Director of Cross Ministry (www.CrossMinistry.org) in Wake Forest, North Carolina.
How does this relate to our preaching on homosexuality? We are tempted to sound vociferous or prophetic. A colleague in outreach to homosexuals once told me he did not mind “offending homosexuals with the truth.” I wondered why he did not use “loving” versus “offending,” as in
Eph. 4:15. Ironically, he used to be homosexual and a target of offensive language. William Quayle cautions “Never say things to evoke the cheer. It is pitifully easy to give way to the desire for applause.” In theater it’s called “playing to the audience.”
What are you saying that you should not say? Conversely, what are you not saying that you should say? Charles Spurgeon, who heard someone say a certain preacher had no more gifts of ministry than an oyster, said “…in my judgment that was a slander on the oyster, for that worthy bivalve shows great discretion in his opening, and knows when to close.”
Advertisement
Any demeaning remark you make about homosexuals wounds about 70 percent of your listeners who have family and friends with same-sex attractions. A mother of a gay son told me her pastor’s frequent depiction of homosexuals is like having a knife thrust into her gut and twisted – which is one reason she has not divulged the “news” to her fellowship. (It took this mother three years from the first time she met me and heard my testimony before she disclosed to me her son’s homosexuality.) Why is disclosure so difficult?
As parents told me, “If our son was involved in drugs or alcohol, fellow believers would pray for us.” If he was incarcerated, “our church would rally around us with support.” But these parents remain mum because their sons and daughters wrestle with homosexuality. They suffer in sustained silence because they’ve “heard the jokes,” “seen the raised eyebrows” and “endured the verbal derision towards homosexuals” coming from the very people they would typically unburden themselves to – their church. And preacher, make no mistake, your people take their cues from you.
In a heart-wrenching article a mother who serves on a church staff, writes, “Why can’t I tell you? Because I don’t need your judgment, your theories or your analysis. I can assure you that my own feelings of guilt, inadequacy and failure, reinforced by the outcries of the Christian community against homosexuals and their families, are more than sufficient.” She pleads that we treat all people with respect, a premise reinforced by Phillips Brooks who wrote an “element of a preacher’s power is genuine respect for the people to whom he preaches.” Writes John Stott, “However strongly we may disapprove of homosexual practices, we have no liberty to dehumanize those who engage in them.”