What makes for human flourishing?

Last Thursday, City Church in San Francisco, a 1,000-attendee congregation that in 2006 left the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) over the issue of women’s ordination, announced its next step: “We will no longer discriminate based on sexual orientation.”

A letter from longtime senior pastor Fred Harrell offered this explanation: “Our pastoral practice of demanding life-long ‘celibacy,’ by which we meant that for the rest of your life you would not engage your sexual orientation in any way, was causing obvious harm and has not led to human flourishing.”

I put “human flourishing” into Google and found 1,290,000 results in 0.54 seconds. The term may originally have been a translation of eudaimonia, a word prominent in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but it’s taken on a life of its own—and Christians are defining it in very different ways.

For example, here’s how Matt Chandler, a pastor of a large church in Texas who is also president of the Acts 29 Network, used the term recently: “To back away from the teachings of Scripture around issues that our culture finds offensive is to wave the white flag on human flourishing. It is to say, ‘Our creator God does not know what is best for his creation. Creation knows what’s best, not the Creator.’ That’s madness.”

So whose understanding of what leads to human flourishing is right? I met Fred Harrell years ago and liked him, and I know what’s it like to criticize homosexuality in a liberal city. Still, Chandler is right: Our Father knows best. The Bible clearly criticizes both heterosexual adultery and homosexuality, so it’s hard to claim loyalty to Scripture while accepting practicing homosexuals as members.

Harrell’s letter on behalf of his elder board stated, “As a church within the Reformed Tradition we go directly to Scripture to find counsel and to reengage the verses that talk about same-sex activity. For so long this has been a case closed kind of issue for evangelicals. But in recent years, multiple respected evangelical scholars and theologians have begun to wrestle with this and a healthy debate is underway. Asking questions about what the Scriptures say on this issue must always be coupled with asking why the Scriptures say what they do and what kind of same-sex activity is being addressed.”

I could make certain assumptions about what that means, but I won’t because I’m visiting San Francisco in May and would genuinely like to hear more of Harrell’s reasoning and report his answers to hard questions. (As Proverbs 10:19 says, “When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.”) I also hope to talk with two of his elders who resigned over this issue, Tyler Dann and Bruce Gregory.

What hard questions would you want me to ask?

Christopher Robins, a PCA minister who is planting a church in San Francisco, wrote a response to Harrell’s letter. His church plant, Glory San Francisco, meets at 925 Mission Street at 10 a.m. on Sundays. City Church’s main meeting place is at 2460 Sutter Street, with services at 9 and 11 a.m. The two churches are only about 2 miles apart, so I’ll try to go to most of a service at each one. (I used to be able to run 2 miles in 13 minutes, but at my age such an attempt would contribute neither to personal flourishing nor to the flourishing of whoever sat next to me at the second service.)