Director of Cross Ministry (www.CrossMinistry.org) in Wake Forest, North Carolina.
As you exegete Scripture, so must you exegete your listeners. What temptations are they fighting? Who appears to be in Bunyan’s “slough of despond?” Is it possible that the distance between your pulpit and your people is measured not in feet but light years?
You, no doubt, preach every week to persons with homosexual attractions. They are among your guests and yes, your members. Men and women, married and single, teenagers and senior adults. They are more inconspicuous than a chameleon in a sandstorm at midnight. But you need to know they are there. Though some are “satisfied” with their concealed homosexuality, many (I believe most) are not. They are not
closeted in the sense they are secretly active – they are
conflicted and deeply wounded. They want freedom from these incessant thoughts and they want a word from you that goes beyond condemnation.
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R. Albert Mohler writes “…Homosexuals are waiting to see if the Christian church has anything more to say after we declare that homosexuality is a sin.” Evangelicals have unmistakably communicated the diagnosis, yet refuse helpful discussion because “it’s a dirty issue” – as if there are “clean sins.”
If a physician gave a patient a diagnosis without a treatment plan and prognosis, he or she would be a disservice to their profession. Does our following that same pattern make us guilty of ecclesiastical malpractice? Jay Kesler writes, “Preaching a sermon that is strong on information but weak on application is like shouting to a drowning man, ‘SWIM, SWIM’! The message is true, but it’s not helpful.”
Your listeners are like the son who snubbed his father’s advice for a college education, saying “I’ve got more information now than I know what to do with.” Homosexuals, like all hurting people, need more than information; they need compassion.
Righteous ResponsibilityIn 2007, The Barna Group released research results showing that “…91 percent of young non-Christians and 80 percent of young churchgoers” believe Christians display “excessive contempt…towards gays and lesbians” and claim “the church has not helped them apply the biblical teaching on homosexuality to their friendships with gays and lesbians.”
Mohler notes that, “Evangelical Christians must ask ourselves some very hard questions, but the hardest may be this: Why is it that we have been so ineffective in reaching persons trapped in (homosexuality)?” Because Christians are unlikely to evangelize people they hold in “excessive contempt.” Christian compassion has become an oxymoron!
Also in 2007, a denominational research division issued its findings, the vast results of which were eclipsed by one shocking sentence: “Most Christians don’t like lost people.” That dislike appears to have moved the church to outsource God’s work, particularly as it relates to homosexuality.