The SBC's 'sad but necessary' move

This week I spoke with John Stonestreet of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview about the decision of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee to disfellowship a congregation over homosexuality. Here are excerpts of that conversation:

NICK EICHER: The Southern Baptist Convention is America’s largest protestant denomination. It has in the past acted against a handful congregations on the issue of homosexuality, but always at the convention level, not the executive committee. The church is New Heart Community Church in La Mirada, Calif., led by pastor Danny Cortez. He now says he believes, “same-sex marriage can be blessed by God.” Cortez spoke of his affirmation of his own son’s identifying as gay, saying, “And for the first time, speaking to someone who is gay, I felt like I was giving them life.”

This is a significant development. We talk about what’s happening in the courts with marriage, and that’s important. But when confessing evangelicals start to turn on this issue, that’s substantial. Now, neither one of us is a Southern Baptist, but the SBC is, as I said, the largest American church body on this side of the Reformation. Did the executive committee make the right move here?

JOHN STONESTREET: This will be the issue that divides evangelical churches. It will be an issue that lays down new dividing lines in Christianity. People are very sad about that, and I’m sad about that, but I think it’s a necessary move. I don’t think it is a peripheral issue. Sean McDowell and I wrote a book on this because we think it’s so important. I don’t think it’s the only issue that we face. I think it’s the tip of the spear of the larger issue about what we mean by sexuality in the human person. It cuts at one of the core doctrines of what we believe to be true about he world, and that is what it means to be made in the image of God. Scripture unlocks that identity of all human persons in a story—the story of creation-fall-redemption-restoration. In light of that, I think they had to speak.

NE: WORLD is reporting online two new parts of this story. No. 1, Cortez is slated to be a guest speaker at the gay advocacy training conference called The Reformation Project. No. 2, he received an invite to a White House LGBT Pride Month event June 30. So he’s immersing himself in advocacy, in persuading others to embrace that point of view, or at least not oppose it vigorously. Can you draw upon the research that you did for your book and give me your response to that?

JS: I don’t want to speak to what’s driving him. I think there’s a lot of issues there surrounding his personal story about this. But what is clear is that this is the new shift that’s taking place. … What we’ve experienced in American society is not just a moral slip or a moral slide toward embracing same-sex activity as being normal, but it’s a fundamental shift of the human person, where the most important thing about someone … is their sexual inclinations. It’s a pretty remarkable shift. Even some pastors think the entire history of Christianity now has to change to accommodate it because we know these new things about what it means to be human. I think it takes a lot more courage these days to stand for a traditional understanding of male-female sexuality … than it does to be an advocate. … This is the world that we now live in.

NE: You want to do anything for your kids. You want them to be happy; you want a good relationship. The intellectual arguments matter, but the power of an emotional narrative is hard to beat. Since this story broke, I’ve read the commentary from Russell Moore, who heads up the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He wrote this about people in pastor Cortez’s situation: “One of the reasons this is such a crushing experience for many is because they assume that their alternatives are affirmation or alienation. I either give up my relationship with my child or I give up the Bible. The gospel never suggests this set of alternatives, and in fact demonstrates just the opposite.” Explain why this is not a zero-sum game, not an “either/or” proposition.

JS: Because a person’s fundamental identity is not their sexuality; it’s that they’re made in the image and likeness of God. … We need to have thought about this earlier. When we find ourselves in the middle of a situation that’s so emotionally taxing, it’s hard to think clearly. For moms and dads to be expected to think clearly about it when the church hasn’t offered a whole lot of guidelines—I applaud Russell for encouraging us to do that. … If you ask me, I think what we have seen from pastor Cortez’s shift—I think what we have seen in terms of other, higher profile evangelicals who are up in the air on this right now—is the result of a real lack of theological structure about human sexuality and the human person. The entire second half of our book is dedicated to giving a framework both for the long-term and for the short-term. To get to the heart of your question, this [issue] is being portrayed as [having] only two options. Either you’re fully affirming, or you’re a hater. These aren’t the only two options that the gospel gives. Neither one of them are the option that the gospel gives. So we need to rethink this pretty quickly.

Listen to Nick Eicher and John Stonestreet’s discussion on culture every Friday on The World and Everything in It: