In 2018’s speech at a religious pro-gay conference known as Revoice, some of you’ve heard of that, a well-known minister within a large confessional denomination was about to explode onto the ecclesiastical scene.
The talk was labeled, Making Church a Haven for Sexual Minorities – Thoughts for Church Leadership. The speaker was unflinching in his commitment to the homosexual world, declaring to his church leader audience, “You have to be prepared to defend sexual minorities, even at the cost of budgets, programs, and numbers”, he said. “Your job as a ministry leader,” he continued, “is to become their biggest, fiercest advocate.”
He sounded like a gay minister from the old guard liberal protestant churches of the 60s and 70s, doesn’t he? Instead, he was a minister in the officially conservative Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA. His name is Greg Johnson. The pro-gay Revoice conference used his church’s facilities there in Missouri.
What is worse is that it was unknown to everyone at the time, but known to Johnson’s church leadership, was he was gay. Nobody else knew it, although surely the church membership suspected something. A little later, while still a PCA pastor, he came out in a Christianity Today article entitled, I used to hide my shame, now I take shelter under the gospel.
Then, as of late 2022, Johnson and his church left the PCA in good standing. But what does a gay pastor like Johnson have to do with female deacons and the church? They both show the ever-present feminization of our congregations.
When the roles of men and women are blurred, and the natural differences ignored, then effeminate men are okay, and masculine female leaders are encouraged. In other words, there are two routes to an effeminate church. Allowing biological women into the church officer pool, or allowing in men with feminine characteristics.
Pastor Smith spoke in the former. My talk is about the latter, especially about homosexual church leadership. But do effeminate pastors make a pro-gay church? Do they facilitate the downfall of congregations? And yes, they do.
This is done in two ways in particular I’ll talk about. By weak-kneed leaders, what I call effeminate leaders, or by homosexual church officers. They open the back door of the Trojan horse of feminism in various ways.
I will talk about both types of leaders before offering some practical insights for today. But first, let me talk about definitions. As Pastor Smith pointed out, we’re at a disadvantage trying to talk about these things.
We’re swimming against the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the culture around us. When I asked, do effeminate pastors make a church pro-gay? I have in mind the New Testament word in 1 Corinthians 6, 9, which most of us probably know that text. The KJV version reads, “Know you not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor effeminates, nor abusers of themselves with mankind.”
The Greek word there translated effeminate, the KJV, has its root in the idea of soft or delicate. It describes the passive partner in the gay sexual relationship such as a catamite.
My use of that word effeminate includes therefore the homosexual denotation of the Greek, such that gays by definition are effeminate. But I also use it to talk about feminine qualities in men, but not implying necessarily that they’re homosexuals. That’s not always the case.
Why is this definition here? Because not only is the physical act of homosexuality forbidden by the Lord God, but also is supporting means, causes, occasions, appearances, and provocations unto homosexuality. This is a common way of applying the law of God, although it’s lost more or less than our day and age it seems to me. For example, consider when God commands us not to murder, he is not just forbidding the bare act of murder, but the mindset, the desires, the words that lead and facilitate murder itself.
This is exactly Jesus’ point against the Pharisees, right? “But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.” They were playing games with God’s word. Similarly, when he forbids, when God forbids violating the marriage vows, that includes anything that leads to or undermines, right, the means, causes, or occasions, though not explicitly mentioned in the Bible, undermines marriage itself, such as watching porn or the husband acting like a woman.
This is a major battlefront against feminization here in the churches, even in the best of them. Having swallowed too much of the worldly thinking, too many of the churches and their leadership whitewash the differences between men and women, opening up the door to men who are too emotional, too soft, and too uncomfortable with controversy and stress. Let us continue with the definition here of effeminate church leaders.
Effeminate Church Leaders
What does it look like? It can be described, you can imagine, and illustrated in various and sundry ways, but I think they all end up with pretty much one simple way of describing it. Men, or male church officers, who act, talk, or otherwise identify with feminine qualities. It’s as simple as that.
So to better understand how churches move to accepting homosexuality of men and leaders who act, talk, or otherwise identify with feminine qualities, we need to cover important moral and theological truth lost in the last few generations, at least on the whole. It’s there in our confessions, it’s there in our history, it’s even there in practice to some extent, as Pastor Smith pointed out. Hey, he can’t run for sports and do football and basketball, neither can I. We know there’s these differences, even amongst the same sex, the males.
When the Spirit listed the qualifications of leaders in his holy word, maleness is the foundation of that. Without it, everything else falls apart. Why? Because the church is not created in a vacuum.
God super-added the church institution upon the already existing natural moral universe, not to undermine it, but to work within it. So redemption does not eradicate nature, but reinforces our native or natural duties one to another. As Paul hammers home various parts of the New Testament, especially in 1 Timothy, from women being sanctified in childbearing, as it says at the end of chapter there, chapter 2, and warning of families in chapter 5 of judgment, if they don’t what? Provide for their own, not the church, but they have to provide for their own.
Insisting the gospel does not remove familial responsibilities. In the Creator’s moral world that we live in, men are charged with using their body and the corresponding mindset and personality that should go with it in order to provide, protect, and preside, that is rule, among other things. Again, Paul argues against female leadership in the kingdom of God by reaching back to the natural state of innocency before the existence of the church.
That’s before quoted this passage here in 1 Timothy 2, “And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.” And what’s his argument? Does he quote the Old Testament? Does he quote Jesus? What does he do? He goes right back to the beginning. “For Adam was first formed, then Eve.”
We all know this. This is natural. This is the way things are supposed to be.
He’s reaching back to how things are at creation before the fall. That’s the point. What does maleness then look like? In a day and age in which we are awash in feminism, the question will come up.
For one thing, men are called to be aggressive and disagreeable in needful situations in a way women are not or cannot. When confronted by violence, for example, in a dark part of town in the back alley, women should run. However, the man would stay behind, to hold them off while the family flees.
It’s that kind of a basic distinction that we understand. Similarly, that kind of stand-your-ground assertion is most needed these days in church leadership. This is why Paul urges the Christians at the churches of Corinth, as we read in chapter 16, “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men.” That’s from the KJV again, because it highlights that word in a way that you don’t see in the modern translation.
This is why I like to quote it there. I have a sermon on that, in fact. It comes from the Greek, which means behave like a man.
You hear that right out of the KJV. Behave like a man. Why? Because literally in the Greek, the word for man is used in that word.
Unfortunately, a counterculture has developed in parallel with the secular spirit of the age that pushes for a new approach to the sex differences. It was already alluded to. I mean, that’s the whole point of the feminism movement.
It’s creating a parallel, and now it’s the predominant culture and way of thinking. It essentially says, this parallel spirit among the churches, it essentially says, the softer, gayer, more tame, more pliable, more agreeable, more third sex, more female-friendly you are, then the closer you are to the kingdom of God. And that’s it in a nutshell. It is this leaven we have all experienced, usually through unspoken assumptions, hints and allegations, that has softened up our resistance to feminism and egalitarianism in general from the pulpit, along the likes of Greg Johnson, a pastor in a supposedly conservative denomination, to declare his homosexuality for all to see without effective blowback.
Nothing came of it. In other words, effeminate male leadership has a soft personality that is unduly sensitive or offends easily, is not bold or assertive, as public church officers need to be when danger arises. I’m not saying be a jerk all the time.
There’s a time to be a jerk. There’s another way of putting it, right? I guess you can use the word jerk in the best way. There it is.
They don’t want to rock the boat and confrontation is too distasteful for them, more often than not. This in turn often leads them to hide behind proceduralism, be aware of that, Presbyterianism, prize against being mean and the like, instead of tackling substance of the matter. Naturally, there are degrees of such effeminacy, right? And it’s not as though all acts of emotionalism or emotions or avoiding to trouble are automatically evidence of feminization.
That’s not what I’m saying. It’s context dependent. But that should not detract from the reality that after all, when we think of strong, effective leadership in politics, in business, in society, right, in nature, the natural way of doing things, we don’t typically think of men who are the opposite of that.
We don’t want those kind of men to lead us into battle, whether that’s war or the struggles of politics or business. Thus the world decay is obvious around us. As we live in an increasingly hostile world, aggressively hounding Christians, our leaders need to be equally aggressive in proclaiming the truth to protect the flock.
Feminine agreeableness and nurturing are not fit for the task, although marvelous in their own ways, right? This is not what this is about. Amen. I’ve got a wife and I’ve got a daughter.
But they know they don’t want leadership. They know that that pressure, they don’t want it. God is not calling men to hand-wring concern, hand-wringing concern about what the world thinks.
The churches need men who are indifferent to public opinion, who do not let emotions or sentimentalism drive them. While withdrawing empathy may be a hard truth, it helps the shepherds of the church stand firm against the flood of wickedness. Consider the fact that congregational officers also hold the keys of church discipline and teaching.
If anything, that entails what? A personality that is impervious to peer pressure and indifferent to soft stories that are often used to manipulate the masses. They have to be thick-skinned. We should not have to relearn the lessons given in the history of the big liberal churches the last 100 years.
Yet here we are. We had a little lesson of it earlier in the prior talk, going over the list of, I didn’t know it was that far back, 1800s, 1700s of the Methodists. That makes sense because they have all this emotionalism that’s, they’re almost quasi-charismatic in many ways, the old ones anyways.
The fall of the big Baptist churches, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, Episcopalians, demonstrate beyond all doubt what happens when pliable men rule the church. They open the gates to heresy, being easily deceived, as Paul warns in 1 Timothy 1, especially with respect to the females that were already there. So not just pliable men, but pliable women in particular.
He says, and Adam was not deceived. Do not forget that point. Heresies come from a man.
It’s not like he’s confused, as a typical rule, especially if they’re a leader. It’s one thing if they’re a layman. When they’re a leader, they’re not confused.
They’re playing games with you. They’re manipulating you or something like that. A woman being deceived fell into transgression.
Yes, men teach heresies, but women tend to, what, excuse it, especially if they’re sympathetic to the bad actor, or the other word is empathetic, typically. I feel you. Can’t you see where he’s coming from? Yeah, I do, but I really don’t care.
That’s the kind of leader you want. So male leadership, in other words, when following the Spirit, of course, can suppress sympathy to create a more objective mindset. This helps analyze words and actions without distraction from close relationships and empathy.
They can clamp down on their emotions in a way that sometimes disturbs women. She had feelings. There’s memes about that. Does that man ever cry?
The history of these liberal churches shows that winsome and weak leaders excused friends and loved ones who had morally divorced, slept around, were gay, and so that by the late 60s and early 70s, as you’ll see in my book, the big progressive churches were already making overtures like Revoice Conference today, we’re just repeating history, to the queer community. And now we have transgender pastors, cross-dressing Lutheran pastors. When male and female differences are watered down, when men acting like women, why not have transgender leadership? There’s nothing stopping it.
If their differences are merely cultural, then men with emotional weaknesses can easily be promoted. Why not? We tend to think in our more conservative circles that it can’t happen to us, but I tell you, we already have timid leadership that is squishy towards the spirit of the age, it seems to me, while easily moved by made-up sob stories of the homosexual world, as I will illustrate. But why go on into the moral and logical reasonings, I’ve already given some, of how soft men will create hard times in the church, when a few examples can drive this home.
After this, I will explore the more immediate danger of gay church officers. So these next few illustrations are about effeminate men in the leadership of the churches and how they affect us even today.
First example here, this example hits close to home for the confessionally reformed churches. It is about Richard Lovelace, this is important, although you know the other guy, Timothy Keller, more readily. And the generational danger of effeminate leadership. Over 40 years ago, Lovelace was an influential church leader, a professor at Gordon-Conwell, he taught several classes that Timothy Keller attended in his seminary years.
Those classes and Lovelace’s book, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, were formative in Keller’s spiritual development, he said in an interview later. Once a well-known evangelical spiritual leader, Lovelace was, “the leader of the conservative minority bloc of the Task Force on Homosexuality” in the United Presbyterian Church in the 70s. Task Force, minority group.
Yet he was already endorsing public gay celibate pastors as a viable option. He’s described as what? Conservative minority bloc. Sounds like narrow or sometimes called thin complementarianism.
Naturally, we know why he had this as an option, celibate gay pastors. Why? Because he knew gays personally, and he felt sorry for them. He said so in his book, I have his book at home.
He wrote all this down in the 1978 published book, Homosexuality in the Church. In the book, he spills ink, lots of ink, lamenting the lack of gay missions, calling the church to confess this defect. He also scolds the church for another, his words, major failure, homophobia.
To combat this made-up problem, because that’s what it is, he turns the caller’s attention upon the church, implying, of course, that she is full of hypocrites. Later in the book, he picks up this theme of nagging the church. He poignantly calls homophobes to put to death, “their inner dispositions which negate love.”
Stop that. There is no corresponding call for homosexuals to put to death their inner dispositions that negate heterosexuality. How convenient.
Rather, there is a call for the church to bring in more gay members, gay and celibate pastors. Now, this is written in the 70s before we understood about the gay life as much as we have now. The studies I have in the next section, I only touched the surface of it.
If you want to walk out, that’s fine. I don’t, I’m going to warn you ahead of time, even though I’m not going into details. It’s appalling.
They didn’t know. Nevertheless, he didn’t need to know. As I’ll point out, he shouldn’t have done it anyways.
There’s also a clarion call for the church in his book to be, as they say now, woke. He writes, “and there will be other dimensions in which the church will be awakened and renewed. It will discover that its unconscious fear and hatred of gay persons has led it to join our society’s unchristian rejection of homosexuality.”
This is the conservative that shaped Timothy Keller. He continues this bizarre self-flagellation, “the homosexual issue is a problem which God has set before the church, the solution of which must involve a thoroughgoing tune-up of theology, spirituality, ministry, and mission.” And sure enough, 40 years later, we witness the tune-up of theology and spirituality and ministry before us today. In a little-known interview with Gay City News, nobody knows about this, it’s in my book, Timothy Keller, a nationally known writer and popular speaker from the PCA, revealed how his personal closeness to gays shaped decades of his popular public ministry.
He admitted as much, “life circumstances have influenced the way I have spoken on the subject [of homosexuality].” How? His younger brother, who’s gay, and died of AIDS. He candidly confessed, “I came to understand his point of view in his struggle with Christian teaching, and that very intense experience helped me express the classical Christian view without compromise, but with a new sympathy.”
That’s code word for, I changed. In practice, this led to a live and let live social ethic for Keller as he admitted. He basically had a libertarian approach to public ethics.
It also probably led him to deny the reality that unrepentant homosexuals go to hell for the sin of sodomy, as he said publicly in the Veritas Forum in 2011. And again, nothing ever came of it. Now, I have another example, one last example, that dovetails nicely to the next part of my talk, which is about outright homosexual church officers.
Although further from our orbit, the fall of mega pastor star John Ortberg is instructive for our congregations today. His scandal is an excellent example of letting weak sentimentalism and agreeableness trump common sense. His is a picture of our collective future if we do not respond appropriately and quick enough.
He was a pastor of a 4,000 plus attendee church in San Francisco Bay area, a Fuller Seminary and Wheaton College graduate. He wrote several books and traveled the speaking circuit. He was amiable, non-controversial, and admired by all.
He was popular enough that even having a transgender daughter did not harm his reputation. After a long-standing discontentment with the liberal Presbyterian Church USA, he helped establish the more moderate evangelical covenant order denomination known as the ECO. He was revered as one of America’s great pastors until his fall in 2020.
Ortberg’s troubles began in 2018, however, when a voluntary youth worker at his church confessed a dark secret. That young man admitted to being a pedophile, yet claimed to be celibate. Satisfied that he had not molested anybody, Ortberg let him continue working with children in the youth group.
As it turned out, John Ortberg not only allowed the pedophile to work with kids, he did not inform other church leaders of this matter, so no one knew but John and John’s daughter, Mallory. She broke the silence by sending a letter to the church asking them to investigate this matter. The church investigated and reprimanded John for his “poor judgment”, their quote, and of course that’s not much of a discipline, is it? But Mallory was not satisfied.
Months later, she revealed the name of the pedophile youth worker, John Ortberg III, John’s son, known as Johnny. As is common in press coverage even today, another side of the sordid tale is missing. Johnny is a homosexual, just as it is an uncomfortable truth that some male heterosexuals lust after young girls, some male homosexuals lust after boys.
In the mid-2020, the daughter revealed that for years Johnny schemed to be alone with boys. Specifically, she wrote, “Last Friday, my younger brother, John Ortberg, Johnny, who is 30 years old, disclosed to me that for as long as he can remember, he has been obsessed with children, especially, he says, boys between the ages of 8 and 13.” The scandal is even more disturbing because it foreshadows our collective future.
As churches, we face uncomfortable sexual challenges of one type or another, or don’t face them, unfortunately, as some churches are at right now. How is this the case? Ortberg could not put aside his feeling and confront the wickedness of his own son. His relationship with his son was compromised because he was already sympathetic towards homosexual sins.
He said as much elsewhere. He wanted people to know he had, “real compassion for anyone trying to treat sexual compulsion.” In other words, Ortberg could not suspend his emotional attachment to his son as he was called to do. He was acting effeminate.
Homosexual Church Leadership
Naturally, this leads us to the second half of my talk, Homosexual Church Leadership. I cover the story of Ortberg excusing his son, who admitted to secretly pursuing young boys to illustrate a known horror in the homosexual world, sexual predation. They’re predators, as a general rule.
Gay men are more sexually active than other people are comfortable admitting. It is an uncomfortable matter, but that doesn’t make it any less important. In fact, to the extent church leadership shies away from inconvenient truths, the more they’re showing a soft side, which is why we have this conference.
We want to deal with these things the way they ought to be dealing with it. They don’t even want to talk about it. So let me dive into the ugly and distressing world.
Dive is the wrong word. This is actually an overview. You want to dive, Chapter 2 of my book. It is dark, as one commentator pointed out, but he pointed out, that’s what the law is. It shows you how dark things are, so you understand the gospel better.
In this case, it gives us a practical understanding of how to deal with these things, as my book points out. So it is disturbing, even without all the details. If you wish to walk out for about five minutes, please do.
To many Christians, the gay life is shrouded with a thick veil. Mass media and pressure groups hide reality behind rhetoric, glitter, and guffaws. Any LGBT people one knows personally will likely not volunteer information about controversial practices in their circles.
Millions of Americans have little knowledge of the gay community. What is known is likely stereotypical or derived from uninformed positive presentations of LGBT issues by the mainstream media. Some believe them to be relationally oriented or angst-ridden, while others think they’re just no different than the rest of us.
How do we find the truth without falling into hype and stereotype? How do you do this? Well, one would use the same tools as for any other demographic group. Polls, studies, professional opinions, personal stories, experts, and the like. And with all polls and studies about categories like gender, nationality, and race, these methods only offer a snapshot of the aggregate, to be sure.
While every individual is unique, the combined picture shows a compulsive, miserable, risky people across the board. First of all, compulsive. The gay life is sexuality run amok.
They are obsessed with it. Studies and testaments and testimonials all paint an ugly picture of sexual compulsiveness, an animalistic drive they use for greater and greater atrocities. Various studies since the 70s, for example, point in the same direction.
Such research includes the number of partners over 12 years, number of partners over lifetime, number of concurrent partners, open and closed relationships, anonymous one-night stands and parks, bookstores, bars, et cetera – public places. So here’s the highlights here of the compulsive part. Studies put the number of their partners at almost three to four times more than straights.
For example, the number of lifetime partners puts 24-year-old straight men at four. They have four girls by that time, women. But the homosexual male has 15.
The numbers rise from there. It’s a four-to-one ratio. By age 39, heterosexual will have 10 as a medium, and the homosexual has 67.
That’s just the ones they’re telling you about. These are partners. That’s not them going to a bathhouse, by the way.
While the small number of concurrent partners shrinks over time for heterosexuals, homosexual concurrency increases. During the AIDS crisis of the 80s, gay men did adjust their reckless rendezvous at the local gay bathhouse from six to four times a month. By the way, a bathhouse is not a prostitution center because money is not exchanged, because their promiscuity is off the charts.
Unfortunately, sexual abuse among homosexuals is more common in youth as well, homosexual youth, compared to straight teenagers and the bisexual, the whole gamut. They are exposed to this sort of world at a younger age, unfortunately, and it has a devastating effect for the rest of their life. Even gay and gay-friendly psychologists and the like admit the sodomite world is drowning in the sex, in the sea of sex fiends.
As one licensed addict therapist puts it, “recognizing sexual addiction in gay men is sometimes tougher than it is with straight men”. I think you know where this is going, I hope. Why would, how could, how can it be harder to find out? Because they’re all crazy this way.
The statistics I gave show why, and they admit it in their own way. “It is difficult to stand”, he says, “out as a sex addict when you live in a sexual permissive community. Most gay men live in such an environment, while most straight men don’t,” so you can’t see the difference. There’s no difference, but he’s got a job anyways.
Second, they’re not only compulsive, they’re miserable.
Their lifestyle is miserable in every way possible. Michael Hobbes wrote an extensive essay sympathetic to the queer community named, Together Alone, the Epidemic of Gay Loneliness in the Huffington Post. So it wasn’t just a fly-by-night.
Huffington Post has been around a while now. The article was published about two years after the Obergefell ruling. They’ve had two years to get, get better, be happy.
It paints a bleak picture of isolation and bullying among gay men. In one interview, one interviewee named John explained it this way, “gay men in particular are just not very nice to each other”, he says.” In pop culture,” he continues here, quoting him, “drag queens are known for their takedowns and it’s all ha ha ha ha, but that meanness is almost pathological. All of us were deeply confused or lying to ourselves for a good chunk of our adolescence, but it’s not uncomfortable for us to show that to other people, but it is not comfortable for us to show that, so we show it to other people in the world through such nastiness.”
Associate Professor of Public Health at Yale University, Pachankis, a pro-gay advocate, surprised himself in a groundbreaking study he conducted. Gays, it turns out, when it comes to misery, “probably are the biggest source of their own stress.”
In fact, it’s not just individual men, but the entire gay community as a whole is, “a significant source of stress.” Many gay men describe the community as obsessed with “sex status and competition”. In fact, he discovered gay and bisexual men’s stress from each other, intra-minority stress they call it, predicted mental health.
He controlled for discrimination in the study, for concealment, general life, and other like factors. He grabbed as much as he could, and leveling all those out, it stuck out like a sore thumb. They stress themselves out. They make their own life miserable.
With such perpetual misery, no one should be surprised, of course, that there are so many many problems that we cannot comprehend. They have consistently higher levels of depression and other mental problems with their so-called community at odds with themselves. Lesbians and gay men do not get along, it turns out.
Third, and lastly, the gay community is not only compulsive, miserable, but they live an unhealthy and dangerous life, which flows from the very first cause. They die younger, have higher risk of drunkenness and drugs, they have higher rates of physical and sexual abuse, as well as STD, and even in this day and age, when you actually have shots to prevent AIDS, they still get AIDS.
Something’s wrong with them, unfortunately, they need Jesus. And their suicide rate is consistently higher. These are studies I’ve gotten from the 70s on, which is decades worth.
Rape was slightly higher among heterosexual women at 17%, compared to 13% for lesbians, but that probably depends on the study you use, but 46% for bisexuals. I don’t think you can fix any study for that. Stunningly, 40% of gay men, 47% of bisexual men reported sexual violence, compared to half that for heterosexual men, less than half, 21%.
Gay males make up a very small percentage of the American population, 2%, at least it was for a while, 1.5%. Yet 62% of early syphilis cases and 59% of new HIV infections stem from them. This is over 40 times greater than heterosexuals. A 2008 review of several studies conducted over, excuse me, including over 11,000 of the queer community, they studied themselves.
The review showed that both male and female homosexuals and bisexuals are 2.47 times more at risk for suicide, but when you dig into the data, it’s 4.28 for men, male homosexuals. It’s a little less for the women, apparently. In Sweden, the suicide rate among married gay males is three times greater than straight men.
This in spite of the cultural and legal system that has done more than almost any other country to accept and celebrate the gay life. They’ve done this since the 90s, and the later studies still show that even adjusting for HIV status, you can imagine having high suicide when you have AIDS. Even without AIDS, they have high suicide.
The National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force team surveyed over 7,000. They discovered 41% of self-identified transgender attempted suicide. The national average, excuse me, yet the number of transgender across the nation at that time, this is a couple of years ago, 1.6, but there, 41% will commit suicide.
The LGBTQ are compulsive, miserable, and risky. Their miserable and risky life is driven by their sexual compulsiveness, their lifestyles endanger themselves and others, and although their miserable life is often hidden behind glamour of Hollywood, it leads to death. All in all, the world, the queer world is a dangerous place, incomprehensible to the rest of us.
It just simply is. Don’t read the footnotes if you don’t want to go there. But this overview is not enough.
To equip us, we need to drill into some of the higher than normal odds of dangerous outcomes of homosexual leadership, because again, we have sister churches who are okay with having gay pastors. The most obvious is the sexual hazards. Consider the Roman Catholic Church or the Boy Scout scandals in the last 10 years.
That’s just the 10 years. They had it again 10 years before then, and then again 10 years before that. That is the Roman Catholic Church.
The Boy Scout was 2018-2019, as I recall. That was a new one. We’re talking thousands upon thousands of victims.
The horrors that brings is, you can just see the numbers if we don’t understand it. The horrors of sexual abuse are unfolded before the public in the last few years there.
In the eye-opening essay, Sex Offenders Groom Churches Too, psychologist and sex offender expert Anne Salter, interesting book, I have it as well, offers a glimpse into the mind of such wolves.
The essay is a must-read for churches, especially for their leaders. Salter warns in this essay that, quote, “many offenders report that religious people are even easier to fool than most.” Why would grooming, that is softening up resistance, is what that word is, be easier in churches? Therapist Mattson explains why, “abusers will exploit Christian principles of, what, forgiveness and grace for their own end, and use any spiritual authority to override people feeling uncomfortable or resisting their grooming.”
But with effeminate church leaders, such a conversation and such protection is harder to find. They find it too distasteful. This leaves the churches helpless without defense in the Lord’s vineyard.
But there’s more. It’s a stubborn fact that a disproportionate number of gay men are sexually attracted to prepubescent and adolescent boys. And on the other hand, it’s a widely known fact that the vast majority of sexual predators of adolescent, prepubescent girls are heterosexual men.
That’s just a known fact. And what? We adjust accordingly for that. When we have clubs going up in the mountains and you have the kids get together, we adjust accordingly.
We don’t do it for gays, because the gays is the pet sin of our age. In Salter’s helpful book, Predators, Pedophiles, and Rapists, and Sex Offenders, she offers one, at least one stat that really stands out: 232 child molesters admitted attempting more than 55,000 incidences of molestation.
They claimed to have been successful in 38,000 incidences and reported they had more than 17,000 victims total, all from 232 men. When you catch them, it’s too late, is the point. So don’t let them in the first place, is the other point.
Men who molest out-of-home female children averaged 20 victims. Although there were fewer of them, men who molested out-of-home male children were even more active, averaging 150 victims. We’re concerned about male predators, and we ought to be.
You got to be double concerned with your homosexual. These numbers are staggering, but the lopsided average of male-on-male molestation, more so. These numbers warn the church to pay attention and not to flirt with danger.
Even so, some may still ask, what about ex-gay pastors? They count. It is not the case, of course, that weak and soft men will necessarily lead to pro-gay churches, but the odds are higher. Let me tell you, having a gay minister will raise the odds to scary levels.
At the end of the day, we cannot know our leaders beyond their words and actions, for it is from patterns we draw inferences, both of words and actions and group analysis. But what kind of inference can we draw from a man who proudly proclaims, as Johnson did, that he was a homosexual, albeit celibate? We should probably conclude that he would be lenient towards homosexuals, and you’d be right. He gives plenty of examples in his life and in his own words.
Of course, not all gay men are loud and proud, but that doesn’t matter. The point of the pattern analysis is to draw probable conclusions, and with more data comes more certainty. So what I summarize in the compulsive, miserable, risky life of gays is a red flag for anyone who wants to face the truth.
If they don’t want to accept it, then don’t be around them, there’s a problem. They’re going to walk into a danger, unfortunately. Look at it this way.
Churches should be weary of someone with a record of sexual assault. Lots of talk about that. It’s foolish to think that if he says the right words, that he could be near young people.
Someone’s background is indeed relevant, even if they are Christians, because why? Christians still sin, asks David. As one internet wag quipped, “why are Christians not better at getting along with registered sex offenders that have repented of their attraction to others?” Why indeed, everyone knows why, but because sodomy is the pet sin of society, no one wants to state the obvious. Churches should be cautious with the gay community, but instead we’re being hit over the head with it.
Too many turn the gospel into license and excuse to harbor questionable people in the bosom of the church. Yet Christians would not treat other sinners, such as child-attracted men or con artists, the same way. Why? Because there’s an assumed degree of sinfulness, that some sins are more heinous or devious and require different responses, therefore.
Homosexuality, both the practice and desire or inclination, is also more heinous sin than others. This point is often forgotten in this discussion. It’s not just a violation of the seventh commandment, among others, but it’s always a violation of the seventh commandment.
Whereas heterosexual desires are allowed within marriage, homosexual desires are never allowed. It’s just forbidden across the board. We’re also called to let Christians suffer the consequences of their sins.
Repentant sinners know this. It’s an uncomfortable truth to be sure. Former thieves do not expect to be in charge of the church treasury.
Former drunkards don’t wish to be in charge of the communion wine. And church workers should not be gay under any circumstances. Christians, with genuine repentance, accept the consequences of their actions, submitting to the Father’s loving authority.
This may mean living with fewer friends, isolation, and perpetual medical problems. The costs are real, both for promiscuous heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. Let’s go back to Paul’s qualification for pastor, because some still think, “surely not all gays fall under these statistics. Mine’s the exception.”
To answer this, we could read verse two there, chapter two of First Timothy, which describes the acceptable minister as blameless. That’s the word he uses.
Now, it doesn’t mean moral perfection, of course, but such sanctified life that his life and his house are in order. And that would preclude homosexual attractions, even if he says, I’m X. The fact that he says X is already a problem. Further, Paul specifies his public witness.
Next, I think, verse four or five. Moreover, we read, he must have a good testimony among those who are outside, that is, outside the church, unbelievers, lest he fall into reproach in the snare of the devil. The world is scandalizing a church officer proudly declare their sexual orientation.
Even if a man is not loud about it, unbelievers are shocked to see that our standards are so low. They ask themselves, “does not the Lord sanctify his people enough that they can offer better leaders?” Look at it that way, because that’s how the Bible looks at it. They’d be scandalized.
As I pointed out at the beginning, by definition, church officers must be male. Having a gay, even if celibate, pastor is already a non-starter. This requirement of maleness is more than a reference to biological sex differences, but it includes what? The personality, the mindset, the wherewithal, the emotional stability, to stand fast with boldness that matches the physicality.
In short, the reality of the gross immorality and grooming nature of the average gay man and the explicit biblical requirements bar ex-homosexuals from public office. Even so, it’s good to show why this is necessary in a concrete way. After all, too many see it as too theoretical.
And so I give you here from various stories, as I think I’m over my time, from Johnson’s own book. Johnson’s own book, ironically, gave me more evidence than I could find elsewhere. He collected it all to show these ex-gay ministry churches from the 70s onward, we’re doing it all wrong, we’re going to do it right now.
Oh, that’s interesting. I found the book that he referenced a few times, but he conveniently left out a lot of details. Of course.
So Johnson surveys the past sort of stories of Christians in their churches in his book, Still Time to Care, and how they treated ex-homosexuals. From porn addiction and broken marriages to salacious sexual liaisons and pastors living double lives, Johnson unwittingly paints a dismal picture of gay acceptance in the church in his own book. Ex-gay groups of the 70s into the early 2000s disavowed gay identity.
They were more conservative than Johnson in that sense, and still failed across the board. For example, the former chairman of now-defunct international ex-gay organization Exodus International, Joe Dallas, says as firsthand evidence, the leader who appeared on national television extolling the ex-gay movement one year became, in many cases, the openly gay ex-leader opposing it years later. And we have this problem in the story of the ex-drag queen John Polk.
He met his future wife at New Hope, which is an ex-gay ministry in California. They eventually became well-known spokespersons for Exodus International. They were on Newsweek cover.
This is the 90s and early 2000s. Over time, as with most organizations, they thought it was a good idea to take this man as a token gay, and so he became the homosexual gender specialist at Focus on the Family. I think you know where this is going, right? He got caught in a bar.
He has a family. He has kids. All the words he used made no difference.
He was still trouble and danger. And the organization, however, let it slide, both of them, Exodus and Focus on the Family. Exodus let him temporarily resign from the board of directors.
Meanwhile, the other parachurch, that is, Focus on the Family, did not fire him, opting for a public rebuke, an unenforceable promise that he would continue to disavow the gay lifestyle. My last story closes my talk here because it portrays a hazard many are unaware of or do not want to talk about when it comes to LGBT folks and leadership. This story is about Jim Pocta.
Jim Pocta is a ruling elder at New St. Peter Presbyterian Church, PCA. Like Johnson, Pocta is a homosexual professing celibacy. As expected, he is quick to defend gays and transgender, repentant or not, while admonishing straights for being concerned with their rising influence, as shown on Twitter.
I have the screenshot evidence. I have the receipts. Yet, like many in those circles, Pocta does not tell his whole gay story.
I had to reach way into the internet to find his early review, in which the backstory we have here personifies a danger in the church few know about, predatory gays who try to convert straight men, as his word. Groomed as a young child, Pocta quickly acclimated to the gay lifestyle by his teens. He moved from “sexual exploration games,” his words, to selling his body for easy cash.
It’s astonishing, the number of stories like that. This state of ungodly affairs changed when he, quote, “really believed the truth about the gospel,” his words, of a loving God during a local revival meeting. Energized, he started traveling with a revival group, garnering jealousy from his boyfriend, he still had a boyfriend. The two confronted each other in a hotel room, and it didn’t turn into a fight any longer.
You know where this went. They got caught in the act by fellow Christians there who warned him, disavowed him, and of course he was angry. And so Pocta doubled down, that’s his own description, of his wickedness in response to how he explained the interview.
Pocta claims to have spent the next year as a sexual “missionary” trying to seduce as many Christian men as possible. That’s his story. If he couldn’t attract them as gay, he tried dressing up with glittery sweaters, mascara, and platform shoes.
“I was really aflame. I did a mean Streisand,” he said, laughing across an open Bible open on the desk. This behavior is not unique to Pocta.
GQ magazine offers a guide to gays lusting after heterosexuals. GQ magazine has been lost for a long time apparently. Vice offers an article along the same lines.
And Greg Johnson’s old book acknowledges that sodomites tend to like it younger victims. Again, he didn’t intend to explain it that way, but that’s exactly what it is. You read carefully.
So the sum of the matter is this. At the end of the day, experience, common sense, and biblical truth answers the question whether effeminate men, either heterosexual or homosexual, make churches pro-gay. They most definitely do.
It will happen one way or the other. Either go slow or it’s going to go fast, but it’s going to happen. None of this is to say, of course, that repentant homosexuals cannot be saved, born again, justified, and sanctified.
Rather, it is to acknowledge that sanctification this side of eternity is a matter of growth. Yet congregational ministers, elders, and deacons are required to be of such Christian growth as to preclude gay officers. As such, a faithful churches will be unwelcome places for predators and wolves.
Risk will be minimized as our churches become a haven for Christians fighting the world, the flesh, and the devil, wanting strong confrontational teaching when needed. And that is best done with robust and sanctified church shepherds that exemplify the love of Christ and the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit.
