Adapted from this women's breakout as a book chapter, in the speaker's voice, followed by questions from the floor (summarized). It keeps the argument, stories and wording where possible, but it is an edited retelling, not a transcript. Tap a time in the margin to hear that moment.
Good afternoon, and welcome. I'm so glad you're here. I'm Rosaria Butterfield, a pastor's wife from Durham, North Carolina. I promise to leave time for questions at the end, and there are public questions and private ones, so I'll also stay to talk and pray with as many of you as I can afterward. I really am Mary Poppins, even though I have a reputation for being some kind of challenging figure in evangelicalism. So let's start with story time with Rosaria. Only this is a true story.
The meeting in the old downtown government building opened in reverent silence and ended in wailing and heaving sobs. It wasn't the funeral of a dignitary. It was a school board meeting in Durham, where residents gave their views on the newly passed parental rights law, which forbids the school board's practice of concealing a child's transgender identity from parents. (You'll be glad to know the word pervert came up only once, hurled at me by a school board member I had worked closely with distributing food during COVID. You can laugh. I laugh at myself all the time. I don't take myself seriously, and you shouldn't either. I take the gospel seriously.)
I came with my then twenty-one-year-old son, a strong Christian and a student at a state college. The room was bursting with rainbow pride: grown adults in rainbow shirts shaking rainbow pom-poms. Each speaker had three minutes. One man commended the public schools for, and I quote, “the emotionally healthy queer children they are churning out.” If you want a definition of grooming, there it is. Another denounced the law's supporters for keeping transgender children from flourishing in their chosen identity. Another extolled the virtues of estrogen for his son (he meant his daughter; he kept stumbling over pronouns and names), mumbled something about castration, stopped abruptly, stared at his hands and fled the room mid-sentence. Speech after speech decried hateful conservative Christians and celebrated something that requires a giant leap of faith: that there is such a thing as a “trans child.” The trans child is the manipulated invention of an evil, Gnostic age.
I was called up next. I shared my history: a retired tenured professor of English and queer theory at Syracuse University who lived as an out lesbian activist for a decade and understood the movement from the inside. (I always feel a bit sorry for them at this point; the liberals are so happy to see a grown-up on the right side of history that they can barely contain themselves.) But when I said I am no longer a lesbian, and that I'm grateful that in those years of confusion I did not mutilate my body or make irreparable medical decisions that would have left me sterile and barren, the board gasped. I explained that the APA's own Diagnostic and Statistical Manual says normal puberty, if not interrupted by social, hormonal or medical transition, resolves gender confusion in 80 to 90 percent of cases, without any therapy at all. (Those are their numbers; mine are higher.) When I called the movement's rejection of stable biological categories of male and female junk science, someone screamed an obscenity from the back. When the timer rang and I sat down, the activists looked seasick. LGBTQ demands affirmation, through membership, allyship, celebration, accommodation or normalization, and betrayal by one of its own will not be tolerated. I'm very happy to stand before you as a Christian, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a very inconvenient convert out of the gay rights mafia in the United States. Let's keep it that way.
A grieving mother came next. She trembled at the microphone as she told how the public schools had transitioned her special-needs daughter without her knowledge. (Parental rights laws aren't even about consent, only information.) The girl was twelve when the grooming began, including hours of pro-trans TikTok during school on a smartphone her mother didn't provide. With humility the mother walked us step by step along the transgender conveyor belt that has taken over our government schools and had abducted her daughter.
The last speaker gave a performance that has become iconic at school board meetings nationwide, replayed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube. A licensed teacher in my county stood at the podium and screamed. Have you ever been in a room where someone screams for three minutes? Near the end her screams softened into words, and she offered one complete sentence: an apology to the board and the activists that the hateful, transphobic Christian speakers (about three out of twenty) were all white, articulate and educated. Let that sink in. I have the distinct honor of being rebuked by the Durham Board of Education for being educated. It felt like doing rounds on a psych ward during a full moon.
As we left, I introduced myself to the mother whose daughter had been transitioned and invited her whole family to dinner. They came. They heard the gospel. Months later the mother committed her life to Jesus. And it gets better: within ten minutes, the girl who thought she was a boy was hanging out with my teenage daughter, and guess what? They were acting like teenage girls. That night I also caught up with the screaming teacher, wrote my phone number on a scrap of paper and said, “I want to hear what's on your heart. If you will only use your words, I promise to listen.” Back in the car, my son said, “Mom, two things. First, the last time you told me to use my words, I was four. And second, don't be discouraged. This is the world Jesus came to save.”
How did evangelicalism get here?
Sin infantilizes people, and a nation that loves its sin starts to sound like a mob of whining toddlers. This is our nation's war on the creation ordinance: an army of whining infants defending the idol of LGBTQ against facts, reality, reason and common sense. But what about American evangelicalism? Surely we know better. Where were the big names while I faced down a woke mob at my school board?
I'm an English professor, so I cite my sources, which sometimes makes evangelicals cry. At that very moment Christianity Today was extolling government education, not as a necessary or possible option if you have nothing else, but as missional, kind, open-minded and good for your Christian child, in an article titled “Public Schools Can Be a Training Ground for Faith.” It was a lesson in bad logic, treating Christ-centered and secular education as moral equivalents, which they are not. And (low-hanging fruit, I know) Preston Sprinkle was running a workshop called “Humanizing the Transgender Experience.” Tell that to the parents asked by a therapist, “Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?” I don't want anyone to accuse me of misrepresenting them. I believe there is faith in what they say, the kind James 2:19 describes, the faith of demons who believe and tremble. My husband, who is preaching through James, put it this way in a recent bulletin: demons have a stronger and more authentic faith than liberal Christians. If you think I'm bold, you should hear the preaching I've sat under for twenty-five years.
How did we get here? Satan has always attacked God's created order, and those who follow him concur. But how did American evangelicalism take up Satan's cause? Why did LGBTQ divide rather than unite evangelicals? The rise of the gay Christian movement alongside the gay rights movement created chaos and confusion over the most basic thing of all, God's created order. (I lived as a lesbian for over a decade; I've been wrong on this too.) We got here in two simple ways. First, unregenerate wolves exploited the easy-believism and naivety of American evangelicals and adopted the idea of a gay “people group,” which some gay Christians call the modern Gentiles coming into the kingdom. Second, we refused to declare the whole counsel of God. We were spineless cowards at the moment we needed to be bold. The women and I prayed for all of you before I took this stage, and my prayer is that you would leave here with no fear of man.
The creation ordinance
The creation ordinance is central, not peripheral, to the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is no Great Commission unless it is grounded in the created order. Genesis 1:27–28: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.’” It rests on four things:
- It is an ordinance, an authoritative order, a call to all men and women to live out their creational identity. It is foundational to what the Bible calls truth, which is both objective (standing outside your perspective) and ontological (rooted in the created order).
- It is relational and noble: man made in God's image, man and woman made for one another. “Man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man… Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God” (1 Corinthians 11:7, 11–12). That is so beautiful.
- It establishes a gender binary: one system with two parts that make one whole. Male and female, created by God's design for life on earth, will remain male and female in the eternal state. Have you thought about that? When I witness to people in the transgender community I tell them there's hope, because God is not mocked: if you commit your life to Jesus, you will be the man, or the woman, you were meant to be in the new Jerusalem. I've seen more transgender people come to Christ through that simple, beautiful eschatological truth than any other. We are not genderless comrades in Christ, not on earth and not in eternity. Our sin nature from Adam distorts and mars God's order, but it does not change what it means to be human, male or female.
- It reveals roles and responsibilities: marriage between one man and one woman with the life-giving blessing of children, and work, including building and stewarding culture. God made men and women to do different, complementary things. Husbands lead, protect, teach and provide; wives submit, nurture, help their husbands and keep the home. (Read that line on a Christian college campus, and sometimes people gasp.)
We cannot advance the Great Commission without the foundation of the creation ordinance. But the rise of gay Christianity and the gay rights movement met an evangelicalism that put its hope in two pragmatic strategies, “third way-ism” and the “triage” method. Dodging the truth isn't peace. We need what the Puritans called holy habits. Meanwhile the civil law was changing. In 2015 Obergefell legalized gay marriage in all fifty states, and, what many people miss, its “dignitary harm” reasoning redefined harm from a material injury to a psychological one. Harm now means refusing to call someone by an LGBTQ identity or to use pretend pronouns. Many evangelicals realized too late that the exchanges of Romans 1 had been written into civil law.
There are three exchanges in Romans 1. First, the Creator for the creature (1:21–23): instead of believing God is God, I believe I am God, and my feelings are God. Second, the truth for a lie, and with it the worship of God for the worship of idols. (Ladies, it's a sin to tell a lie, and it's also a sin to believe one. The sin in the garden wasn't Eve telling Satan a lie; it was Eve believing his.) Third, normal sexuality, the kind we find in the garden, for what Scripture calls dishonorable passions, homosexuality. I know that's not how people who call themselves gay understand it (I once did), but I'm perfectly confident they would be better off if they did. Then in 2020 the Supreme Court read sexual orientation and gender identity into the 1964 Civil Rights Act, shifting LGBTQ from how someone feels to who someone is, a matter of personhood. At that point evangelicals didn't want a war. We should have fought; instead we lost our footing. That's why in the United States today LGBTQ is treated as a people group. And how can the gospel be good news if it tells a people group it can't be a people group?
The life cycle of sin
Open to James 1:13–16. How many of you homeschool? (I did until 2025.) How many have a poster of the life cycle of the butterfly on your dining room wall? James 1 is the life cycle of sin: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.” Protestant theologians before the late nineteenth century read this as sin from start to finish, not some morally neutral temptation.
First, sin as an embryo: the sin that lives in the inner man, indwelling sin flowing from original sin, the corruption we receive from Adam and possess before we do anything. And sin grows unless it is killed through gospel repentance and mortification. Sin never stays where you put it; it has a life of its own. You are responsible for killing it, and so am I. I am not to become the SPCA for my pet sins. It is a sin, not a syndrome, and it must be mortified, not domesticated, coddled or kept on life support. When I came to Christ at Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church, no one told me to pray the gay away. They told me to own it and kill it. It was my responsibility. (I remind my Pentecostal friends that it is not the Holy Spirit's job to repent of my sin. It's mine.) Second, the caterpillar stage: indwelling sin never repented of grows into something visible, in words or deeds. Third, sin full-grown and unrepented brings forth death. You die in your sin. The gospel remedy is repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you don't repent, sin grows to the next stage.
Sadly, false teachers have promoted the idea that you needn't repent of sin unless it is acted out or willfully chosen, often out of a desire to reach young people. What it has actually produced is a generation of young people losing their battle with sexual sin of every kind. Is it easier to fight something small or something big? Before the whole world knows, or when people are cheering you on? When it's just you and the Lord Jesus, or you and an illicit lover who doesn't want you to repent? Wait too long and you set yourself up to fail.
Two modern evangelical errors
I was at a conference when a paragraph was crafted as the way forward for evangelicals. I'm ashamed I didn't object then, because it sounds good: same-sex attraction, like any other temptation, reflects our fallenness, but the presence of temptation is not itself a sin to be repented of; we seek forgiveness for sin, but deliverance from temptation. There's truth in it, which is why it twists us around. But it relies on half-truths and what the Puritan Thomas Watson called counterfeit repentance. Desiring what God hates is not a morally neutral temptation; it is culpable sin, and specifically the sin forbidden by the tenth commandment: you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, and so on. God's law draws the line at the desire for what he forbids, not only at the taking, though the taking is worse. It draws the line in the heart.
Another popular author puts it this way: because we live in a fallen world, all of us face temptation, things that entice us away from God; but we don't need to feel guilty for temptations we didn't choose; we should ask Jesus to deliver us from them and help us live godly lives, and not beat ourselves up over temptations that arise unbidden. Really? Did any of you get up this morning and choose to yell at your children? Then don't worry; you didn't choose it, so it's not sin. The tenth commandment says something very different.
Let's unpack it.
- Celibate gay theology says the internal desire for sin is brokenness or fallenness, not sin, unless acted on. The tenth commandment says it is sin. What makes a desire sinful is not its intensity or authenticity but its object. If the object isn't yours to desire, desiring it is sin.
- It says we experience these desires because we live in a fallen world. That's a half-truth. In Genesis 4:6–7 the Lord says to Cain, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.” In Genesis 3 we meet sin outside Eve, in the form of a serpent in the garden. In Genesis 4 there is a door, but they live in a garden; it's a metaphor for the door of the heart. Sin has moved inside. Don't blame the fallen world for that. The Bible distinguishes external temptation, which is morally neutral and becomes sin only if you blow it (Joseph and Potiphar's wife), from internal temptation. If before your alarm goes off you're already praying, “Lord, I don't want to yell at my children today, or waste my time on Instagram,” that starts inside you. Homosexual desire will always be sin. It cannot be stewarded for good. It must be mortified and forsaken. Conversion gives you the power to fight the flesh with the Spirit's help and to grow, through repentance and the means of grace, in freedom from sin's bondage. But the fight is not with the fallen world; it's with the sin inside us.
- It says we shouldn't feel guilt or shame for feelings we didn't choose. But our feelings don't define God's law; God's word does. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” If we love God, we will feel ashamed of our sin: not a shame that paralyzes, but the shame that says, I haven't been lobotomized; I know what I did; it was awful; now I repent and move forward in Christ. “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.”
- It says we aren't sinning by experiencing internal desires, so we shouldn't repent, only ask for deliverance. John Owen helps here. External sin beckons from outside; internal sin is like a robber already hiding in your bedroom closet. Where will you flee? It's inside you. You must learn to mortify your sin, to hate your sin without hating yourself, and, as Owen says, to vivify, to bring to life your union with Christ through all the means of grace. Thomas Watson's The Doctrine of Repentance sets out six ingredients of repentance, and it has been a lifeline for me. Sin lies to you, so call it what it is. Use God's word to define your feelings, not your feelings to define God's word. That is what change means: the desire for sinful objects is replaced, as Thomas Chalmers put it, by the expulsive power of a new affection.
- It says Jesus was tempted in every way, so my internal sexual sin isn't sin. But Hebrews 4:15 says we have a high priest who sympathizes with our weakness, “one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” Jesus sympathizes with our frailty, but because he was not born in Adam, he had no original or indwelling sin, and so no internal temptation.
And it says, “Because I experience same-sex attraction, I am called to celibacy.” (We don't even use clear words. In the UK last year it seemed every third pastor introduced himself to me as a same-sex-attracted pastor. By the twentieth, sleep-deprived, I asked one privately what exactly that meant. We need clear words.) The tenth commandment says that if you desire what God condemns, you are called not to celibacy but to repentance. The slogan sounds noble, but there are always two ditches on either side of the gospel road, and it manages to fall into both at once. One is antinomianism: celibate gay Christianity rejects the Bible's clear teaching that homosexuality is a work of the flesh forbidden in God's moral law and overcome, praise God, by the Savior. The other is legalism: it replaces repentance with a vow of celibacy treated as a good work, which the Westminster Larger Catechism (Q. 139) actually lists among sins against the seventh commandment, “entangling vows of single life.”
Why does this matter? Because sin never stays where you put it. It grows until it eats you alive and everything you once loved. Evangelicalism bought the lie that feelings are authentic and true and that, since God loves you, he loves all your feelings, even those that take aim at his holy law. Sisters, there is nothing Christian about gay Christianity. It rejects the Bible's witness that homosexuality is a work of the flesh like any other. How many of you struggle with a work of the flesh? Everyone should raise her hand. Imagine believing it was fixed forever, that you would never see any victory over that bondage, that the resurrection of Jesus Christ means nothing for it. That is heresy.
Gay Christianity has two sides, like an old vinyl record (I'm sixty-four; I remember these): side A, the greatest hits, and side B, the lesser-known dirges. Side A is gay-affirming; its best-known spokesman is Matthew Vines, author of God and the Gay Christian and founder of the Reformation Project, who twists the Bible like a gargoyle. He writes that affirming same-sex relationships is the only way to defend biblical truths with clarity, coherence and persuasiveness. You come away from his books sensing he is not only unregenerate but has a reading comprehension problem besides.
Side B: Wesley Hill, an Episcopal priest and New Testament professor, author of Washed and Waiting, argues that homosexuals coming into the church are the modern equivalent of Gentiles being grafted into the covenant, a case he makes in his books and in a 2016 article on the transformation of the Gentiles. It's heresy. Preston Sprinkle edited a side-B study Bible published by Zondervan, and I think Zondervan should be flogged. (I even checked whether they had a booth here so I could tell them in person. They don't. The organizers of this conference love you so much that there's no garbage in the bookstore; I wandered around like a little waif with nothing but good books to buy.)
Then there is Greg Johnson, formerly PCA until he tired of the PCA and left, now troubling the EPC. His 2021 book Still Time to Care was such a dumpster fire that Zondervan sent buyers an addendum, “On Mission with the LGBTQ Community.” (Note the preposition, homeschool moms: not to but with.) In it he says mission must be unhitched from biblical ethics: “Mission and ethics are very different endeavors. Reaching people in the LGBTQ community is a missiological question and comes with a different set of biases than Christian ethics.” His complaint with Christian ethics? It “pushes us to get as far away from sin as possible.” Someone should tell him so does Jesus; the gospel call begins, “Repent and believe” (Mark 1:15). His mission is to help LGBTQ “people” feel seen and heard, and to that end he says the only path to evangelizing them is to humble ourselves beneath them. So his elders served highballs to drag queens in the church narthex at art shows. (I'm a Presbyterian teetotaler; no drinking or smoking at the Butterfield house. Baptists are welcome.)
It is a mission, a mission to hell, but a mission, and it leaves no room for born-again believers to live as new creatures in Christ, because it contains no gospel. It can't. Unhitch the Great Commission from the creation ordinance and you lose the gospel. The gospel makes all things new; it redeems soul and body beaten down by sin; and its first word is “repent.” The LGBTQ mission denies the created order and imagines you can advance the Great Commission while abandoning the creation ordinance. It envisions genderless comrades in Christ rather than redeemed men and women. It depends on an anti-biblical anthropology. Self-assigned LGBTQ identities are not real human categories or physiological realities; they are patterns of sin supported by carefully crafted ideology backed by political power. There is no such thing as a gay man or a lesbian woman. A man who thinks he is gay is a man with a sin pattern from which Jesus came to set him free, and in his pride he is rejecting that hope. A gay man may know what a man is, but he does not know what a man is for. Beware of thinking you are more merciful than God.
The evangelical war on the creation ordinance is no friend of missions.
Philosophically, celibate gay theology reflects the subjectivism of late Romanticism, the nineteenth-century movement that rejected Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism and replaced them with human experience as authentic and as the measure of truth (that's what Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is about). Biblical Christianity declares truth objective, standing outside human subjectivity, and ontological, grounded in the creation ordinance. When American evangelicalism exports emotional empathy untethered to Christ, it is no friend of missions. Faithful missions must be willing to call out these errors and dethrone such false teaching, whatever the cost.
Gracious God and heavenly Father, we come to you as humble sisters in Christ, women who love you and have known your gospel grace, and who want it for our children and neighbors. We often feel beaten down, as if we're the only ones who think a born-again Christian lives differently, feels differently, has a different calling and purpose. Renew each woman here in gospel grace and strength. It often feels like we're singing a solo, but we're not; at the very least you are singing with us. Give us courage to stand alone if need be and proclaim the gospel to our loved ones, and may we see them come to Christ in the land of the living. In Jesus' name, amen.
Questions from the floor
Jesus tells us not to cast our pearls before pigs and tells his disciples to shake the dust off their feet when people reject the message. How do we know when we've done our part and it's time to stop? How do we tell a genuine struggler from someone who has hardened their heart, and when does persistence stop being faithful obedience?
That's a brilliant question; it sets a high bar. Hebrews 4:12: the word of God discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart; it knows you better than you know yourself. Mature Christians need to know when to do exactly what you describe, and I have done it many times. Pray that the heart would change and that the Lord would send someone else. But a hard heart toying with the gospel violates the third commandment; it's blasphemy, and you shouldn't encourage people to add to their sin. Pray, keep holy habits, and then draw a clear line in the sand. Especially as women, knowing when to say no matters. We should stop nodding and smiling in front of every heretic. You can say, “I could be wrong, but I think you're a heretic. Go talk to my husband.”
How do you begin speaking the truth in love in long relationships, with parents and family, where you've been loving while forsaking the truth?
I love that question. People ask it about hospitality too: “I've lived across the street for twenty years and never asked their names; do I just show up now?” (The introduction to my last book lists five things I needed to repent of from my previous books. I'm serious.) So you repent. Sit down with your brother who thinks he's gay and say, “Bill, I love you, and I'm asking your forgiveness. I've been lying to you all these years, and I love you too much to keep doing it.” That's it. Repentance is wonderful (Psalm 51:10). It redeems your future and heals your past. Psalm 32 says blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven. Want to be happier? Go repent.
I met a woman at the gym who's in a same-sex relationship and says she's a Christian. She says she used to think she'd go to hell, but then read that God keeps giving more grace, so the more she sins, the more he covers it.
The more she twists the Bible. Paul has a verse about that. First, know the solid ground you stand on. You can't be gay and Christian because you can't be regenerate and reject the created order. A Christian is a man or woman redeemed by God, and if truly regenerate, given grace to fight indwelling sin. Everyone is born in Adam with desires for things God hates; homosexuality isn't special. With someone like that, get away from the gym and go to coffee: “You're twisting the Scriptures, and I'd really like to know you better. I'll buy. Can my brother and I meet you, and bring your Bible?” It's the word of God that sets people free, so don't just have thematic discussions; open the word. We pray that the word would haunt our prodigals, not the pirate song from VBS. As for passages: there's nothing like Romans 3 through 7, and on into the start of chapter 8 (nobody wants to stop at the end of 7). That's the systematic theology of sin and grace, and Paul says the exact opposite of “sin more to get more grace.” You'll also get what it means to be baptized into Christ's death and, as Owen would say, vivified in his resurrection.
This summer I worked at what I thought was a Presbyterian camp. I'm a Southern Baptist, and it turned out to be PCUSA, a three-month mistake, though God used it. I saw twelve-year-olds whose mothers were pastors telling them they were trans girls. How do we deal with people who struggle with same-sex desire and keep themselves in the church by going to affirming churches like that?
(I once spent five days at a Free Methodist camp; it felt like a B-grade vampire movie where everyone is so nice at first. It happens to the best of us.) First, you cannot change a church from the pews. I don't want to hear, “Pastor Barbara is so faithful; if I just sit here and pray and never rock the boat, she'll lay her ordination on the altar.” You're part of the problem. Mainline churches are dying; may their death come swiftly. (You're laughing, but I'm being so restrained up here; I'm decaffeinated.) Talk to people individually if they're willing. But the gospel is a clarion call: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” You are not more merciful than God. People can be deluded, believing they're Christians when their faith doesn't match what the Bible calls Christian faith. I can't read hearts, but I can hear what comes out of mouths. And where there's life there's hope; to say someone is unregenerate is not to say they're damned, because they're still alive before God and before you. But don't coddle the mainline church. If you're in a mainline church with these problems for tradition's sake, repent and leave. Worship should be exactly what we heard this morning: a pure act of God's grace returned to God.
I'm a pastor's wife on the mission field. Two women in a same-sex relationship come to our church, sit in the back and don't take communion. My gift is hospitality, so I invite them out to eat, but they're on pins and needles wondering what my agenda is. How can we love them and also protect our church?
Churches should be hospitals; we want people coming from the hardest places. But this isn't a big-church-potluck moment. It's “Sister, let me help you”: one-on-one with a mature woman, or for a man, a mature man. It's not about “loving on them” in the Southern-hospitality sense, because they have a crushing problem. They need to repent and forsake their sin, and if they're older they're already doing the math on all the relationships they'll lose. It's not a party; it's mourning. It's private counseling, not public hospitality.
I'm Felicity, and I'm twelve. How would you share the gospel with kids my age in the LGBTQ community without pouring shame on them?
The fact that there are twelve-year-olds in the LGBTQ community tells me it's a social contagion. Do you know what that is? Like when all the girls on a gymnastics team start fearing they're fat and develop eating disorders together; they catch it from one another, like the flu, because they're all telling each other the same thing. There's no such thing as a twelve-year-old LGBTQ member. There are young people who feel different, and that's not the same as the rah-rah pride-march identity. You have to get people out of the social situation that produces the contagion, and the treatment for any dysphoria (seeing your body differently from how everyone else sees it) is not to affirm what they think they see but to teach them the truth. So, with your parents' blessing, become friends with one girl who seems interested in the gospel, and bring her home to your family devotions. Homosexuality is a form of atheism, which the Bible doesn't treat as neutral but as hostility to God: God isn't God, I am; my feelings are. It's the second or third thing that happens after someone stops believing in God. So share the real gospel, not “Jesus loves you and has a plan; just be you,” but justification, where God applies the blood of Christ and frees you from condemnation, and sanctification, where the power of the resurrection lets you fight your sin, not to be perfect or have your feelings zapped, but to stand outside your sin and say, “That's sin; that's not me; I'll fight it in Christ.” Galatians 5:17 says the Spirit fights the flesh “to keep you from doing the things you want to do.” That's the fight. Get your parents involved.
I'm Deborah, on staff at a Baptist church in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. We didn't realize there were two kinds of Baptists in Texas, and I've landed in a church far more liberal than I knew. What resources would help a church hold firm that a pastor should be a man?
I have no authority over you (if I start sounding like a heretic, some of the men here can stop me), and you need to talk to your husband. But I'd say flee that church like the building is on fire. Leave your passport, as they say on the plane, and run. Then, from the outside, your husband can sit down with them about the serious travesty of twisting the Bible for pragmatic ends. That war isn't ours to fight as women. We're called to the war against our own sin.
I'm from Australia. A male friend is afraid to go to church because of the judgment he might receive; and he says he prefers women because of past trauma.
I'd say: get over your pride. And ladies, wolves prefer women because we're easier to deceive, and we're flattered: “He prefers me because I'm gentle and kind.” Get a man on this. Darkness loves darkness (John 3:19). The church is a hospital, but please, not a psych ward. Wanting a gospel that doesn't offend or scare me, the gentle and lowly Jesus but not the one who overturned tables, won't do; we need the whole counsel of God. Someone needs to say, “Joe, man up,” and the man discipling him can bring the church to him: sit down and read Psalm 119 together, start to finish.
Would you go to a gay wedding to share the gospel?
No. There is no way to share the gospel once you've abandoned your post as a faithful Christian, just as Greg Johnson isn't sharing the gospel when he hands a drag queen a highball. Attending a gay wedding says, “Blessing on you; I agree.” You cannot share the gospel from a posture of unbelief, heresy or blasphemy. (Funny story: I was scheduled to speak at Alistair Begg's church while he was advising people to attend gay weddings. Kent Butterfield had a little phone call with his staff and said, in effect, that Mrs. Butterfield is not in the business of teaching against the position of the main preacher, so unless there's repentance, she isn't coming. That's how we roll.)
Over ten years I've watched a friend reject God, leave the faith and start dating a woman. Now she's engaged and asked me to be a bridesmaid. After a tearful conversation I told her I can't be a bridesmaid or attend. Now that she's fleeing God and our friendship, what is my role? How can I love her?
What a beautiful story. I'm in the same boat, and probably many of you are. Your friend didn't deconstruct her faith; no one can deconstruct what they didn't construct. She has gone apostate. And I love that you sat down privately and mourned together, and that you explained you couldn't participate, because it would be blasphemy and destroy your witness. What now? You pray, and you let her go. And for those who have gone to gay weddings and regret it: don't beat yourselves up. As a Christian you should be repenting of something every day, and now you know what today's is. Congratulations. Repent of it, and if the relationship continues, say something where appropriate. When Jesus regenerated you, he covered not only the sin you'd already committed but the sin you would go on to commit. The same is true of backsliding.
Repentance has six ingredients, and you should know them: see sin as sin (“I thought I was being winsome and kind, a soft place to land, but I destroyed my witness”); sorrow for sin (Psalm 51 is one I sing often); confession of sin, to your pastor, husband or sister if needed; hatred of sin without hatred of yourself (“It is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me,” Romans 7), because when a Christian sins she is going against her new nature; shame, which in its ancient sense means an undressing, uncovering the situation so that Christ can clothe it; and turning from sin, walking the opposite way. The thief who no longer steals isn't just a thief who hasn't stolen for two weeks (my husband calls that a thief on vacation); he works with his hands and gives to the needy (Ephesians 4:28). Then leave it at the cross and live in the joy of the Lord. Imagine if the apostle Paul had been so burdened by his past that he couldn't write the letters he wrote. In that small Christian community he must have met people whose mothers he had killed. If Paul could say, “I have a clear conscience,” so can you, and so can I.