Does Your Church Encourage Homosexuality?

Undoubtedly, many who read this title are members of churches where homosexuality is considered morally wrong. These people will think: “No, my church doesn’t encourage homosexuality. We are against it.” Determining which churches promote homosexuality and which do not may seem obvious, but it isn’t.

Three Churches that Encourage Homosexuality

There are several ways that churches can encourage someone toward homosexuality. There is of course the obvious way, such as when a church says: “We do not condemn homosexuality. God made some people to be homosexual just as he has made some to be heterosexual.” There are churches that say this as directly as I just did. They welcome homosexuals believing that homosexuality can honor God just as much as heterosexuality. Let’s call these type of churches Openly Approving Churches. It is easy to see how these churches encourage homosexuality.

Then there are the churches that rail against these kinds of shameless promotions of homosexuality under Christ’s name. Thinking that they actively discourage homosexuality, they pride themselves on the way in which they condemn it, call down judgment on those who practice it, and rid themselves of anyone who struggles with it. These churches often have only have two words for those they discover to be homosexuals in their churches: “Get out!” (Ok, maybe three or four: “Get out, queer!/flaming homo!, etc.”). Let’s call these type of churches Openly Condemning Churches.

Then there are churches that generally don’t have much to say about the issue, but when they do address the subject, they simply state that it is a sin to practice homosexuality. They don’t want homosexuals in their church and wish they would just quietly go away. Let’s call these type of churches Silently Condemning Churches. I suspect that the majority of churches fit into this category.

I want to argue that each of these three responses to homosexuality are in fact responsible (in some measure) for encouraging it and bringing about the very thing they claim to hate. Here’s how it happens… 

Suppose that you belong to a Silently Condemning Church. It is common knowledge that the church doesn’t approve of homosexuality but it is rarely talked about. If someone was to admit to being a homosexual or if someone who struggles with homosexuality were to begin attending the church they would ostracize this person. He/she would not be welcome at the church and some members would prompt the pastor to have a talk with this person and let him/her know that he/she should leave the church. The pastor perhaps tells the person that what he/she is doing is sin and that he/she should stop having feelings toward members of the same sex. Ultimately (and rather quickly) the pastor makes known to this person (explicitly or implicitly) that he/she does not belong in this church.

In this scenario, what has the church communicated to this person about his/her homosexuality? In effect, it has said: The church has nothing to offer you. The church is not for people who struggle with your sin. We leave you to your sin. A homosexual is what you are and must be, but what you are is wrong and we offer no help with it. Furthermore, Jesus Christ can’t help you. He only helps normal people who sin but you are beyond the pale.

The person hears this message loud and clear, and, even worse, believes it. Your church convinces him/her of something he/she either already accepted or had been considering for a while: your real identity is that of a homosexual. It is who you really are. If the person ever thought that homosexuality might be wrong, that notion is quickly abandoned for the belief that it is never wrong to be true to yourself and to be who you are. A God that would judge someone for being who they are and for doing what they cannot change is evil.

Now, maybe this person wishes that he/she wasn’t a homosexual. Nevertheless, believing this is true, he/she practices homosexuality. This person has found out that the people out there who are against homosexuality are only in the business of condemning it, they don’t have anything else to say about it.

This is how your church pushes people (further) toward homosexuality.

In an Openly Condemning Church, the process takes place even more quickly and is more severe. It is possible that in Silently Condemning Churches people might initially think (as mistaken as they might be) that the church might be willing to help them in their struggle. But people who have sexual feelings toward the same sex or are involved in homosexuality are under no delusion that Openly Condemning Churches will help them.  Not only will these churches will not seek  to help someone who wants help in their struggle with homosexuality, they live for the opportunity to banish them. These kinds of churches very quickly push people further toward homosexuality.

Why Churches Unintentionally Encourage Homosexuality

But why do churches do this to people who are involved in or tempted by homosexuality? They don’t usually do this to people who struggle with anger, food addiction, depression, etc. They are even more longsuffering toward people who commit sins of the heterosexual variety. Furthermore, they are often more than accepting to those who make life difficult for anyone who struggles with the above sins.

I propose that there are at least three reasons the Silently Condemning Churches and the Openly Condemning Churches unintentionally encourage homosexuality.

The first reason that churches treat people this way is that they view homosexual behavior to be something that marks one as an unbeliever. Even in cases where a church’s view isn’t this well-formed, homosexual behavior or homosexual feelings at least indicates a person who is clearly not one of us. It is harder to say that someone who struggels with, say, anger demonstrates themselves to be an unbeliever since it is something with which we all struggle. We view anger as a common sin. It is normalized for us and so we are much more accepting of those who struggle with it. Where condemning a sin doesn’t require us to condemn ourselves, we are much more likely to tolerate it and perhaps even stand by someone else in their fight against it. But where a church feels like it can condemn others without condemning itself the temptation to do so is great. When we don’t understand how someone could be involved in homosexuality or have homosexual feelings we are prone to consider it one of the really awful sins. Sins that a believer (or at least someone who belongs to our group) couldn’t be in involved in.

The second reason that churches treat people this way is that the church has not historically had to deal with homosexuality in its midst. This is new territory. The history of Christian thought on the subject has promoted the idea that it is a sin that is only committed by those outside the church. Think of how little has been written in the history of the church that addresses the subject of how to bear someone’s burden who struggles with homosexual desire or is involved in homosexual activity. The social pressure to approve of homosexuality is something the church has not faced before (or at least not since the first and second centuries). But there is no sign that this pressure is decreasing and so the church must confront a problem that it is not used to confronting: how do we relate to church members who have homosexual feelings or are involved in homosexual activity? When a contemporary church, operating with the historical view that homosexuality is a sin that is only committed by those outside the church, encounters a member who admits to homosexual desire their first inclination is to put them on the other side of the doors where the church has historically taught those who are involved in such things belong.

The third reason that churches treat people this way is that homosexuality is often viewed (by both Christians and non-Christians) as a person’s greatest identity-determining factor in a way that other sins are not. Someone who is angry doesn’t call him/herself “an angry” the way someone who is involved in homosexuality considers him/herself “a homosexual”. An angry person doesn’t associate him/herself in groups of angry people. Even heterosexuality isn’t treated as one’s primary identity marker the way homosexuality is. Both homosexuals and heterosexuals often think of homosexuality as what is most important about someone who practices homosexuality. The church has bought into this view of homosexuality as well, and so it presents a challenge to treating someone as having  an identity in Christ that is greater than his/her struggle with homosexuality.

These reasons work together to explain why churches push someone away who might otherwise seek help in their fight against sin.

So what should we do?

There are those who have given up fighting against the sin of homosexuality. We must love them, be gracious to them, call them to repentance, and pray for them. But we cannot biblically consider them to be part of the church, just as we cannot consider to be part of the church anyone who has given up fighting against sin of any kind.

But those that I’m primarily considering here are those I’ve continually referred to by the phrase “struggling with homosexuality”. It is those who fit this description that the church must bear with, show patience toward, bring under the ministry of word and sacrament, and remind of Christ’s forgiveness. They must be treated as part of the company of the rest of us who are living as simultaneous saints and sinners.

Christ does not give up on those who turn to him.  He stubbornly fought against sin for them. To push away from the church those who call for help as they fight against any sin is to treat sin as greater than grace, to withhold the resources of forgiveness and strength, and to proclaim a savior who is too weak to hold the battle for them.

I don’t have much recommendation beyond this. I don’t think we should have much more to say than this. In thinking about how to relate to those who acknowledge that homosexuality is a sin but are still tempted by it, fall into it, but turn to Christ for hope, we must avoid treating their sin as somehow worse than ours. The effectiveness of the church community in the lives of those who struggle with homosexuality will, in large part, come about precisely because we do not distinguish “them” from “us” and do not treat their sin as a greater offense to Christ than ours.

Homosexuality is a sin just as adultery is a sin, just as pride is a sin, along with embezzlement, or hating the guy at work who annoys you. These sins will, of course, have different consequences in one’s life, and the consequences may come in varying degrees. But with regard to its status as a sin, homosexuality has nothing going for it that your sins in the past half-hour don’t. We have then only two options: push people further toward homosexuality by our hostility, alienation, neglect, and self-righteousness; or, with confidence in the power of Christ, stand by those who are struggling with the sin of homosexuality in the same way that we must stand by others in any sin, and in the same way that we desire others to stand by us.