularly popular among female friends of hers who belonged to one the city’s larger evangelical mega churches.  Women for whom the message of the subjugation of women through a latent patriarchy still alive in the church was not just good news, but new news.  Whatever the reason for the success of Dr. Barr’s book may be, I was reminded that there are always new people asking old questions and that the world is fortunate to have people like Dr. Barr who continue to speak necessary truths for fresh ears.  Because before there was Sarah Bessey & Rachel Held Evans there was Gloria Steinem & Betty Friedan.  And before them were the first evangelists at Jesus tomb who also happened to be women.

The second recent event in my life that opened me to the possibility of writing about this was an experience I had around a bonfire in Minnesota after my nephews wedding in the fall of 2024.  Surrounded by my adult niece and nephews, our conversation turned from the ethical use of legalized marijuana to same-sex marriage.  My nephews and niece are very much like an early 20ish version of myself in that they attend what I would categorize evangelical churches, but different in that the cultural shifts over the last decade like the Obergefell ruling have rendered them much more openhearted about the conversation than I was.  Still, they wanted to know how I arrived at my position of affirmation.  

One last word here about the methodology that follows.  I am by no means an Evangelical.  Perhaps, if we wanted to let someone like David Bebbington define the word for us, I might have affinities for certain instincts, but even those affinities are fading as my theology evolves.  In what follows though I make a journey as one who was an Evangelical.  At the center of that identity and this conversation is the role of the Bible.  Years ago, I read a John Piper tweet (when it was still a tweet) that went something like this (which is admittedly paraphrased), “the debate about is about the authority of scripture.”  I think that is both understated and overstated.  Overstated in that I believe in fifty years the national, if not global perspective on same-sex relationships will mimic the perspective on race.  Current restrictive attitudes will be seen as anachronistic and yet we will be navigating a complicated reality in which discrimination is alive and well.  Said differently, the debate upon that which the integrity of scripture rests will have shifted something else.  Understated in that insofar as one’s perspective on scripture is shifted to a largely hermeneutical approach by any issue, in which the practice exegesis becomes a historical task instead of ecclesiological one, one is forced to rethink the role of scripture as a theological tool altogether.  At least that was my experience.  More on that complicated concession in what is to come.  

So here I identify as one who was an Evangelical because while I no longer identify that way, it strikes me that very few affirming people take the time to or value scripture in the same way that Evangelicals do.  Said differently there are very few affirming folks who use the scripture to speak to people who value scripture about how they used the scripture to change their mind.  But maybe that’s because most people who are affirming come to their position despite scripture and not through a conscious effort of moving with scripture.  Or perhaps now I’m the one who is overstated.  Alas, hopefully I’ve given you enough of a frame to decide whether or not you would like to read about the theological tools I used to make my own choice.

In what follows below are a series of blog posts that I wrote almost a decade ago as I worked through this conversation myself. While I have changed some of the pronouns to reflect my shift in self-identification, especially with the label Evangelical, the rest remains largely intact. One editorial word. It’s unclear to me if the word homosexual is now considered pejorative. In some instances, where speaking relationally or from my own vantage point I have changed the occurrences to “same-sex.” In other places when quoting someone or responding to an idea with the authors original language I have left the word as is.