Cru's LGBTQ+ Teaching Series

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. Yesterday, I released a podcast episode on the recent history of crew's adoption of some social justice teachings, namely critical race theory, and more recently, LGBTQ plus normalization.

And I chronicle how I, over the last few years, have been involved in exposing some of this. And I've talked to numerous crew staff and former crew staff, well over 20, I would say at this point, who have shared their stories with me.

And my gut is that crew is probably not an organization that is going to right the ship, because in every case, whether it's internal or external pressure, they seem to be unwilling to do what the Bible calls repentance, to turn from their sin, admit that they've done something wrong, and then to course correct and be transparent about this course correction.

Instead, what you find is they either double down or they say they pretend there's nothing to see here, or they will retract things without admitting that they've retracted anything. And so at this point, I'm not even quite sure what crew is teaching in regards to sexuality and gender, though I believe the statement on their website is insufficient.

It's inadequate. But up until at the very least, late last year, maybe they're still using some of this material. They were using material called Compassionate and Faithful. It was a whole course, about six hours of video, a number of printed materials.

And I did a podcast last year in which I went over some of these printed materials and explained why I believe them to be in error. You can go to a link in the info section for this video, or if you're listening in the info section in the audio version on iTunes, and you can click that link and download those materials if you want to look at them.

And I would encourage you, don't just take my word for it. Compare what you see in those materials to scripture. Look at them yourself. Hopefully my commentary will help you and point you in the right direction, but look at them yourself.

And if you want to watch all six hours, you can do that yourself as well. Some of this material that was previously not available became available last week, and a number of other outlets have started talking about this and exposing it and attempting to explain why there's errors in it.

And this is my attempt to explain in further detail why I believe this Compassionate and Faithful teaching is in error. Now this is going to be a long podcast, might be one of my longest, if not my longest ones by the time I'm done.

I'm not sure yet, but I've distilled about six hours of video into half an hour. And I'm going to comment on that half an hour, so it's going to take some time. I'm going to try to be as brief as I can, but knowing me, I tend to try to be thorough as well.

So we'll see how long this goes. But I want to be crystal clear about my motives. I was at Crew in a campus situation as I suppose a member helping out with Crew for a very brief period of time, years and years ago.

I have not been involved in Crew since then. I am not involved in Crew currently. So why am I doing this? Why have I spent since 2019 much time going through Crew materials and exposing and explaining why I think there's problems?

Well, there's really one reason more than anything else, and that's because I understand the importance of Crew. And I would say the same thing about other campus organizations like the Navigators or InterVarsity.

InterVarsity is probably to the left of Crew, to be quite honest. Navigators, I'm not exactly sure where they're at. But these are organizations that have a profound effect on young people. And I've been involved in a number of campus organizations.

It's one of the ministries I enjoy. And it really bothers me, especially at that formative age, to see Christian organizations providing inadequate direction. And that's a heresy in some of what I'm about to share with you, in my opinion.

And I believe that this is biblically what we would consider false teaching, some of it. And so I'm going to share that with you in the hope that there can be some change. Now, there's two kinds of change that can happen.

One is that Crew can internally course correct in biblical repentance. That has yet to happen, whether it's been internal or external pressure. So you saw recently Rosaria Butterfield at Liberty University called out Crew.

You saw World Magazine do a piece on this. You saw staff, so this is more internal pressure, the Mundells coming out and saying this teaching, compassionate and faithful, is bad. And we basically, they left Crew over the response that Crew gave.

Crew didn't want to have, in their words, a biblical conversation about this, where they got out their Bibles and really talk through it. It was more of a neutralizing, a threat. And the Mundells felt like a threat.

And I know they're not alone. And one of the things that bothers me about organizations like Crew, and Crew might be one of the worst ones in the Christian world that I've dealt with, is so many of the staff members who have come out and shared their stories are afraid to share them publicly.

They're afraid that they're going to be in trouble, even after they've left Crew. There is some kind of a control element that Crew has. They feel like they're insubordinate, that they're in sin. It's like a child when they contradict their parents.

That's how they feel. And it's odd because I've noticed this is a pattern with Crew. It's like, like, I just expect that from Crew staff. It's very few staff are willing to come out publicly and talk about their negative experiences.

And there's many negative experiences that, I remember one staff member a few years ago told me she was in California and she had been required, she was required to go look at a homosexual art exhibit that had some profane things in it.

And she was told not to evangelize while she was there, but just to understand what queer culture is. And this was part of being missional and all these kinds of things. I mean, this stuff has been going on now for years in different quarters in Crew.

Now it may not be, if you're a staff member listening, where you are. Crew's a big organization with a lot of moving parts, and it's different in every place. But this has become, in my mind, more and more prevalent.

And this compassionate and faithful teaching that was, as far as I know, being implemented fairly widely within Crew is evidence that Crew is going, has been going in a bad direction. And when you're young and impressionable, and you're a staff member at a college campus, and you're trying to lead students, then this kind of thing is very appealing.

It promises, or at least gives you the impression, that you can be compassionate. And you'll see with some of the video that I'm showing you, this really seems to mean being somewhat affable and acceptable to the world, while at the same time remaining doctrinally sound and pure.

And this is very appealing when Christianity is targeted on campus. So that's the spoonful of sugar in my mind that makes this heresy go down. And so I want to expose the heresy and show that this sugar isn't good.

This isn't actually being, much of this is not compassionate, much of what you hear in this teaching. So anyway, my motive is to help. If there's a course correction, then the course correction needs to happen.

My suspicion, of course, is that probably won't because over the course of years, both internal and external pressure have not brought that about. The other hope is that if it's not course correction, that at least people will leave.

And if you're someone who you have good relationships with the people who contribute to you, to you, maybe you can start your own 501c3. That's what some have done. Or you can join another campus organization.

I don't know which one to choose. I'm not familiar with campus organizations, but Ratio Christie might be one. I know some have gone there. You have Campus Ambassadors. That's another one. And you might want to look at, and maybe there's others.

But I just want to get the ball rolling in that direction. There needs to be some kind of accountability here. And that's my motive. I care about college students. I care about campus ministry. And I care about young people.

And so that's what's motivating this for me at least. So with that, we will get started on the video. I want to share with you a number of clips from this compassionate and faithful teaching. If you go to link in the info section, you can find this montage that I prepared from the six hours of video.

And you can check it out for yourself without my commentary. But I'm going to start out just playing this for you.

Same-Sex Attraction, Gender Dysphoria, and the Goal of Comfort in Cru

We want those who might experience same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria to thrive in serving with Crew.

So that was Mark Rudder, the Leadership Development Coordinator for Crew. And he starts off this whole series by telling you the purpose. And he talks about people serving with Crew. So you're thinking staff, people that Crew is actually paying to do ministry.

And they experience same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria, and he wants them to feel comfortable. Now, that should raise some red flags for you, that Crew has staff. These are people that are carrying the message of Crew.

And this is a Christian ministry that are experiencing these things. And what you're not hearing him say is, we want repentance. You're hearing him say, we want them to be comfortable. We want them to feel accepted at Crew.

We want them to not feel like they're unwanted or unwelcome because they experienced these sinful inclinations. These are sinful things. And we would never, you're gonna hear me say this a lot, but we would never accept this about other sins.

We wouldn't say this about someone who has an inclination towards breaking one of the other commandments, even the 10 commandments, right? So if it was not a sexual sin, but let's say it was something along the lines of hatred or murder, or, you know, you pick whichever one you want.

We would never say this kind of thing. But the Bible identifies these desires, these covetousness desires as sin. And so that's part of the problem. It would sound so strange if we heard Mark Rutter saying, hey, we want those who are really attracted to taking things without asking to feel comfortable while serving at Crew.

Well, they shouldn't feel comfortable if that's the kind of thing that they're engaged in, that they shouldn't feel, they should feel comfortable that there's an opportunity to repent and there's help for them.

But that's not the kind of person, if they're characterized by this thing, by a sin, especially if they make that part of their identity that you want serving and representing Crew, let alone Christ. And then to top that off with, we want them to be comfortable.

So this is setting the stage for the rest of this entire teaching. So I just shut my eyes and said, okay, fine, I'll be a Christian. It's been over a decade since then, and I'm still attracted to women.

The question early on became, what does it mean for me to walk in faithfulness in the midst of this experience? So you had Rachel Gilson, who's part of their theological team, and she's saying that she still experiences these things.

So if you were wondering what Mark Rutter was talking about, what he meant by people who are staff in Crew, who experienced same-sex attraction, there's an example of someone who is staff in Crew, who does experience that and is comfortable with still having this inclination, or at least identifying that she has this, and really not seeing that inclination as something to mortify, something that's sinful, but seeing it as something to live with and make peace with.

That's the overall sentiment you're going to hear more and more as we play these clips from within Crew, that this isn't a tendency that we need to be mortifying. This is something that you don't act on it, but it's okay for it to kind of exist on this level in which it's not physical, this more non-physical level.

You can have these things and still be married and still.

Engage in ministry and not feel shame for it. Jonah didn't think that God wanted to reach that people group, but God proved him wrong. God did want to reach them because He's our Savior God. He wants to reach all the people groups of our world.

If we're going to be wise missionaries, we need to understand the history, the culture, and the language of the people group we're trying to reach. In history, with regard to LGBT folks, we find systemic victimization.

In Nazi Germany, gay men were subjected to high rates of mistreatment, being tracked by the Nazi government, arrested, being placed in concentration camps where they experienced incredibly high death rates because of low rations and worst work assignments.

During the AIDS crisis, thousands of young gay men died alone in hospice care. They died alone, some of them becoming like little boys crying out for mom and dad, but their parents refused to come even when they pleaded.

Why? Because their parents had disowned them years ago. Today, there's a crisis of trans people being assaulted and murdered. Victimization isn't just in the past, it continues in our world today. Especially in other cultures, LGBT people can face death, life imprisonment, and other forms of victimization that mirror the past.

Wise missionaries always take note and learn from history because we want to understand the sensitivities and the vulnerabilities that marginalized people face, even in our world today. Missionaries also look at the culture of the people group they're wanting to reach.

Specifically with regard to LGBT folks, what's it like growing up gay or transgender in our world today? A lot of people would say a gay marriage is legal, LGBT rights have accelerated, there's no problem, everyone loves gay people.

This is not what the research shows, and it's certainly not what our ministry experience shows in our direct work with LGBT youth. We see high rates of children at a very young age both feeling different and being treated differently, such as experiencing name calling, teasing, shaming, excluding, and bullying.

By their teens, these youth experience inward-facing shame that can develop into self-hatred, as well as an external expression of anger and frustration. This is exhausting to deal with, and often it can lead to high levels of depression and suicidality.

Also, there can be very high levels of homelessness resulting from family rejection. LGBT youth make up 20 to 40 percent of homeless youth in America today. It's not easy growing up LGBT, even in our world today.

Missionaries also need to understand the language of the people group that they're seeking to reach. This is very true for marginalized people. We can't reach people if we're not willing to understand their language.

This involves learning, asking honoring questions, and listening with open hearts and minds, and being willing to die to our own discomforts. Every missionary understands that we will do the work to learn history, culture, and language of the people group we're seeking to reach, because this is the pathway to gaining proximity in people's lives, earning trust, and building the opportunity to share Christ with people where they are, as they are.

Okay, there's a lot there. That's Bill Henson,.

And he is, I guess he's a missions guy. He's trying to communicate to crew staff how they should approach the LGBTQ people, I guess movement, but more the people that are involved in this. The first thing that you need to notice is he compares them to a culture.

He really says they are a culture. Now, I guess I'm a stickler a little bit on this, but I think it is an important point before I get to some of the more major points here, that culture is something that belongs to God.

It's actually a good thing. There can be bad elements in culture. There can be sinful elements in culture, but culture itself is something that God gives. God even created languages. He created peoples.

He formed the borders of their habitation, as Acts 17 says. I mean, cultures are distinct. They're unique. They're particular. The only way that you get culture is by cultivation, as the word implies, which means having children, having progeny, and rearing them in a certain way so that they will mimic their parents in certain ways.

There's an agreement unspoken between the parents, the children, and then their progeny in turn. Cultures are something that are good. Cultures are life-giving things. What you have in the LGBTQ plus community, if you want to call it that—I don't even like calling it that because it's not a community either.

It's really just people who mostly are enthusiastic about their sinful choices and some don't think they've made choices. Whether they feel like they're making choices or not, the people who proudly wear that label are people who embrace a certain aspect of sin that's opposed to God.

They embrace that either in their identity or their inclinations or whatever word they want to choose. They're saying, this is part of me somehow, and so I belong in this group. For there to be a culture, you have to have at least more than one person.

There's a group of people in this, but it's not life-giving. It's not actually a culture. It's fake. Some people call it James White. Christian apologists will say this is the culture of death because they can't give life.

There's no life to be given. You can't procreate. The thing is, it's not even that. It's not even a culture of death. It's not even a culture. It's just fake in that way. You can get together with your friends who are enthusiastic, let's say, about a video game or a board game or something, but it doesn't mean that you've now formed a culture.

Maybe I'm a stickler on this, using that word properly, but I think we legitimize these things and form umbilical categories when we start calling things like this culture. We wouldn't say there's a culture of thieves or there's a culture of people who are enthusiastic for some other sin, even sexual sins that we haven't normalized yet, like pedophilia or polygamy or these kinds.

We wouldn't say in that culture. We might talk about Mormon culture, maybe, or Islamic culture, or I should say fundamentalist Mormon culture, but we're not going to take certain things that we consider in our actual culture to be sinful or wrong or twisted or deviant and then say that, well, this constitutes an actual culture.

I think that this is one of the subtle language shifts that helps normalization out. Number two, though, and this is more important, is there's a lot of social justice language going on here in treating the LGBTQ quote-unquote culture as victim.

It's a victim group, and he gave many examples of this. There's increased death. There's homelessness. There's all these things, but the answer to why these things exist is never brought up. Why is there more murders for trans people, like he said?

Why does Bill Henson not mention maybe why there's homelessness? The assumption that you're left with is that parents are kicking these people out of their houses. Parents must be murdering their children.

I'm not saying that never happens, but is that the reason that you have these high rates, suicide rates, et cetera, because parents are just putting this on their children, or is there something attached to that sinful inclination?

Is there something called guilt? Is there something called shame? Is there a knowledge that Romans 1 talks about that we have, that we know something in our conscience? We know it's wrong, and yet, when we do those kinds of things, we feel that shame, and that leads to depression, these other things, but he doesn't talk about it.

He just assumes that the only examples he gives are parents who bully their kids and Nazis, and who wants to be on the side of Nazis, right? Those are the bad guys. These are the villains of the story that are victimizing, and you don't want to be on their side.

You don't want to be like them, and so there's no call to repentance in any of this. It's a posture shift, I would say, from an organization that once would have overtly called for repentance on these things to now trying to understand, trying to see from their perspective, to empathize, to put yourself in their shoes, and think about what it's like to grow up different in these ways, just like you would do for someone who grew up, let's say, more poor than you, to try to put yourself in their shoes, and so now you're putting yourself in their sin, though.

You're trying to think from their sinful minds, what was growing up like, so this is for a missionary to have that be the starting point, or the, and it sounds almost like the starting and the end point.

You try to empathize, and then you share the gospel, right? That's what you're getting from this, but where's the call to repent of these things, right? I think, you know, Bill Henson would likely come out and say, would sign an orthodox statement saying, of course, repentance needs to be here, but look at the emphasis, though, that you're seeing.

This is not just a view that's put out there on social media. This is training for crew missionaries on campuses and otherwise. This is the way you're supposed to approach these people, and you wouldn't treat any other group of sinners this way, but yet this is the way that people who are engaged in homosexuality and transgenderism, etc., are treated.

The crew.

Theological development and culture team has worked hard to put together teaching that is.

Anchored in the Bible. Okay, so Jake Abraham from Cruz City Ministry just wants to say, and I kept this clip in there just as we go through it to see if you actually think what he said is true. I don't.

I don't think it's true, actually. There's very little Bible in the six hours or so, and it's okay to me if you want to, by, you know, good and necessary consequence, take biblical principles and scriptural teachings, and you want to further explain how these apply.

I do that on the podcast a lot, but what we find more often than not is there's this broad understanding of what constitutes love and acceptance and tolerance and compassion, and that's an assumption underlying all of this, and then here's the way that you apply that, but we don't look at the biblical examples of how these sin patterns are confronted in Scripture and treated.

We spend more time assuming that there's some kind of a normalization to these things, that these aren't necessarily the inclinations, at least, or the desires or the underneath this, the concupiscence, if you would, that these things are acceptable in some way, and then it's the question is how do you show compassion?

That's what I see more about. I see more in this particular teaching series. It's not a wrestling with the Bible, but that's how it's presented, and so that's another spoonful of sugar. When you have a young Christian who's going through this, they're going to hear that, and they're going to think, okay, this is what smart people who understand the Bible better than I are telling me the Bible teaches.

Very dangerous when you're not actually representing faithfully what the Bible teaches.

It's important to remember that this is personal within our crew community. This isn't just out there in the culture. It's a complicated reality within our organization. In this module, you'll hear two more stories from staff who experience same-sex attraction.

That was Angela Negden,.

Who serves with U .S. Digital Strategies for Crew, and the reason I played that clip is you're going to hear this over and over throughout the montage. Speakers who want to acknowledge those who you might be serving with them if you're on crew staff, same-sex attraction, and they're a special circumstance, really.

She says it's complicated, but I think that's what that means is you have to be accommodating to this particular inclination. This particular pattern of sinful desire is treated differently than perhaps other desires.

I can't imagine them applying this to necessarily something that they would find very abhorrent, given especially the fact that they've imbibed a lot of CRT and crew racism. Would they say, we have a lot of staff members who are racists, and you need to be accommodating to them.

It's a complicated thing. No, they of course wouldn't do that. But on this particular circumstance, this special circumstance where it's complicated, we're supposed to be accommodating. I think you're going to see that silver lining kind of throughout the montage, and certainly if you watch or listen to all the six hours of teaching, you're going to find that to be the case.

Now the meat of the theological teaching in this particular series is delivered by Preston Sprinkle, and he has an organization that specializes in the area of gender and sexuality. He is really the one behind the teaching in this particular series given to the staff at Crew.

I want you to pay attention closely to what he says. He's going to start by introducing various friends. I took clips, I didn't take all of them, but they're friends that he has that are on the LGBT spectrum, essentially, and they're not actually there.

They're just people he describes, but he wants Christians to apply what we've already heard, which is understanding from the perspective of LGBTQ people how they view the world, what their experiences are like, in order to understand them and then be compassionate and gracious toward them.

So here is Preston Sprinkle.

Now Dan is a non-Christian. He hasn't been to church in years, and he's a gay man who's married to another man. Tom has a unique story in that even though he's a pastor, even though he's married to a woman, he is exclusively attracted to other men, and nobody knows about it.

Now when I say that, I'm not saying he's like running around sleeping with other men. He's actually very to his wife. Matt is a sold-out believer in Jesus. He's a theology student, wants to go into ministry, and from the time he was 13 years old, he's 27 now, he realized he was exclusively attracted to other men.

And again, kind of like Leslie, he's attracted to the same sex, but he's also sold out for Jesus. And after studying the Bible thoroughly to see what does the Bible say about homosexuality, he came to the conclusion that the so-called traditional view of marriage is correct, that God designed marriage to be between a man and a woman, and that God does not intend for him to act on his attractions.

And so he is, out of allegiance to Jesus, he is committed to a life of celibacy, and yet he's still gay. He's still attracted to other guys, and so he is a celibate gay Christian. Like there's a story lying behind why Dan is so adamantly opposed to Christians.

Maybe Dan is tired of seeing people like Eric, who when he comes out to his Christian parents, gets kicked out of the house, which ends up ultimately leading to suicide. I think of my friend Tom, who is a wonderful believer in Jesus, prays for me every single day.

And the fact that he has to live his life with this secret, and not even a secret of like some sinful lifestyle he's living, he's not. He's living a life of purity. He's doing his best to remain faithful to Jesus.

I want to create a church environment where Tom could stand up one Sunday behind the pulpit, where he's been preaching the Word of God faithfully day in and day out, and say church, I struggle with something.

I want to tell you about it. I struggle with same-sex attraction. Most LGBT people I talked to were raised in the Christian church. They were raised in the Christian church, and most of them had a very similar story.

They said, oh yeah Preston, I was raised in a church. I even went to Awana, and I have all the Awana patches on my vest. I still have my vest in my closet, you know. But you know, church just didn't work out for me.

And I said, well why is that? And best case scenario, the sort of best response I heard was, well, I realized I was different, that I wasn't like all the other straight kids in the youth group, and people began to realize that I was different, and nobody really wanted to get to know me after they realized I was different, and so I became lonely and isolated.

I just, I needed community. I needed love, and so I had to leave the church. I had to leave the church to find love and community. You know, that was the best case scenario. Worst case scenario went something like this.

Well, I was raised in a Christian church, and I realized I was attracted to the same sex. I tried to pray the gay away, and that didn't work. I tried to, you know, came out to my parents, and they treated me harshly, and then I went to my youth pastor, and he mocked me and shamed me, and I came out to some of my friends, and they didn't want anything to do with me, and so I was shamed.

I was shunned. I was mocked. I was verbally or even physically abused, and so I became suicidal, and I didn't want to know how to deal with this, and so I had to leave the church to find love and community.

One of my friends, Drew Harper, he's a gay man in his late 20s. He was raised in the Christian church, and he says this. This kind of summarizes the multitude of perspectives that I heard from all my LGBT friends.

He says this, to be gay in the American evangelical church is to be dead. You're an outcast, an orphan, a refugee, a diseased person. You know, I thought that the church was supposed to be a hospital for sinners, right?

We hear that growing up. The church is a hospital for sinners, so my question is, when did it become a graveyard for gay people, and so I'm trying to bring these two together. How can we maintain faithfulness to the Word of God and yet embody the radical kindness of God toward all people within our midst?

You see, we can get the Bible right, but if we get love wrong, we're wrong. Ask your gay friend, your gay neighbor, your gay co-worker, hey, when you think of the church, what comes to mind? What are they going to say?

What's your gay neighbor going to say when you say, hey, I'm a Christian, and I'm just curious, when you think of the Christian church, what's the first word that comes to mind? What are they going to say?

Oh, kindness. When I think of the Christians, kindness. I hope they would say that. Unfortunately, I would say, for the most part, most LGBT friends you meet on the streets who are not part of the church, when they think of the church, the first word out of the mouth is not kindness, and that is a problem.

See, over the last 40, 50 plus years, we have built a reputation of not embodying the kindness of God towards LGBT people, but embodying fear. You see, for the most part, we always see Jesus kind of being the one who's seeking out sinners and going to meet people in need, but here it says tax collectors and sinners were seeking out to hear Jesus.

They wanted to be around Jesus. They wanted to be in the presence of Jesus. Was it because he was pro-tax collecting, pro-treason, pro-sin? No, but he was pro-people, and radically so, and they wanted to be in his presence.

My question is, do LGBT people think the same of the church today? Are they seeking to be in the presence of Christians today? Are they wanting to be in our churches? Are they gravitating towards the love and kindness that is radiating from the Christian church?

You see, the grace, truth, way of Jesus has a very high standard of obedience, but excessively loves those who are falling short of that standard, especially, especially people who have been marginalized and ostracized by religion today.

All right, there was a lot there,.

And that's only the first section of clips from Preston Sprinkle, so let's go over some of this. If you're taking tabs of who the villains are, who the heroes are, who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, you're going to notice that over and over, the church is portrayed as in the position currently of being the bad guy, and the aim of this particular teaching is to restore the church or help the church, maybe for the first time, to become what it ought to be in the way it treats homosexuals and LGBT people, and so what we have is a few people mentioned.

You have Dan, who's married to a man. Now, there's so many other things for me to mention, but I should at least say that when Preston says something like this in a very vetted clip from someone who is supposedly an expert on sexuality in the Bible that is vetted by Crewe's theological department, this should not have made it past the gate.

I understand an impromptu discussions and things, but Dan is not married to a man. Dan thinks he's married to a man, and that should be stated, but Preston says stuff like this, makes assumptions like this that actually undermine the Bible, and like I said, I understand.

I don't want to be too nitpicky here in general conversations for shorthand, maybe saying something like that, but when you're teaching people specifically about biblical sexuality and you make a statement like that, you better qualify it.

Now, he talks about Tom, who's attracted to men but still somehow faithful to his wife, which this is kind of confusing because he's exclusively attracted to men, but somehow it can also equal a faithfulness to his wife.

What do you mean by attracted to men but faithful? How does this work exactly? He's also a pastor who's a victim in a sense because he can't be honest with his own congregation, and he's living in purity, but he's also attracted to men other than his wife exclusively.

How does that work? How are you living in purity? You're not. If there's a sinful pattern, these are disordered desires, and I realize some of you perhaps haven't heard my other podcasts on this. I've done a number of interviews with Jared Moore, and I've also done my own podcasts on this, walking through the difference between temptation that's internal versus external or disordered desires versus ordered desires, and I'm not going to go through all of that now, but a lot of this comes from James chapter 1 and properly understanding that chapter, but the thing is here, historically, this would have been considered sinful concupiscence and a pattern of it, and yet somehow he's still living in purity.

This creates a lot of confusion, and would Preston say this about other sins? Would he say someone who is sexually lusting, or if Preston doesn't want to say lusting, but exclusively desiring sexual relationship with minors, let's say, are they somehow living in purity?

That wouldn't make sense, but you see examples like this come up throughout this teaching. You have Matt who's attracted to other men but sold out for Jesus, and so he's celibate. He's a gay celibate Christian, and this is really the model, I think, that Crewe wants to put forward for homosexuals is that they ought to be celibate, so they don't act on these inclinations in the physical sense, but they can still possess these inclinations without mortifying them, and that is acceptable.

So he talks about the villains in this being parents who drive people to suicide, apparently, youth pastors who mock gay people, Christians who reject gays because they're different, and so I mean this is classic bullying, right?

He's applying all of this to the church and saying this is what leads to isolation, and there's no love at the church. He talks about a guy named Drew, another character he introduces us to who basically says to be gay in the church means to be an outcast.