Mainline Slide

The push to accept homosexuality gutted traditional Protestantism. Evangelical churches are headed down the same road.

As attendees at a sold-out parenting conference at North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., streamed out the doors into the parking lot, twin lines of blue-shirted volunteers cheered and held signs that read, “You are loved,” “You’ve got this,” and “You’re not alone.”

North Point held the conference, called “Unconditional,” at the end of September for “parents, ministry leaders, and counselors who want to love and support the LGBTQ+ community well.” Attendees snapped up every available ticket in advance, even though some cost well over $500. The event’s 14 speakers included Andy Stanley, North Point’s founder and senior pastor, as well as two men, Justin Lee and Brian Nietzel, who are married to other men. Lee believes God blesses same-sex marriages, and Nietzel co-founded Renovus, a nonprofit that aims to create “a world where no one has to choose between their faith and sexual orientation.”

The conference was billed as an approach to supporting parents and their gay and transgender children in churches “from the quieter middle space.” But within evangelicalism, that space is one in which ministry leaders either subtly or blatantly assert that homosexuality and transgenderism are compatible with Christianity. It’s also a space that’s growing—fast.

Nearly a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, church leaders face intensifying pressure to adopt current cultural language and messages about sexuality and gender. More pastors are capitulating, nudging evangelicalism down the same road that has gutted mainline Protestantism.

Until the 1960s, more than half of all American adults aligned with one of the seven mainline Protestant denominations, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. It’s a grouping scholars use for denominations such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church. Since then, those denominations have been on a downward spiral. Today, they represent only about 10 percent to 13 percent of the population, according to surveys compiled by researcher Ryan Burge.

While other factors have contributed to that decline, congregants and churches have broken ranks in droves as mainline denominations take steps to affirm same-sex marriage and ordain homosexual and transgender clergy. Many who stayed approve the shift away from Biblical orthodoxy. Roughly two-thirds of white mainline Protestants now support same-sex marriage, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.

Thomas Kidd, a research professor of church history at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, says evangelical churches that hold to traditional views on marriage and sexuality will face increasing scorn: “What price are they willing to pay to maintain their status?”

Parents like Greg and Lynn McDonald, the couple behind the Unconditional Conference, have become a driving force in evangelicalism’s shift. The McDonalds’ own shift began on the darkest day of their parenting experience. They were on their way out the door to a farmer’s market, but Greg couldn’t escape a nagging thought. He told Lynn he’d be a few minutes and ran down the steps to their 17-year-old son’s bedroom. The computer was on, and Greg pulled up the search history. He found what he’d feared—pornography—and something even more alarming: The images that filled the screen didn’t include women, only men.

The McDonalds recount this scene in their 2019 book, Embracing the Journey….they describe their shift from seeing their son’s homosexual lifestyle as sinful to embracing his “gay identity”—and his live-in boyfriend.

But the McDonalds’ most high-profile support, including financial donations, has come from their own congregation. Since 2013, they’ve attended one of the campuses belonging to North Point Ministries, a group of eight nondenominational evangelical churches in the Atlanta area. The ministry includes the Alpharetta congregation that hosted the Unconditional Conference.
Its pastor, Andy Stanley, is known as a gifted orator and has been a popular leader for Bible studies used in churches across the country. But he’s also no stranger to controversy related to his views on the Bible and sexuality. In 2018, Stanley suggested in a sermon that the Christian faith must be “unhitched” from the Old Testament. At a pastors’ conference last year, Stanley dismissed the Bible’s so-called “clobber passages,” verses that speak directly against homosexuality. “A gay person who still wants to attend church after the way the church has treated the gay community, I’m telling you, they have more faith than I do,” he said.

Evangelical support of same-sex marriage is on the rise. Among white evangelical Protestants, it rose from 11 percent in 2004 to 29 percent in 2019, according to the Pew survey. It also found that 4 in 10 of those who attend religious services once a week now favor same-sex marriage.

Stanley’s public statements that conflict with Scripture, as well as his ties with groups such as Embracing the Journey, are emblematic of a wider problem, Kidd said.

“Now, the realm of the possible changes within the broad and very poorly defined evangelical sphere,” he said. “It suggests the traditional Biblical view of marriage and sexuality is no longer a defining principle of the evangelical movement.”

But backlash is brewing. Many church leaders are speaking out on the need to return to Scripture and address sexuality and personhood with greater clarity and courage.

Evangelical drift “always begins with this desire to be compassionate and loving,” [Christopher Yuan, author of Holy Sexuality and the Gospel] said. “That’s not a bad thing. … The issue comes when we’re busier listening to the marginalized and not letting their stories be filtered through the lens of Scripture.” Yuan left behind homosexuality, as well as using and dealing illicit drugs, after coming to Christ in a jail cell. He says his parents never enabled him in his sexual sin or gay identity.

“If I were to identify as a gay Christian, I would be trying to resuscitate my dead man,” Yuan said. “We should never put our identity in our sin nature or in our flesh. Sin is never meant to be sanctified. It’s meant to be mortified.”

https://wng.org/articles/wide-is-the-way-1696291182