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JAMES RONDINONE PUBLICATIONS
Category:
Religion
Publisher: James Rondinone Publications
ISBN-10: B09K1TYM2N
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 161
Copyright: October 24, 2021
ISBN-13: 9798499921913
Price: $1.99 (eBook)
This book is written for Christians struggling in not knowing how to deal with their sexual inclinations or involvements, along with the perception that their fellow believers are not fully accepting them and their sexual orientation.
This book will also help us understand what it means to be accepted, equal, or one in the body of Christ.
Furthermore, it will clarify who we are in Christ, what God’s plan is for our lives, and what kind of sexual relationships the Word of God condones?
And ultimately, it will teach us how to be no longer subject to the cravings and desires of our sexual weaknesses but rather how to operate in God’s love.
This book talks about the subject of sexual identity that has been to say the least a controversial and contentious topic in the New Testament church. Hopefully, this study will provide clear and concise information about it from the Word of God that will help to clear up any misunderstandings and provide scriptural resources for mental renewal and inward transformation.
STORYLINE
I think all of us have questions about a particular sexual behavior we have been, or are thinking about, engaging in as to whether Scripture condones it or not. Likewise, I’m sure all of us have had, or still have, concerns we are wrestling with in respect to how others in the church are treating us because of our sexual desires or relationships.
This book will help us in becoming aware of what it truly means to be accepted, equal, or one in the body of Christ.
I’m sure that each of us have our own presumptions as to why we believe God should approve of our sexual inclinations. What we will be made aware of is that there are actually four different words for love in the New Testament. Subsequently, we will be informed about what each one means and whether the actions of such indicate expressions of godliness or worldliness.
We will also learn about how God sees us and who we are in Christ. This will culminate in the realization that God can set us free from these sexual desires and relationships that inhibit our walk with Him when we choose to appropriate His solution.
What is this solution, you ask?
The answer is like trying to find a buried treasure. You need a map. This book is your map. Start digging.
Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
I am writing this study to help fellow believers who are having difficulty walking with God, especially in addressing their sexual inclinations or propensities. This study came about as my wife and I were watching the news on TV, and a story about sexual abuse in a particular mainstream church was being reported. The allegation was that many, who were leaders in the church, preyed upon young boys and forced them to have sexual relations. Not only were these actions reprehensible, but something else we were told was even more shocking. There were some in leadership who were aware of these liaisons but did not report them as criminal actions to the civil authorities. In fact, they did all they could to keep quiet whatever happened, along with eventually relocating these sexual predators to resume their position in the church somewhere else.
A few days later, my wife found an article on the internet involving sexual misconduct that had to do with a well-known Christian megachurch. I was familiar with this church mainly because of its Christian music, which I listen to almost daily. So, she sent the article to my email, and I proceeded to read it. The name of the article is entitled, Sex Abuse & Gay Conversion Therapy: The Dark Past of Justin Bieber’s Megachurch Hillsong.1
What resonated with me were a few things. The founder of the original ministry, which was initially under a different name, allegedly admitted to abusing some of the young boys in the church. Eventually, he resigned. His son took over the ministry under a new name. As I continued to read the article, something else caught my attention, and that was how there were some members and/or former members, who were not happy with the church’s stance on gay marriage, gays in leadership, and in general, how they were being treated.
Some of their comments set my mind in motion. I wanted to help them in the perception of their walk with God. One of their comments was, “I can’t worship at a church knowing that I am not fully accepted and considered equal to all those around me.”2 Another one was, “… surrounded by people that might love me as a person but do not accept me as being gay; instead, tolerate me.”3 The final one was, “…people who don’t recognize that any relationship that I have with a man is part of God’s plan and that it would be full of love, equal to any other.”4
Certain sections of the article have been omitted so that the three comments mentioned are what is focused upon. I included the article so that you could be aware of the context in which these perceptions were conveyed.
SEX ABUSE & GAY CONVERSION THERAPY: THE DARK PAST OF JUSTIN BIEBER’S MEGACHURCH HILLSONG
… The forerunner to Hillsong was founded in 1977 by Australian pastor Frank Houston, who created the Sydney Christian Life Centre. Frank’s son—current Hillsong lead pastor Brian Houston—and Brian’s wife, Bobbie (also a pastor), worked there under Frank until 1983, when the couple left to start their own church. They called it Hills Christian Life Centre, named for the suburbs of Sydney in New South Wales where it was located. They started with just 45 congregants; today, Hillsong churches operate in 14 countries and claim to welcome some 100,000 worshippers every week. They believe that Jesus Saves and the Bible should be read literally—and that worship should be an experience: singing and clapping, speaking in tongues, faith healing.
In 1999, when Frank retired—or was fired, depending on your semantic druthers—Brian merged his father’s church with his own, and rebranded under the name Hillsong, after his in-house music ministry that was quickly winning fans worldwide. Hillsong’s biggest draw has always been the music: Some 40 albums and hundreds of songs have been produced under the church’s umbrella since 1992, raking in millions. …
[This] brings us to what Brian Houston calls “the elephant in the room,” or “the gay situation.”
***
When Alex Pittaway’s youth pastor stood before a group of 800 evangelical Christian boys and men in Sydney and shouted, “Shirts off!” everybody listened. Boys as young as 13 and their leaders, some as old as 30, all ripped off shirts in a sign of godly macho solidarity. Someone jumped on stage and was shouted down, with jeers of “Go to the gym, mate!”
It wasn’t just pastor Scott “Sanga” Samways (the nickname is slang in Australia for a sausage sandwich) who utilized partial nudity as a church-approved bonding technique, Pittaway said. At youth group and Bible camp, or any time when men and women were separated, Alex remembers “a hell of a lot of homoerotic [behavior]."
For Alex—a closeted gay teen and member of Hillsong—the command was terrifying. Did the brothers in Christ slapping his back or complimenting his abs know he was gay? If someone knew, would he think Alex was “looking”?
Alex quit the church in [2008] after a traumatic coming out where he says he was referred by his youth pastor to counseling that proposed to make him straight—the kind of conversion therapy we now know is based on pseudoscience, as ineffectual as it is damaging.
For years, in fact, coming out to a Hillsong pastor landed a church member in just such an ‘ex-gay’ program. According to former members, Hillsong first helped congregants struggling with their sexuality pray their gay away in Exit Ministries, started by Frank Houston, or Mercy Ministries for lesbians; the church then outsourced the conversion work to Living Waters (self-shuttered in 2014) or Exodus ([/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/06/21/exodus-closes-marking-official-end-of-the-ex-gay-movement.html] closed in 2013), or maybe an online course like Setting Captives Free (banned in the Apple Store in 2013). Self-proclaimed reformed [gay] and former executive director of Exodus, Sy Rogers—who now identifies as transgender and is married to a woman—wrote books and tapes and would preach at Hillsong conferences about overcoming his gay demons. He’d tell the struggling faithful: “You gotta learn to bow down and obey and deal with it.” Rogers’s current ministry has moved away from the ex-gay [message,] and though Rogers hasn’t said so publicly, Brian Houston told a blogger that Rogers probably regrets his involvement with Exodus.
But Hillsong doesn’t try to “fix” gay congregants anymore. Sometime around 2011, Houston distanced his church from conversion programs, and he now talks often about the “weight” the church bears when it comes to its treatment of gays and lesbians. “They feel like ‘maybe I’m gay’ and they go to a youth leader and they are rejected,” Brian said in a 2013 sermon. “At that [moment,] a great hatred comes in. At that moment some of them have gone so far with the rejection and gone to parents who didn’t understand and ended up committing suicide. That’s the weight we live with.”
It should be said here that Alex, now an openly gay seminary student in Indiana, still thinks of Hillsong fondly, speaks of it warmly, and often catches himself humming the church tunes. He says that while he didn’t feel safe or comfortable trying to find God in a building where most of the people in it thought he was going to hell, for those who don’t define themselves by their sexuality, who can compartmentalize, it’s a fine place to “worship anonymously.”
Ben Fenlon, a three-year member of Hillsong’s London satellite, explained his reasons for quitting the church in a piece for the Huffington Post. He wrote, “I can’t worship at a church knowing that I am not fully accepted and considered equal to all those around me. Surrounded by people that might love me as a person but do not accept me as being gay; [instead,] tolerate me. People who might tell me that being gay is okay, but on the inside are praying for me to let Jesus move in my life and change me. People who don’t recognize that any relationship that I have with a man is part of God’s plan and that it would be full of love, equal to any other.”
Alex told me about a gay friend who had been booted from his position in Hillsong’s children’s ministry after he came out and another who, after coming out to Hillsong leadership, was relieved of his duties as an usher. “He wasn’t even allowed to serve cups of coffee or help direct traffic in the parking lot,” he said. (Hillsong did not return requests for comment on these alleged incidents.)
“Gay people need to know that when they go to Hillsong, they have to go to the back of the bus.” Alex said. “Hillsong is hip and attractive and contemporary, but there’s certainly nothing contemporary about what LGBT people will face if they want to be a leader in the church or offer themselves up for service. That’s something [Hillsong] will have to be upfront with, and they haven’t been so far.”
To be fair, Hillsong’s task isn’t an easy one. How does an extremely conservative [Pentecostal] church fight irrelevancy and attract those coveted millennials—a group that’s been running from churches and overwhelmingly supports gay marriage and equal rights for LGBT people—and maintain its tithing, if intolerant, base at the same time?
Hillsong has taken certain halting steps that place the church to the left of its conservative counterparts, some of which have labeled the Aussie megachurch as [unbiblical] and say its leaders have sold out God’s word for a younger, more tolerant crowd. For [example] Hillsong Leadership College recently removed homosexuality from the list of “sexual sins” in the student code of conduct. And some members have taken Pastor Carl Lentz’s stance—[basically,] that homosexuality is a sin, [okay], but no worse than any other, and he gets why everyone is always asking, but he’d rather not address it, because Jesus pretty much didn’t, and Hillsong loves everyone anyway—as a move in the right direction.
It’s not just conservative churches that are criticizing Hillsong’s stance. Anna Flowers, pastor at Greenpoint Reformed Church in Brooklyn—a “progressive, young and vibrant church” where she shares the pulpit with two lesbian pastors and one transgender male pastor—has tweeted about what she calls Hillsong’s false permissiveness. “not as hip as Hillsong Hipsters, but we actually love and accept everyone,” she said in one tweet. In another: “drives us NUTS when Hipster evang. churches fool ppl into thinking they are progressive.” Flowers tells me, “[There] are far more truly progressive churches than people realize. And sometimes churches look more progressive than they really are.”
I read as many of Lentz’s statements on the LGBT issue as I could [find,] and he gave what I consider the most straightforward answer to Jonathan Merritt at Religion News Service in August of 2015 (emphasis mine):
“Our beliefs on biblical marriage and sexual morality have never changed at Hillsong church. Yet we stay open and desperate in our pursuit of the [whosoever’s].”
What that means in practical terms is that Hillsong wants anyone and everyone in the [seats] but neither supports same-sex marriage nor allows LGBT people to serve in positions of leadership. As Brian Houston clarified last year, following the sacking of a choir director who announced his same-sex engagement to another member of the choir, acceptance of gays and lesbians extends only as far {the pew}.
And for some, including Josh Canfield and Reed Kelly, the couple at the center of the choir controversy, that’s enough. For [now,] at least.
Ben Gresham also still attends Hillsong in Sydney, despite a complicated past with the church, because he believes gay and lesbian members are key to helping the church move forward. “I try and speak to church pastors and leaders when I can and have had some encouraging discussions,” he said.
Gresham has told the story of coming out at Hillsong on his blog. After three years of ex-gay therapy, constant praying, even undergoing an exorcism, he realized he would never be straight. The thought of never being able to enter the kingdom of heaven, to marry a woman, to be the person Hillsong told him that God wanted him to be, led him to cut himself with a razor blade, and one night, to drive his speeding car nearly off the side of a highway. He considers the last-minute change of heart a miracle.
“For me, Hillsong still feels like home. It has been a source of harm for me in the past but continues to bring me much joy and help me grow in my faith, which is invaluable,” he said. “As a gay man and a [Christian,] I would love to see Hillsong fully affirm and include its queer members. I hope it happens sooner rather than [later,] but given my [experience,] I remain doubtful.
“Hillsong is a big [church,] and so it takes time to move it forward. I just wish they would move a bit faster.”5 …
What was being conveyed seemed to be saying to me that answers to these comments needed to be addressed. So, let’s see if we can find a biblical perspective on each of these concerns. But before I attempt to do this, I would like to present my testimony. The purpose of this is to personally identify with those believers who are having a difficult time in their walk with God. Along with this, it’s presented in order to provide clarity as to how we can walk victoriously in Christ irrespective of the sexual inclinations or tendencies that try to distract us every day.
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