Cru's LGBTQ+ Teaching Series

Conversations That Matter

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The Conversations That Matter podcast,

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I'm your host, John Harris. Yesterday I released a podcast episode on the recent history of CRU's adoption of some social justice teachings, namely critical race theory and more recently

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LGBTQ plus normalization. And I chronicle how

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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,

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I would say at this point, who have shared their stories with me. And my gut is that CRU 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

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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.

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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.

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And so at this point, I'm not even quite sure what CRU is teaching in regards to sexuality and gender, though I believe the statement on their website is insufficient, it's inadequate.

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But up until at the very least late last year, maybe they're still using some of this material.

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They were using material called compassionate and faithful. It was a whole course, about six hours of video, a number of printed materials.

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And I did a podcast last year in which I went over some of these printed materials and explained why

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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.

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And I would encourage you, don't just take my word for it, compare what you see in those materials to scripture.

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Look at them yourself. Hopefully my commentary will help you and point you in the right direction, but look at them yourself.

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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.

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And this is my attempt to explain in further detail why I believe this compassionate and faithful teaching is in error.

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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,

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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.

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I'm going to try to be as brief as I can, but knowing me, I tend to try to be thorough as well.

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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 a,

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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.

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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

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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.

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And I would say the same thing about other campus organizations like The Navigators or InterVarsity.

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InterVarsity is probably to the left of Crew, to be quite honest. Navigators, I'm not exactly sure where they're at.

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But these are organizations that have a profound effect on young people. And I've been involved in a number of campus organizations.

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It's one of the ministries I enjoy, and it really bothers me, especially at that formative age, to see

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Christian organizations providing inadequate direction. And that's a nice way of saying it.

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Frankly, there's 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.

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And so I'm going to share that with you in the hope that there can be some change.

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Now, there's two kinds of change that can happen. One is that Crew can internally course correct in biblical repentance.

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That has yet to happen, whether it's been internal or external pressure. So you saw recently

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Rosaria Butterfield at Liberty University called out Crew. You saw World Magazine do a piece on this.

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You saw staff. So this is more internal pressure. The Mundells coming out and saying this teaching, compassionate and faithful, is bad.

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And 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

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Bibles and really talked through it. It was more of a neutralizing, a threat. And the

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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

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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.

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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.

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They feel like they're insubordinate, that they're in sin. It's like a child when they contradict their parents.

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That's how they feel. And it's odd, because I've noticed this is a pattern with Crew. I just expect that from Crew staff.

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Very few staff are willing to come out publicly and talk about their negative experiences. And there's many negative experiences.

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Remember, one staff member a few years ago told me she was in California, and she was required to go look at a homosexual art exhibit that had some profane things in it.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And this compassionate and faithful teaching that was, as far as I know, being implemented fairly widely within Crew is evidence that Crew has been going in a bad direction.

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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.

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It promises, or at least gives you the impression, that you can be compassionate.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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So anyway, my motive is to help. If there's a course correction, then the course correction needs to happen.

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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.

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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, maybe you can start your own 501c3.

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That's what some have done. Or you can join another campus organization. I don't know which one to choose.

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I'm not familiar with campus organizations. But Ratio Christi might be one.

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I know some have gone there. You have Campus Ambassadors. That's another one you might want to look at. Maybe there's others.

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But I just want to get the ball rolling in that direction. There needs to be some kind of accountability here.

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And that's my motive. I care about college students. I care about campus ministry. And I care about young people.

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And so that's what's motivating this for me, at least. So with that, we will get started on the video.

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I want to share with you a number of clips from this compassionate and faithful teaching.

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If you go to the link in the info section, you can find this montage that I prepared from the six hours of video.

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

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

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So that was Mark Rudder, the Leadership Development Coordinator for CRU. And he starts off this whole series by telling you the purpose.

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And he talks about people serving with CRU. So you're thinking staff, people that CRU is actually paying to do ministry.

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And they experience same -sex attraction and gender dysphoria. And he wants them to feel comfortable.

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Now, that should raise some red flags for you, that CRU has staff. These are people that are carrying the message of CRU.

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And this is a Christian ministry that are experiencing these things.

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And what you're not hearing him say is, we want repentance. You're hearing him say, we want them to be comfortable.

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We want them to feel accepted at CRU. We want them to not feel like they're unwanted or unwelcome because they experience these sinful inclinations.

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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.

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We wouldn't say this about someone who has an inclination towards breaking one of the other commandments, even the 10 commandments, right?

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So if it was not a sexual sin, but let's say it was something along the lines of hatred or murder, or you pick whichever one you want, we would never say this kind of thing.

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But the Bible identifies these covetousness desires as sin.

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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 CRU.

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

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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

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CRU, let alone Christ. And then to top that off with, we want them to be comfortable.

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So this is setting the stage for the rest of this entire teaching. So I just shut my eyes and said, okay, fine,

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I'll be a Christian. It's been over a decade since then, and I'm still attracted to women.

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And so the question early on became, what does it mean for me to walk in faithfulness in the midst of this experience?

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So you had Rachel Gilson, who's part of their theological team, and she's saying that she still experiences these things.

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So if you were wondering what Mark Rutter was talking about, what he meant by people who are staff in CRU, who experience same -sex attraction, there's an example of someone who is staff in CRU, who does experience that and is comfortable with still having this inclination, or at least identifying that she has this.

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And really not seeing that inclination as something to mortify, something that's sinful, but seeing it as something to live with and kind of make peace with.

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That's the overall sentiment you're going to hear more and more as we play these clips from within CRU, that this isn't a tendency that we need to be mortifying.

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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.

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You can have these things and still be married and still engage in ministry and not feel shame for it.

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Jonah didn't think that God wanted to reach that people group, but God proved him wrong.

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God did want to reach them because He's our Savior God. He wants to reach all the people groups of our world.

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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.

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In history, with regard to LGBT folks, we find systemic victimization.

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In Nazi Germany, gay men were subjected to high rates of mistreatment, being tracked by the

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Nazi government, arrested, being placed in concentration camps where they experienced incredibly high death rates because of low rations and worst work assignments.

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During the AIDS crisis, thousands of young gay men died alone in hospice care.

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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.

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Why? Because their parents had disowned them years ago. Today, there's a crisis of trans people being assaulted and murdered.

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Victimization isn't just in the past. It continues in our world today, especially in other cultures.

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LGBT people can face death, life imprisonment, and other forms of victimization that mirror the past.

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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.

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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?

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A lot of people would say a gay marriage is legal, LGBT rights have accelerated.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This is exhausting to deal with, and often it can lead to high levels of depression and suicidality.

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Also, there can be very high levels of homelessness resulting from family rejection.

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LGBT youth make up 20 to 40 % of homeless youth in America today. It's not easy growing up LGBT, even in our world today.

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Missionaries also need to understand the language of the people group that they're seeking to reach.

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This is very true for marginalized people. We can't reach people if we're not willing to understand their language.

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This involves learning, asking honoring questions, and listening with open hearts and minds, and being willing to die to our own discomforts.

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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

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Christ with people where they are, as they are. Okay, there's a lot there.

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That's Bill Henson, and he is, I guess he's a missions guy.

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He's trying to communicate to crew staff how they should approach the

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LGBTQ people, I guess movement, but more the people that are involved in this.

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And the first thing that you need to notice is he compares them to a culture. He really says they are a culture.

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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.

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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.

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God even created languages. He created peoples. He formed the borders of their habitation, as Acts 17 says.

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I mean, cultures are distinct. They're unique. They're particular. And 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.

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There's an agreement unspoken between the parents, the children, and then their progeny in turn.

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So cultures are something that are good. Cultures are life -giving things.

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And what you have in the LGBTQ plus community, if you want to call it that,

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I don't even like calling it that because it's not a community either. So it's really just people who mostly are enthusiastic about their sinful choices and have, and some don't think they've made choices, but 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.

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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.

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And so I belong in this group. And for there to be a culture, you have to have at least more than one person, right?

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So there's a group of people in this, but it's not life -giving. So it's not actually a culture, it's fake.

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Some people call it like James White, the Christian apologist will say, this is the culture of death because they can't give life.

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There's no life to be given. You can't procreate. But the thing is, it's not even that.

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It's not even a culture of death. It's not even a culture. It's just fake in that way. Like 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.

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So 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.

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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.

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We wouldn't say in that culture. We might talk about Mormon culture maybe or Islamic culture,

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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.

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So I think that this is one of the subtle language shifts that helps normalization out.

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Number two, though, and this is more important, is there's a lot of social justice language going on here in treating the

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LGBTQ quote -unquote culture as victim.

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It's a victim group. And he gave many examples of this. There's increased death.

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There's homelessness. There's all these things, but the answer to why these things exist is never brought up.

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Why is there more murders for trans people? Like he said, why does

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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.

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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?

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Or is there something attached to that sinful inclination? Is there something called guilt?

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Is there something called shame? Is there a knowledge that Romans 1 talks about that we have that we know something in our conscience?

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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.

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But he doesn't talk about it. He just assumes that the only examples he gives are like parents who bully their kids and Nazis and who wants to be on the side of Nazis, right?

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So those are the bad guys. These are the villains of the story that are victimizing. And you don't wanna be on their side.

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You don't wanna be like that. And so there's no call to repentance in any of this.

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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.

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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.

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And so now you're putting yourself in their sin though. You're trying to think from their sinful minds, what is growing up like?

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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.

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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?

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I think, Bill Henson would likely come out and say, we would sign an orthodox statement saying, of course, repentance needs to be here.

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But look at the emphasis though, that you're seeing. This is not just a view that's put out there on social media.

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This is training for crew missionaries on campuses and otherwise. This is the way you're supposed to approach these people.

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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, et cetera, are treated.

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The crew theological development and culture team has worked hard to put together teaching that is anchored in the

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Bible. Okay, so Jake Abraham from Crew 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.

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I don't. I don't think it's true, actually. There's very little Bible in the six hours or so.

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And it's okay to me if you wanna, by good and necessary consequence, take biblical principles and scriptural teachings and you want to further explain how these apply.

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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.

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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 this particular, these sin patterns are confronted in scripture and treated.

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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.

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And then the question is, how do you show compassion?

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That's what I see more about, I see more in this particular teaching series. It's not a wrestling with the

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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 gonna hear that and they're gonna think, okay, this is what smart people who understand the

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Bible better than I are telling me the Bible teaches. Very dangerous when you're not actually representing faithfully what the

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Bible teaches. It's important to remember that this is personal within our crew community.

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This isn't just out there in the culture. It's a complicated reality within our organization.

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In this module, you'll hear two more stories from staff who experienced same -sex attraction. That was

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Angela Negden, who serves with U .S. Digital Strategies for Crew. And the reason

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I played that clip is you're gonna 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.

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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.

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This particular pattern of sinful desire is treated differently than perhaps other desires.

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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, right?

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Would they say, we have a lot of staff members who are racists and you need to be accommodating to them.

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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.

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And I think you're gonna 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 gonna find that to be the case.

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Now, the meat of the theological teaching in this particular series is delivered by Preston Sprinkle.

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And he has an organization that specializes in the area of gender and sexuality.

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And he is really the one behind the teaching in this particular series given to the staff at Crew.

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So I want you to pay attention closely to what he says. He's gonna start by introducing various friends.

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I took clips. I didn't take all of them, but they're friends that he has that are on the LGBT spectrum, essentially.

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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.

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So here is Preston Sprinkle. Now, Dan is a non -Christian.

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He hasn't been to church in years. And he's a gay man who's married to another man.

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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.

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Now, when I say that, I'm not saying he's running around sleeping with other men. He's actually very faithful to his wife.

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Matt is a sold out believer in Jesus. He's a theology student, wants to go into ministry.

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And from the time he was 13 years old, he's 27 now, from the time he was 13 years old, he realized he was exclusively attracted to other men.

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And again, kind of like Leslie, attracted to other, he's attracted to the same sex, but he's also sold out for Jesus.

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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.

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And so he is out of allegiance to Jesus, he is committed to a life of celibacy.

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And yet he's still gay. He's still attracted to other guys. And so he is a celibate gay

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Christian. Like there's a story lying behind why Dan is so adamantly opposed to Christians.

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Maybe Dan is tired of seeing people like Eric, who when he comes out to his

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Christian parents gets kicked out of the house, which ends up ultimately leading to suicide. I think of my friend

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Tom, who is a wonderful believer in Jesus, prays for me every single day.

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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.

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He's living a life of purity. He's doing his best to remain faithful to Jesus. I wanna create a church environment where Tom could stand up one

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Sunday behind the pulpit where he's been preaching the word of God faithfully day in and day out and say, church,

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I struggle with something. I wanna tell you about it. I struggle with same -sex attraction. Most LGBT people

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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.

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They said, oh yeah, Preston, I was raised in a church. I even went to Awana and I have all the

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Awana patches on my vest. I still have my vest in my closet. But church just didn't work out for me.

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And I said, well, why is that? And best case narrow, the sort of best response I heard was, well,

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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

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I was different. And so I became lonely and isolated. I just, I needed community.

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I needed love. And so I had to leave the church. I had to leave the church to find love and community.

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You know, that was the best case scenario. Worst case scenario went something like this.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And so I had to leave the church to find love and community.

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One of my friends, Drew Harper, he's a gay man in his late twenties. 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

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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.

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You know, I thought that the church was supposed to be a hospital for sinners, right?

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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?

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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?

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You see, we can get the Bible right, but if we get love wrong, we're wrong.

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Ask your gay friend, your gay neighbor, your gay coworker. Hey, when you think of the church, what comes to mind?

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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

33:58

Christian church, what's the first word that comes to mind? What are they going to say? Oh, kindness.

34:03

When I think of the Christians, kindness. Um, I hope they would say that. Unfortunately, I would say for the most part, most

34:11

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.

34:19

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.

34:33

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.

34:40

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.

34:47

Was it because he was pro -tax collecting, pro -treason, pro -sin? No, but he was pro -people and radically so.

34:55

And they wanted to be in his presence. My question is, do

35:01

LGBT people think the same of the church today? Are they seeking to be in the presence of Christians today?

35:12

Are they wanting to be in our churches? Are they gravitating towards the love and kindness that is radiating from the

35:21

Christian church? You see, the grace, truth way of Jesus has a very high standard of obedience.

35:29

But excessively loves those who are falling short of that standard. Especially, especially people who have been marginalized and ostracized by religion today.

35:42

All right, there was a lot there. And that's only the first section of clips from Preston Sprinkle.

35:49

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 gonna notice that over and over, the church is portrayed as in the position currently of being the bad guy.

36:08

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.

36:22

And so what we have is, a few people mentioned, you have Dan who's married to a man.

36:27

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

36:40

Bible, that is vetted by Cruz Theological Department, this should not have made it past the gate.

36:48

I understand an impromptu discussions and things, but Dan is not married to a man.

36:53

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

37:03

Bible. And like I said, I understand, I don't wanna be too nitpicky here in general conversations for shorthand, maybe saying something like that.

37:13

But when you're teaching people specifically about biblical sexuality and you make a statement like that, you better qualify it.

37:20

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 that also equals, it can also equal a faithfulness to his wife.

37:39

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.

37:50

And he's living in purity, but he's also attracted to men other than his wife exclusively.

37:58

How does that work? How are you living in purity? You're not. If there's a sinful pattern, these are disordered desires.

38:04

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 disorder desires versus order desires.

38:23

And I'm not gonna go through all of that now, but a lot of this comes from James chapter one and properly understanding that chapter.

38:32

But the thing is here, historically, this would have been considered sinful concupiscence and a pattern of it.

38:40

And yet somehow he's still living in purity. This creates a lot of confusion. And would Preston say this about other sins?

38:46

He'd say someone who is sexually lusting, or if Preston doesn't wanna say lusting, but exclusively desiring sexual relationship with minors, let's say.

38:59

Are they somehow living in purity? That wouldn't make sense. But you see examples like this come up throughout this teaching.

39:06

You have Matt who's attracted to other men, but sold out for Jesus. And so he's celibate. He's a gay celibate

39:11

Christian. And this is really the model, I think, that Crewe wants to put forward for homosexuals is that they ought to be celibate.

39:21

So they don't act on these inclinations in the physical sense, but they can still possess these inclinations without mortifying them.

39:28

And that is acceptable. So he talks about the villains in this being parents who drive people to suicide.

39:39

Apparently youth pastors who mock gay people, Christians who reject gays because they're different.

39:46

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.

39:53

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.

40:04

It means to be dead. And Preston says himself that the church has become a graveyard for gay people.

40:11

These are really harsh words about the bride of Christ, that the church is really bad. And where is he getting all this from?

40:19

Well, he's getting it from the perspective of homosexuals. And I would assume other

40:24

LGBT people or people who think that that's what they are. They're telling him, this is my story.

40:30

This is what I feel like. This is my, I wasn't accepted or my sin wasn't accepted. And this is my experience with the church.

40:39

And so he's taking them at their word and he's legitimizing it and saying, well, their perspective is the right perspective.

40:46

And this is in conflict though with what we see from Jesus. And so that's the standard he wants to make.

40:52

He wants to say that Jesus was sought after by sinners. Sinners wanted to be in Jesus's presence because he loved people.

41:00

He was pro people. But today the church isn't pro people. Well, the people who came into Jesus's presence who are sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes did so because they were repentant.

41:08

They were attracted to Christ's message. It wasn't because Christ was accommodating in the sense of legitimizing their sinful patterns.

41:18

He wanted them to change. He wanted them to go and sin no more. Of course, the people who did not want to go and sin no more ended up shouting things like crucify him.

41:26

So this is, that's on the table here for the church could be shouted down if they're doing their job by sinful people who want their death.

41:36

That's a legitimate option in being like Jesus but that's not what's brought up here.

41:42

It's just Jesus was, he was liked by sinners. You see that how dangerous this can be.

41:49

Of course, we're supposed to be gracious. Of course, we're supposed to be salt and light. So people are supposed to see our good works and glorify our father in heaven.

41:55

We will also be hated by all men on account of Christ. That's also in there, right? So this doesn't factor though into Preston's teaching in this particular teaching series.

42:07

And so the problem becomes that Christians have built a bad reputations and we should use gay people.

42:13

That's the term he uses their perspective in how we assess ourselves. So when we look at ourselves, it should be through this lens of what do gay people think of us.

42:21

And if it's not the kind of kindness they want then we should accept their critique that we're not measuring up.

42:31

So we get the Bible, right? Many Christians do, but these same

42:37

Christians can get love wrong. And I just like to suggest that's an odd way to phrase it, that there's a conflict there.

42:43

If you're getting the Bible right, you should get love right. If you're getting the Bible or getting love wrong, you're probably getting the

42:49

Bible wrong, right? But he creates this conflict, I think, or the assumption that there could be a conflict where there isn't any.

42:56

And so it ends up being a promotion of the quote, grace, truth, way of Jesus, which has special room for people who have been marginalized, especially them.

43:06

So they get an extra kind of status that other sinners don't have.

43:11

There's a level of protection and accommodation there that other sinful desires and patterns don't seem to receive.

43:21

Understanding God's design for marriage doesn't make living life as a single person with same sex attraction in the church always easy though.

43:29

At times, I still feel embarrassed to admit my attractions as if I'm doing something wrong despite my faithfulness to living out

43:38

God's design for sexuality. It's hard to think about how I might be seen as a failure if I never marry a man and a disappointment if I never bring my family grandchildren.

43:50

But God met me in this. He brought friends and even other believers who are same sex attracted into my life who have helped me experience

43:58

God's love palpably. Having people to talk with gives me space to further process, grieve, think about my future and see my relationship with Jesus as where I ultimately find worth and belonging.

44:12

I still feel excluded at times when the church prioritizes marriage so highly and misunderstands same sex attraction, which has led me to share my story and speak out for people like me in our communities.

44:26

God didn't ask me to clean up my life before I came to him. He showed how to walk obediently day by day, speaking grace and truth to me through my brothers and sisters.

44:37

If we aren't willing to create a space of vulnerability and humility, discipleship wouldn't have touched the deepest areas of my life.

44:46

Equating same sex attraction to sin and speaking judgmentally against those in the

44:51

LGBT plus community doesn't prove conducive to sharing the gospel with non -believers.

44:57

Okay, that was Christina Thomas, who's a field staff member with Crew. And you find from her that she feels like,

45:04

I think this one's interesting because she feels like she's doing the wrong thing. She feels a conviction and some kind of a guilt, even though she says, but I'm being faithful.

45:14

I'm living a righteous life. I'm doing the right thing. But somehow I still have these feelings and some of it's connected to not having a marriage and a family and giving up the idea of having marriage and family.

45:27

And in this process of giving that up, she is comforted by other

45:33

Christians, including Christians who also experience same sex attraction, who help her grieve this. And this is so sad to me because it doesn't have to be this way.

45:42

I mean, this is promoting an example to young people who are helping college students, many of them, that at a young age, they ought to be, if they have same attraction, same sex attraction, perhaps giving up the idea of having a family and having kids that they won't escape it.

46:02

I guess just throw in the towel. This kind of thing's done. The Holy Spirit, God, and Jesus in the

46:07

Bible aren't going to help you out of this pit, apparently. So you just got to make peace with it. That's the kind of discouragement that I'm seeing.

46:14

And of course, I would be discouraged if I was in her spot. This is one of the reasons I want to critique this video because nothing against her as far as like,

46:23

I just feel sorry for her that she's believing these things. Like, I want her to believe that it's possible to get married and have a family and to mortify the sins in her life.

46:33

That's the kind of help that I would hope that crew would be willing to give someone like that.

46:39

It may take time. There may be deeply rooted sins there, but mortify them. Don't give up the fight and just say, well, this is who

46:47

I am. And you notice what happens in this situation. The church is now expected to change.

46:55

They're expected to now walk on eggshells around her. This is what Christians need to do. They need to change their prioritization of marriage so it doesn't offend her.

47:04

It makes her sad. And that's understandable because it's something that is natural and it's something we desire because God's put it within us.

47:16

And so we should want that kind of a thing, but she feels bad because she kind of wants it.

47:21

But she doesn't think she's going to have it. Now, she says some interesting things here.

47:28

And I understand she's probably not a theologian. She is on staff with crew though, but God didn't ask her to clean up her life. Just be careful with that.

47:34

Yeah, of course, God didn't ask her or any sinner to clean up their lives in the sense of being 100 % perfect so that he would accept them.

47:43

And if that's what she meant, that's fine. But he does expect us to repent, to turn from our sin.

47:49

And so, yes, of course, it's a gradual process of sanctification that we enter into when we're justified.

47:56

But there is an acknowledgement that this sin is wrong, including sinful desires. Now, same -sex attraction, she blatantly says is not sin and that this causes damage when

48:07

Christians equivocate that and say it is. And when they speak judgmentally against homosexuality, somehow this is prohibiting them from sharing the gospel effectively.

48:19

And speaking judgmentally is so broad and vague. And this is the kind of language you're going to hear throughout this whole montage is speaking judgmentally, don't be judgmental.

48:30

What does that mean? We know what the world means by that, but Christians say it. And if we're not told exactly what's meant by this, it's so dangerous because you just start assuming what the world means.

48:41

I think this is an off -ramp from even the side B theology right into side A. In other words, from the same -sex attracted gay celibate theology, right?

48:51

Right into why not affirm same -sex marriage? Why not maybe even leave

48:56

Christianity because its ethic is bigoted. I mean, you don't want to speak judgmentally, right? So we got to be careful of these broad statements that the world has specific definitions for and understandings of and we don't then define because it makes it sound like we're sounding exactly like the world.

49:15

And maybe that is attractive for someone on a college campus because you can appeal to people who already agree with you, but that is not the way of Jesus.

49:26

As Preston Sprinkle says, the truth way of Jesus, that's not it. So let's talk more about Preston Sprinkle, though.

49:34

He's more the theological guy in this whole conversation, and he has some more to say. I want to make something really clear. 1

49:41

Corinthians 6, the words arsenach, and 1 Timothy 1 that uses the word arsenach again.

49:49

Paul is not thinking about gay people per se in these words.

49:56

Now, listen closely. Paul is not thinking about somebody, for instance, like my friend Matt, who is committed to celibacy, who is not sleeping with anybody else.

50:05

He's not thinking of my friend Tom or Leslie, who is not engaging in sexual activity. Paul is thinking explicitly of people who are engaging in ongoing, unrepentant sexual immorality.

50:19

He's not thinking of somebody who simply identifies as gay or somebody who experiences same -sex attraction.

50:26

He's thinking of people engaging in ongoing sexual activity. In fact, in Paul's day, a lot of people who engaged in same -sex relationships weren't even gay.

50:36

Now, that's one of the more bizarre things that I heard in this particular series. He says arsenakoites and malakoi don't equal gay, that these are just physical things.

50:50

You basically have to sleep with someone in order for the prohibitions against these things to apply to you.

50:57

Having the desire does not count to do those things. And yet what we find in scripture over and over again is we're told to mortify the pathos, the epithemia, these terms in Greek that are translated often as passion or desire.

51:13

So you go to a passage like Colossians 3, 5, which says, therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry.

51:27

So passion and evil desire, pathos, epithemia, these are talking about internal desires.

51:36

This isn't something that you're doing externally in a physical way. This is something that exists within you.

51:43

And what does the scripture say to do to put them to death? Because why?

51:48

They're not sinful. It's okay to be a Christian. You can be in good standing and have these things. No, because they're sinful.

51:54

That's why. You even have in Romans 1 where it explicitly talks about homosexuality.

52:03

If you go to, there's actually two words. You have epithemia used and then orexus used.

52:10

You would go to, let's see, verse 22. It says that professing to be wise, they became fools.

52:21

They exchanged the glory of God for the image in the form of corruptible man. Therefore, God gave him over in their lusts, the lust of their hearts, it says to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.

52:34

For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator.

52:39

So this lusts of the heart right there, that's epithemia. And then you get to, therefore,

52:45

God gave them, or rather for this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions. And what's the very next thing?

52:52

For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. And in the same way, also the same way, it says men abandoned the natural function of the women and burned in their desire toward one another.

53:05

So here's what you see in Romans 1. What precedes the sinful action, sinful desire?

53:12

There's a desire there. God gives them up to this desire before they proceed to the action.

53:18

At least that's the sequence that we see here. And are they not homosexuals then or gay is the term that Preston wants to use until they actually go through with the act?

53:31

Or were the desires for those things, was that also sin?

53:36

And this is such an interesting thing to me because he goes on to say something that seems even more bizarre by assuming that people in the ancient world, more often than not,

53:49

I suppose, were straight when they committed homosexual acts, that these were somehow straight people, their orientation was straight.

53:57

This whole thing is confused by the fact that Preston Sprinkle buys into this unbiblical category of orientation.

54:04

So this wasn't something that you had in scripture. You had sin, sinful desires, not just sexual sinful desires, but sinful passions for all kinds of different things that God had not given to man, that God considered sinful.

54:21

And today, there's a sliver of those things that are considered to be part of a legitimate category called orientation, which is part of your hardware.

54:32

It's what's built into you. And Preston Sprinkle seems to just assume this is that there's this built in hardware some people have.

54:39

They're gay. That's part of who they are. And the only thing that applies to them in scripture then is to not commit the actions associated with that.

54:49

But it's kind of like fixed or it's stubborn. It's not going to easily move because you can't get rid of it necessarily or you shouldn't expect to get rid of it.

55:02

That's probably a better way of putting it because this is something that's kind of hardwired. That's the understanding of orientation that the world has today.

55:10

And you see Preston trying to kind of merge this, try to assume this and to say that people who in the ancient world, they must not.

55:20

They didn't really want it, I guess. They didn't want to. They didn't have that orientation because I guess some of them, they were married, right?

55:28

You had people in the Greco Roman world who were married and then they would have homosexual relationship with a young boy or a slave.

55:36

And especially in military relationships, you had things like this. Therefore, they weren't gay. Well, that's by a modern standard.

55:44

You know, it's not that a biblical standard is you have the desire for the thing.

55:50

Then that sin that would accompany the desire that if it was to go to its full fruition, that's already within you.

55:57

And let me bring this to another example to make it more clear. If you wanted to steal things, if you were a thief, let's say, you say like, that's just my orientation.

56:06

I have a thief orientation, but I've never stolen anything. I just, but I'm a thief and it's

56:12

OK that I'm a thief. I have a thief orientation. You need to accommodate me. But no, I'm never going to steal anything because the

56:19

Bible says not to do that, right? That would be kind of like the equivalent of what you're seeing here. It's just very bizarre.

56:25

And that's what happens, I think, when you try to merge this unhelpful, inaccurate worldly category of orientation with the scripture, which does not assume that kind of thing.

56:36

And Preston is pretty good. And I think kind of slick in my mind at doing this. But I think it's it gets you into these weird corners where you end up having to assume very strange things that just don't comport with reality.

56:51

You'll read a dialogue between Rachel Gilson and Greg Coles, demonstrating how different followers of Christ decide whether they should use

57:00

LGBT plus related terms or terms such as same -sex attraction.

57:06

It's important to listen and read carefully. The language conversation can easily bring up a lot of emotions and opinions.

57:14

Crew doesn't have an organizational position or practice regarding language use. This doesn't mean that these questions are unimportant.

57:22

There is room for more than one view in Crew on these questions. So really what I wanted to show you with this clip is that Crew, in not taking a position on this orientation language that is so profound and important, it can be attached to your very identity.

57:40

So you could call yourself a gay Christian. In not taking a stand on that, they are in fact taking a stand because if you challenge that, you are now causing disunity because they allow for that view.

57:53

So you're not allowed to, you know, bring up like First Corinthians 611 and say this contradicts that because it says such were some of you.

58:02

You know, you can't have that as part of your identity. They're going to say, no, we allow this in Crew.

58:07

So this actually would be a positive policy in my mind, even though they're trying to take a neutral stance on it.

58:15

This isn't really neutral. This is taking a side and legitimizing this orientation category and really allowing it to be elevated to an identity marker.

58:28

And it's a sinful identity marker of the 76 percent that left the church, had a bad experience in a church, but still have some desire to return to the church of the 76 percent.

58:39

Only 8 percent, 8 percent said I will only return to the church if the church changes their theology.

58:50

8 percent, 8 percent are really hung up on the theology, meaning 92 percent say, you know what?

58:56

Can the church just give me some time? Can they listen to me? Can they walk with me?

59:02

Can they can they love me? Can they not dehumanize me? It's not the church's theology that's driving

59:10

LGBT people away by their own admission. It's our posture, because sometimes how you believe is just as important as what you believe.

59:22

We can change our posture without changing our theology and therefore extend genuine love and care toward LGBT people.

59:31

Transgender, it's really an umbrella term that can mean many different things to many different people.

59:37

Some people who identify as transgender believe that they are in the wrong body, like they believe they are a sex different from their biological or natal or birth sex.

59:50

While other people may say that they're trans if they just don't like to try to match up to the stereotypes.

59:57

So, for instance, a biological woman who doesn't feel very feminine or doesn't like to wear dresses or, you know, go to sewing parties or whatever, if that's something women do, they may say they're trans because they're just kind of protesting the stereotypes.

01:00:11

And so transgender can mean all kinds of different things. I really don't like the term conservative.

01:00:17

It has way too many political connotations. And what does it even mean? It's just, you know, if you happen to be to the right of somebody else, they call you conservative.

01:00:28

But, you know, the fact that I believe in the Bible, some people say, oh, you're conservative. You believe the Bible is true.

01:00:33

And other people say, yeah, but you're liberal because you don't read it in the King James. You know, it's just such a subjective term, conservative, liberal.

01:00:40

So I don't actually say I believe in a conservative view of marriage. Traditionally minded or conservative Christians think of when they hear the term gay, they think of lust or they think of sexual behavior.

01:00:51

And so I hear a lot of people say, well, I don't think Christians should ever say they're gay. I mean, I don't say I'm an adulterous

01:00:57

Christian or I'm a lustful Christian. You see, when they say that, they assume that gay means something very sinful, like I'm lusting after somebody of the same sex or I'm actually engaging in sexual acts with somebody of the same sex.

01:01:10

But the term gay doesn't have to mean that. It doesn't have to imply that the person is lusting or acting on their attraction.

01:01:19

So it's a very impersonal term. And it could, I'm not saying it always will, but it could just erect like a thin wall that separates you from the person you're trying to relate to.

01:01:29

So I've gotten rid of the term homosexual. I just do not use it ever in this conversation. Some straight Christians love to use the phrase gay agenda as if all gay people in America have the same agenda.

01:01:39

But that's just not accurate. It's just kind of a sloppy phrase. And again, if there's a gay agenda, there must be a straight agenda.

01:01:46

Do you have the same agenda as every other straight person on the planet? Probably not. You would probably resist the stereotype if somebody said, oh, you're straight, and then assume that all straight people have the same agenda.

01:01:58

So homosexual, gay lifestyle, practicing homosexual, gay agenda. Let's just get rid of those phrases.

01:02:04

All they are are stereotypical phrases that oftentimes create barriers between two people trying to engage in a real relationship.

01:02:14

If somebody wants to identify as gay and that's a term that's helpful for them and it makes sense of their experience,

01:02:21

I'm OK with that. Just when you thought Preston Sprinkle was getting bizarre and maybe the next one wouldn't be as bizarre, you got that clip.

01:02:29

So it's bizarre. It starts out not as bizarre. He just assumes that the church should be looking at itself through this gay perspective.

01:02:37

And he sees in this poll, the gay perspective, which I've not looked at the poll, but supposedly 92 percent of those who have left the church are willing to come back if the church would change its posture and stop dehumanizing them, which is the word he uses.

01:02:48

I don't really know what to say other than shepherds have staffs for a reason and you see your sheep wandering and they're wandering near wolves and they're outside the fold.

01:02:59

The job of the shepherd is to be stern at times. It's to open up the Bible and to apply it and and to show that you're veering off the track if you're in fact in sin.

01:03:09

There is a confrontation element. And so, yeah, we're supposed to encourage the fainthearted and help the weak and be patient with all men.

01:03:17

We're also supposed to correct the unruly. So what do you do?

01:03:25

You have to evaluate those kinds of things. And this is where shepherds, pastors are supposed to be uniquely equipped in those areas.

01:03:34

And it would be a real shame if that correction element was just dropped and that there's no chastening, there's no discipline.

01:03:44

It's just everything should just be this attitude of having a good side, bedside manner and maternal instincts.

01:03:53

I mean, you pretty much take the backbone out of the shepherd if that's all he's reduced to. And that's what

01:03:59

I would fear for people actually watching this is that's what they might walk away with. Now, he gets into these terms is where it gets bizarre again.

01:04:06

But he's it's almost like in crew, you get the impression that you can be trans, you can be gay.

01:04:14

These were both acceptable terms. And the trans is fluid. It could mean different things. And so that's fine.

01:04:20

You can accept that. But what you can't do, what wouldn't be good to do is call yourself a conservative because that's also a fluid term.

01:04:28

Somehow trans is a fluid term. Conservatives of fluid term. But he uses that fluidity to justify trans, but to disqualify the term conservative.

01:04:36

That's very odd to me. It's very bizarre. Homosexual is also not acceptable somehow.

01:04:43

So gay is but homosexual. He doesn't like that term. I guess it's archaic and people could get the wrong impression.

01:04:53

So he says that we shouldn't assume that gay is sinful, that being gay is sinful, because again, it could just mean orientation and not action.

01:05:02

And we shouldn't use the term gay agenda. And this is I thought this was really bizarre because there can't be a gay agenda if there's not a straight agenda or something like that.

01:05:11

I just I don't even know what to say about that. You don't have to have an agenda on the other side necessarily for your side to have it.

01:05:23

So when people talk about gay agenda, they're talking about over the past few decades, a political agenda, a cultural political agenda that has normalized homosexuality.

01:05:34

And the crown jewel, of course, was getting gay marriage. But there are all sorts of things that led up to this or legalize the law where people recognize that you can have these gay marriage ceremonies, even though it's not a real marriage.

01:05:49

And now, of course, it's pushing the boundaries in other areas like transgender sports and that kind of thing.

01:05:55

That's what people are talking about. They're talking about this. Of course that exists. Are you blind? Like you could call it something else,

01:06:01

I guess. But perversion, it's sexual perversion agenda, I guess, if you want to say that.

01:06:07

But that's what people generally mean when they say gay agenda. So, yeah, straight agenda. No one says that because that's been kind of the default is we've ordered our society and based on a

01:06:19

Christian understanding to suit families and complementary husband and wife matching pairs.

01:06:27

That's how we've modeled our society. And so that if you want to call that an agenda, that's just been acknowledging the way

01:06:36

God created things. And that's been established in our laws and mores and customs. So now you have a challenge to that.

01:06:43

That's the gay agenda. It's the ripping down of that. It's the culture siege to take down the straight or heterosexuality being normalized as the legitimate option.

01:06:56

And then say, there's this vast array of options that are equally legitimate. That's what it has been. That's what it is. It's just very odd to say, well, there has to be a straight agenda.

01:07:04

And that would mean that you have to agree with every other straight person on everything. It's just such a straw man.

01:07:10

And I just don't understand why he'd even say that. It's just a weird, just weird. All right, let's keep going.

01:07:17

I'm gay. Well, when I fast forward to my life in Christ today, it still feels like I'm playing the cootie game.

01:07:24

Let me explain. In cross -cultural settings, especially for people like me who are racially ambiguous, we often demonize parts of people, point out that they have cooties, if you will, in order to segregate them.

01:07:35

So for example, in Filipino settings, while I was welcomed, I was never Filipino enough because I didn't speak the language fluently.

01:07:41

Same in Portuguese culture. In fact, it's just how I always felt in the church. I was never

01:07:47

American enough, holding up to certain values of Americanism within the church. Now add the layer of being gay or SSA, whatever, pick what term works for you.

01:07:57

When I first started following Christ, I would still hang out in gay circles and the folks there would say, wow, you're so butch, which means you're masculine.

01:08:04

And I would always take that as a compliment because I was always reminded of how relatively feminine

01:08:10

I was. Shoot, I still get mistaken as a woman if I call customer service phone numbers on a regular basis.

01:08:16

But then I would oftentimes go to men's retreats and not want to play football or any of those sports. And they'd throw me a ball and I couldn't throw a ball.

01:08:24

And I would think to myself, I'm not manly enough to be accepted in this community. Even as of late, some of the men's activities

01:08:30

I've seen done for churches or even within crew are very much centered around a cultural notion of what it means to be manly, but not necessarily a biblical one.

01:08:40

Isn't that what scripture means when we are to glorify God in body and in spirit? Isn't that what we are all supposed to do?

01:08:48

Not glorify what it means to be manly culturally, but what it means to be a godly man made in his image?

01:08:55

So that was Kevin Pateo from Crew Neighbors. And he says he's gay and he didn't fit in culturally.

01:09:03

Or ethnically. And he also doesn't seem to fit in a category as far as his gender is concerned.

01:09:12

At least he doesn't feel like that. And this is a problem. He doesn't like the fact that he is outside these circles.

01:09:18

He talks about hanging out in gay circles, even as a Christian. Now that's a warning bell should be going off at this point.

01:09:28

Why are you hanging out with people who characterize themselves by their sin? After being a

01:09:33

Christian, would you want someone who was an alcoholic or abused alcohol to then go to bars and hang out with alcoholics after they became a

01:09:44

Christian? Circles where they're identifying themselves by that particular pattern of behavior.

01:09:50

No, of course you wouldn't. But this is just said. And it's just there's no qualification. It's just said. And really, the point of this, again, is to change the way the church acts, to change the way

01:10:00

Christians act. So men's activities center on the culture and not the

01:10:05

Bible. And the one he brings up is throwing a football. And this is bad.

01:10:10

This is glorifying culture. Throwing a football. He's left out of it because he can't.

01:10:16

And this is kind of like, it almost feels like tyranny of the weaker brother, right? If you watch the

01:10:22

R .C. Sproul sermon on that particular teaching, that because I can't participate in this, therefore, you all must change what you are doing.

01:10:33

What is normative must now bend to what is the exception.

01:10:42

And yeah, of course, there's guys in wheelchairs who probably can't throw footballs too well.

01:10:47

You're not gonna be able to play football, certainly, right? There's disabled people who can't do that. Does that mean that you get rid of men's activities?

01:10:54

There's women who can't participate in some women's activities. What we would consider culturally women's activities.

01:11:01

Should you just get rid of them because there's someone who can't necessarily participate in that? I mean, there's so many discussions on this.

01:11:08

I remember years ago, some folks I knew at the time from Southeastern wanted to stop celebrating

01:11:17

Mother's Day. And I remember the wives of one of the professors thought that it was terrible that churches would celebrate

01:11:24

Mother's Day. And it's because there were people who wanted children that didn't have them.

01:11:30

And so this was a hurtful time. And so you end up making everyone else kind of change the traditions that they have, the normative traditions that celebrate something beautiful God has created that's part of the natural order.

01:11:42

And you put a stigma on it. And so anyway, all this to say, yeah, of course, this is kind of sly in my opinion.

01:11:52

You're gonna see this come up quite a bit. Of course, the Bible doesn't say that to be a man, you must throw a football, right?

01:11:58

Just to be a man, you gotta bench press a certain amount of weight, or you gotta shoot a gun. That's what being a man is, or you gotta be able to grill a steak.

01:12:06

You know, these are all things in our culture though, that we would associate with manliness. If you read the

01:12:13

Bible, it assumes manliness exists. And let me read for you just two passages. 1 Kings 2 .2

01:12:18

says this, I am going the way of the earth, this is David talking to Solomon, be strong therefore and do what?

01:12:26

Show yourself a man. It's the first thing he says to him when he charges him upon his death, show yourself a man.

01:12:32

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 16 .13, be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.

01:12:41

We see in scripture, there is this understanding that men are going to have strength, resilience, they're protectors, they have certain duties that women don't have, at least not as strongly, or it's not as great of a priority, or they're not uniquely equipped as much to do these things.

01:13:01

And we all intrinsically know this. We really do. We function this way. When you need something done, when you need something that requires a lot of strength, physical strength, especially,

01:13:14

I think this gets into other areas as well, but physical strength is an obvious example. That's the one he uses, throwing a football.

01:13:21

Who do you generally go to? Is it a man or a woman? It's going to be a man. What are most militaries composed of?

01:13:27

Men. The standards even have to be changed for women who want to be in the military today, now that women are included, because they can't keep up with the men.

01:13:37

So this is a, I think this is kind of a, this is wrong, because what it does is it tries to say that cultural traditions that reflect

01:13:51

God's design are somehow unbiblical. That's what they're doing. So there's a conflict between that and the

01:13:59

Bible in a sense. Like you're being unfaithful in some way if you have these men's activities that certain people might not be good at.

01:14:07

Like maybe there should be a willingness to learn how to throw a football so you can participate as much as you can. And if you're not good at it, that's okay.

01:14:14

Like maybe that's the thing that the men should also learn. It gives them the opportunity to, okay, some people aren't as good at this.

01:14:20

We need to be patient. It gives us an opportunity to be patient, right? There's certain sports I'm not that good at.

01:14:26

I participated anyway. And I remember I really wanted my youth group when I was younger to play soccer because I was like halfway decent at soccer.

01:14:34

I had played soccer a bit. I wasn't like good, but I was halfway decent at it. I was also like halfway decent at basketball, but actually football was a sport.

01:14:43

I never could throw a football that well. I just couldn't. And I didn't spend a lot of practice time doing it, but I didn't like it when they played football.

01:14:52

But you know what? I would always play and they would have to be patient with me. And I might be the last picked for,

01:14:59

I don't think, I don't know if I was ever the last, but I might be near the end, right? We know John's not good at that one as much, right?

01:15:05

But I figured it was an opportunity for me to be with these guys, to do something they enjoy, to gain new skills that I don't have.

01:15:15

And that's how this probably needs to be viewed. Or if you can't legitimately do it, you sit out, but you don't spoil all their fun, right?

01:15:21

And this is a way, it's funny to me, because like probably a decade ago or more, this would have been the way

01:15:27

Crew would have attracted men. They would have probably been putting out promotional materials. I'm sure they exist to say, use sports to attract people to your group.

01:15:34

Go play football on the quad at your school. And then people will come and then invite them to Bible study.

01:15:39

I'm sure this was something that was done because I saw it done in Campus Ministries. And now it's like, you don't know what to do.

01:15:47

Like, what are we gonna do? Everything that you do is going to exclude someone or someone's not gonna feel like they like it.

01:15:53

It's not their preference. They're not included. They're not as good as other people. This, it really comes across as immature.

01:15:59

It really comes across as whining to be quite honest with you. And it ignores the opportunities that are there.

01:16:04

So here's the bow at the ribbon at the end of this for me to wrap this whole thing up.

01:16:11

You're gonna hear more of this as we go through the montage. But I would say that a lot of these activities they're talking about, often they're vague about it, are just activities that reflect natural inclinations that are good that God gave to men.

01:16:25

Men are competitive. Men are strong. Men bond through these things.

01:16:32

The Bible recognizes that men are built a certain way. And to then say that like, it's unbiblical, like what are the biblical things that you can do?

01:16:42

You just Bible study, just things that directly the Bible says you can do. Are those the only things that you can do?

01:16:48

You know, so that's what I would say to that. And yeah, probably more that could be said, but that's what's going on in crew now.

01:16:57

They're changing their whole strategy around. It sounds like. How amazing it was that we go to a church that is biblically faithful and yet it was one where my gay daughter was eager to invite her non -Christian girlfriend.

01:17:16

And I thought that was such a great picture of both remaining firm in the position that we hold and yet having that loving posture at the same time.

01:17:29

In crew, we talk about being a caring community that is passionate about connecting people to Jesus Christ.

01:17:35

And that was such a good example. Even though it was church, it wasn't crew. That was a picture of what

01:17:43

I would love to see our crew movements around the world look like. So this is a very simple question really that will determine where you come down on what you just heard.

01:17:57

Is the church for believers or for unbelievers? Like what's the primary mission of the church?

01:18:05

And I think it's for believers. I think that's why the church is there. It doesn't mean that unbelievers can't come and spectate and that this can't be a means by which they become saved.

01:18:15

But the church isn't supposed to be catering to unbelievers. The church is supposed to be encouraging believers and that's a place for them to use their spiritual gifts in a complimentary fashion.

01:18:25

It is the gathering of the saints. That's what you're not supposed to be forsaking. That's what church is. So there's a pride here that there's this particular church.

01:18:38

Homosexuals were willing to attend. They felt like they could attend and not be offended while they were there. And this is supposed to be the model crew is to have as well.

01:18:46

And this could actually be a very good thing. Like they could be just very nice people and also speak the truth.

01:18:53

And it really, this is very subjective because it depends on these particular, I mean, it sounds like this is a lesbian daughter with someone that she considers to be her girlfriend and has a father that's in crew and in the church.

01:19:09

And so she might be more accommodating than some anyway. I don't know, but I mean, that's a good thing.

01:19:16

It's good that they're going to church. There's no doubt about it, but you just have to be careful because again, coupled with all the other teaching in this particular series, we don't know exactly what the church is doing.

01:19:29

Why did they feel comfortable? Is the church, how far is the church bending to accommodate? And are they bending so far that they never really confront the blatant sin that's there in the way that they should?

01:19:42

That's the question. I'm not saying being a jerk, obviously, but it's, are we so conscious of the unbelievers, the people who are engaged in sin and proud of it and it's part of their identity that we cater our whole message towards them, that the church becomes about reaching them instead of feeding the sheep and giving them the unadulterated word of God.

01:20:03

And there's a lot of things that offend homosexuals in that word. So I'm going to grab a sign like this and hammer it into my own yard.

01:20:12

So if I see a sign like this, I want to grab a hammer and knock it down. But if you, like me, want to be guided by the

01:20:23

Bible, we actually can't afford to take either approach. Instead of grabbing a hammer, we need to pick up a

01:20:31

Sharpie and we need to carefully sort through the things that the Bible does and doesn't call us to affirm.

01:20:40

As someone who has always experienced same -sex attraction, I've had to wrestle with this prohibition.

01:20:47

Okay, so that was Rebecca McLaughlin. And she has this way about her that it,

01:20:54

I think it's the accent too, like there's this profundity that she's evoking, right?

01:21:01

What she says, I don't know what it is, but Americans, when we hear that accent, we just think that must be true, what they're saying, it sounds sophisticated.

01:21:08

But she holds up this sign. And the sign says, in this house, we believe Black Lives Matter, women's rights are human rights.

01:21:14

No human is illegal. Embrace the science. Love is love. Diversity makes us stronger. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

01:21:21

And I couldn't read the whole thing, but I'm pretty sure that's a standard sign. So I looked it up online and that's the end of it.

01:21:26

So the first few lines you could see her holding up. And so what she's trying to say is that there's this third way.

01:21:35

That's a political sign, right? When people put that in their yards. And she's saying that, hey, there's some people want to hang that up and some people want to knock it down.

01:21:44

But really what we ought to do is go through each of these propositions with a Sharpie and figure out which one is legitimate and which one isn't.

01:21:52

So Black Lives Matter, that's legitimate, right? Because of course black lives do matter. But when it comes to love is love, we have to be skeptical of this if it means a homosexual relationship, right?

01:22:04

And so there's a good conclusion in that, but what she's also doing, I just want to point this out because this isn't just about the topic of LGBTQ normalization.

01:22:15

You're also seeing on these other left -wing issues and normalization of those within crew, right?

01:22:22

So even as, so I've seen this for a number of years, especially with gospel coalition types, which

01:22:28

Rebecca McLaughlin is one. They will try to kind of almost, it seems like gain points with those in authority and power, in culture, in society, in institutions by showing them that, hey, we're reasonable people.

01:22:46

We kind of disagree with you on this thing over here, but look at all the things we agree with you on. So we're reasonable.

01:22:52

We're not all on one side. We're not all conservative. We're not all on the left. We're just kind of in this middle ground and we can look at a sign like that.

01:23:00

And so this trains people, I think, to think of themselves as not really, like politically homeless.

01:23:10

Because they're Christians, they transcend this divide. But inevitably what ends up happening is it shifts people to the left because it's being propagated in circles that have traditionally been more religious rights that have been more against the agenda, who have prioritized things like abortion and the profaning of marriage.

01:23:30

And now it puts these other issues. She didn't outright say this, but she's looking at these propositions and saying, well, some of these are good.

01:23:39

Some of these are bad, perhaps. And so you have to evaluate everything kind of like on its own merits.

01:23:46

Instead, really, I think when you see a sign like that, you should understand this is coming from kind of like a holistic understanding of the world.

01:23:56

Some would call it a worldview, but there's a reason that people where she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts have that sign.

01:24:03

You're not gonna see that sign much in Auburn, Alabama, right? There's a reason people there have this.

01:24:09

These are all coded phrases that mean something politically. And it's all on the left.

01:24:16

It all fits into that paradigm. And so she wants to take things from that paradigm and legitimize them to young people among the audience here and crew who are engaged in campus ministries, et cetera.

01:24:30

So I just wanna point that out. It's not, and you're gonna see this in the next clip. It's not just the LGBT stuff that's being somewhat legitimized here.

01:24:38

There's other things that would be concerning as well. I'll explain why a gospel -centered approach to love and social justice isn't dependent upon agreement.

01:24:49

It has the strength to thrive amidst difference and disagreement. We've been commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves.

01:24:57

And we can't do that if we're not willing to advocate for our neighbor's wellbeing and protect their human dignity.

01:25:05

That's all a biblical definition of social justice is. If we truly love our LGBT plus neighbors, we'll be socially concerned about their wellbeing and we'll be active.

01:25:17

Thankfully, we have many examples of same -sex attracted people who've chosen to be faithful.

01:25:24

Now, some say that earnestly committing to social justice means affirming same -sex relationships.

01:25:30

But a redemptive conception of social justice is about affirming human dignity and flourishing, not about affirming behaviors and beliefs.

01:25:40

You see, some Christians are simply unwilling to critique or challenge conservatism or secular progressivism.

01:25:48

But that's indoctrination, an uncritical acceptance of certain beliefs. And it's sinful.

01:25:55

But Christians must live in the tension between love and truth. Do we have the moral imagination to look past the narratives of the day and see that love and social justice transcend agreement and affirmation?

01:26:11

And God's love can thrive and cause our cup to overflow even when sex is absent.

01:26:19

Okay, so this is Justin Giveny who is with the AND campaign and they are definitely on the left.

01:26:26

And go look at my videos on the AND campaign. And he says social justice throughout this whole thing.

01:26:32

He says we gotta be active, meaning we have to be activists. We have to be forwarding social justice.

01:26:39

And he talks about same sex attraction, that you can be faithful with this. We see this throughout.

01:26:45

You've already come up with a few examples of it. This is just the latest. And he does what

01:26:50

Rebecca McLaughlin just did, that he proposes this third way that you are actually sinful.

01:26:56

He uses that word, that you're sinful and you're indoctrinated if you're on one side.

01:27:02

And so if you're conservative, if you're all conservative, you're indoctrinated and you're sinful.

01:27:08

Which, I mean, talk about, like he starts off the whole thing with like, we can disagree, right?

01:27:14

There's this like tolerance, this openness. And then it's like, and you're sinful if you're conservative or you're all the way on the left or the right, you're sinful.

01:27:21

You gotta be somewhere in the middle. It's like, I guess there's not the openness we thought. There is this rigidity somewhere.

01:27:27

And this isn't being introduced into a moderate or a leftist kind of group.

01:27:33

This is crew. This is formerly Campus Crusade. This would be considered kind of like a right -wing coded group. And this is the kind of thing that's being introduced to it.

01:27:41

So it does move people politically to the left, but it's also merging it with the spiritual categories of like sinfulness.

01:27:49

If you are, I guess, too far to the right, but he doesn't really specify what that means. And then of course, love and truth or intention.

01:27:57

This is a very popular notion that I've come across many times. And I think it's very wrong because we don't really find this in scripture.

01:28:07

We don't find this conflict between love and truth. There isn't attention there.

01:28:13

If it's legitimate love and it's legitimate truth, we should speak the truth in love, right? Legitimate love, legitimate truth go hand in hand.

01:28:21

It's not like there's attention like, well, you know, did I say too much truth? I better up the love a little bit because that was too much truth or that was too much love.

01:28:31

I need more truth. These two things aren't in conflict and there's this assumption, and this is often used to really take messages of truth and scale them down to make them less offensive, to try to up the love so that the truth is watered down.

01:28:51

And that would be my concern is that that would be the direction that maybe someone could take this.

01:28:56

A significant portion of this conversation revolves around gender and even gender stereotypes.

01:29:03

You may not experience gender dysphoria, but you may have been in some environments, both outside and inside the church, where particular stereotypes of manhood or womanhood were held up that made you uncomfortable.

01:29:17

So these gender conversations may be tender, even apart from discussing transgender identities.

01:29:24

We want to make sure to listen to scripture by both affirming the goodness of God's creation of humanity as male and female, while not confusing stereotypes as what it means to be a man or woman of God.

01:29:40

Okay, so now Carlos Palma from Cruz High School Ministry is telling us that these cultural ways of men and women living and the activities that they would share with one another, these could be gender stereotypes.

01:29:56

It is very negative, apparently, and they might make you uncomfortable. That's what he says. And so the thing that I keep thinking as I hear this kind of thing is they need training for this.

01:30:07

Like, wouldn't just adults being, he's high school, so maybe not, but wouldn't even high schoolers, wouldn't there be a way to just kind of work out if someone's uncomfortable with a certain activity, like on the high school level?

01:30:21

But they have to have like an organization -wide training to get rid of certain kinds of activities that reinforce gender stereotypes.

01:30:32

So we're not told what those are. What does that mean? I mean, is that football? Is that grilling a steak?

01:30:38

Like, we shouldn't do that. It's too manly. Like, I guess anything that makes someone feel uncomfortable ends up becoming a stereotype.

01:30:44

It ends up becoming something that you should just kind of be aware of and not do. And like, well, maybe the person who's the exception should exercise some patience and some love and maybe try some new things.

01:30:54

Like, maybe it would be good. And this is the thing too, with just society in general needs norms.

01:31:01

You need social norms to function as a society. There needs to be established obligations and responsibilities for children who are growing up so they know what to shoot for.

01:31:13

And these are exemplified. And this is one of the things I'm concerned about for our own world and our own culture right now is we don't really have many heroes.

01:31:22

We don't have good role models. And in some ways, sports figures for young boys can be good if they exercise good character because all the things that go into sports, the training, the physical exertion, the team, the sportsmanship, playing on a team, getting along, competition that's healthy, all these things are really good things that help nurture boys and make them men and help them function in other situations in which they're gonna have struggle and stress and need to work with people.

01:31:52

And that's just one thing. I keep taking the sports thing because football was used previously as an example of this.

01:31:59

But those are good things. And to not have these, to not look at that and think like that's a good thing for young men, but to just kind of be neutral on any gender activity.

01:32:12

So it's like, you're not gonna have gender activity. So that way, either women are now playing football or you just eliminate football.

01:32:20

And so what is it then? You'd have to eliminate, I guess, a lot of sports. And what are you left with?

01:32:27

I guess everyone can play Clue together, maybe a board game. But even that, like some board games, like if you're playing

01:32:34

Risk, that's military. That might be manly. You can get into so much overthinking on these issues instead of just living kind of naturally in society.

01:32:47

And as situations come up where someone might not be comfortable with something, examining that, walking through it with them.

01:32:53

Maybe they need to conform. Maybe that would be good for them. Or maybe they need to sit out, right? But none of this is like a one size fits all, just eliminate these things that are considered gender stereotypes.

01:33:03

Sex refers to the biological sex of a person, sometimes referred to as the natal or birth sex of a person.

01:33:10

While gender refers to, as one scholar says, that the psychological, social and cultural aspects of being male and female.

01:33:22

The Bible does not support most of our gender stereotypes.

01:33:28

Most of our ideas of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman, most of those stereotypes come from culture and not the

01:33:37

Bible. I mean, just look throughout scripture at how men act and how women act.

01:33:43

And you don't see a lot of stereotypical images of our conception of what it means to be a man and people maintaining those distinctions in a rigid way.

01:33:52

For instance, was David being a man when he slew Goliath? Okay, sure, yeah.

01:33:59

He was being a man when he slew Goliath. What about when he was sitting on a hilltop, playing his harp and writing poetry when his brothers were off at war?

01:34:07

Yeah, he was equally being masculine when he was playing a harp and writing poetry. Throughout the

01:34:13

Bible, we see men who kiss one another in a non -erotic way. We see men who weep and cry and are artistic and sew garments together and do all kinds of things that our cultural lenses would say, oh, that's not very masculine.

01:34:29

But the Bible doesn't adhere to our narrow culturally -driven views of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman.

01:34:36

Or was Jesus being a man when he turned over the tables in the temple? Or when he was turning the other cheek as he let other people beat him up?

01:34:45

Was he being a man when he preached hard -hitting sermons on obedience, like the

01:34:50

Sermon on the Mount? Or how about when he looked over the city of Jerusalem and said, I long to gather my people as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings.

01:35:00

We have women in the Bible that stayed home and cooked and cleaned for their family.

01:35:05

We have women like Deborah who led Israel into war. We have people like Lydia who was a wealthy businesswoman.

01:35:12

You see, these narrow gender stereotypes just aren't justified by the

01:35:17

Bible. And so we need to stop, as Christians, we need to stop reinforcing these very narrow views of what it means to be masculine and feminine.

01:35:27

And we need to embrace the very generous view that the Bible has toward gender expression. That's how our culture often views gender.

01:35:34

But here's the problem. This is how the church often views gender too. When we maintain these narrow gender stereotypes, we open up this in -between world for everybody else to fill in some different gender or sex identity.

01:35:50

Instead, the Bible says there is male and there is female.

01:35:57

But how you express your masculinity or femininity is very broad.

01:36:04

Okay, I'm not gonna go through every example he gives from scripture because we'd be here all night.

01:36:09

Let me just make a few points. First of all, there is something in the Bible and it's the thing we're talking about in this entire series.

01:36:17

It seems pretty obvious to me, but it's not a cultural or a stereotypical view of being a man or a woman.

01:36:28

It's just kind of basic rooted in creation. This is what a man is. This is what a woman is.

01:36:34

And guess what it is. Men are attracted to women and women are attracted to men.

01:36:40

Read Romans 1. The exchange that is made, the truth exchange, is that women burn in their own passion for other women and men for other men.

01:36:53

This is unnatural. This is a disordered desire. Read the passage. It's not me you have a problem with.

01:36:58

It's the passage if you're upset about this. You look even in Genesis and the helpmate that God made for Adam was a helpmate suitable to him.

01:37:07

There is a complimentary nature here. It's rooted in nature. It's not just something arbitrary

01:37:13

God said. Now, this is the basic, basic, basic characteristic of men and women.

01:37:20

It's at a fundamental level. That's what they're supposed to be. And this is what we've been talking about that there's men and there's women who don't seem to have these desires.

01:37:30

That's what they say, right? And they have the desires. Romans 1 identifies as disordered or unnatural.

01:37:44

So it's just, he's bringing up all these examples. But when it comes to the across the board, all men and all women are to be like this.

01:37:51

This is how God designed them, which is the very subject at hand.

01:37:58

We're supposed to somehow accommodate that. That accommodate people who fall outside of these lines or choose to be outside of these lines.

01:38:09

So the Bible is very generous, he says, with the way that you can express your gender because sex and gender are different.

01:38:15

Sex is rooted. Gender is psychological. And so the gender thing can be very broad.

01:38:21

This is what allows Christians, I guess, you don't want to offend people in the world. They can have the full kind of rainbow of expressions without saying, like someone like Preston Sprinkle can say, for example, he can say, like,

01:38:34

I affirm all these experiences, but they are experiences, psychological experiences that allow me to then also, on the other hand, say, hey,

01:38:45

I believe in biblical marriage between a man and a woman. Hey, I believe that there's only two genders in reality.

01:38:51

This is how he does this thing where people get all confused because they'll hear him say those things.

01:38:57

And they think, oh, I guess he's solid. He's saying what the Bible teaches, but then he'll sound like someone who's defending an

01:39:04

LGBTQ plus view of the world. And it's because he makes this bifurcation that sex is rooted and gender is psychological.

01:39:13

So sex is rooted in biology, but the expression of your sex or your gender, really,

01:39:20

I mean, the expression of these things is men being attracted to women and women being attracted to men.

01:39:27

So it kind of defeats the whole purpose if he wants to go down this route. If he wants to use the Bible as his standard on this, then that's universal, right?

01:39:36

And so he says the Bible doesn't support these gender stereotypes, but here's the thing, the

01:39:41

Bible assumes, I already brought up these two passages that talk about being a man, and it's just assumed people who read this should know what that is, right?

01:39:49

It just assumes that there are stereotypes or there are ways that men function and ways that women function.

01:39:58

And some of the examples he brings up, like Deborah, that's a bad example, right? Deborah, it was because of Barack's weakness that Deborah does what she does.

01:40:05

She's not, that's not to be held up as some prescriptive thing. It's a description of what happened. So you gotta also look at the examples he brings up and is it descriptive or is it prescriptive?

01:40:18

You know, is it a positive example or is it just, is this what happened? And the Bible's not really telling you whether that's what's supposed to happen.

01:40:26

Now, men do have a maternal nature in the sense that men like, okay,

01:40:33

I'm gonna have a child here soon in about a month, my babies do, a little over a month. I'm going to hold that baby.

01:40:40

I might cry, right? I might enjoy the pleasure of being with my child in that way and I'll comfort them and I'll be soft and gentle with them, right?

01:40:51

Does that mean I'm not a man or something? No, no, but, and my wife may do the same thing, but who's more wired?

01:40:58

Who's more designed to be that way on a consistent basis and to give that kind of love in a greater capacity?

01:41:07

It's obviously women. It's obviously women. Men have, men can do these kinds of things, but it's to a lesser extent.

01:41:16

Just like women can, I remember one of my, well, I probably shouldn't say one of my earliest memories about my own mom. She might listen to this, but I remember my mom going outside with a .22

01:41:28

rifle and shooting at a fox when I was young and she was barefoot and in a straw hat.

01:41:33

Sorry, mom. I remember this, one of my earlier memories. You know, is that, does that mean she wasn't being feminine?

01:41:40

She's not a woman. Well, like my dad wasn't home. Who would have done it if, my dad would have done it most likely, you know, and again, this isn't like hard and fast things.

01:41:50

These are general trends. It's just generally how men and women are. Men generally are going to do the things that require strength and violence and these kinds of things.

01:41:58

Women are generally going to do more maternal things. This is just in general, how

01:42:03

God designed men and women. And it reflects itself in these cultural things like football, since we keep bringing that up.

01:42:12

I don't even really, like I said, I don't even play football. That's the example I keep using though, right? Maybe I fall outside. Oh no, maybe

01:42:17

I'm not a man. Oh, come on. Like, I obviously know that I'm a man and I tried to play football or I did when, you know, my friends would play it and stuff.

01:42:26

So the whole point of this is that the church needs to open itself up to this vast array of gender expressions and not be so narrow.

01:42:35

And in fact, this is the reason that you get all these different gender identities is because the church is being too narrow.

01:42:42

And so people fall outside the church's definition and then they just leave the church because there's no place for them. And so it's the church's fault that you have these people who don't fit into either male or female or think they don't.

01:42:53

This is just absurd. I mean, I guess the question if Preston Spriggle was here,

01:42:59

I'd want to ask is like, you know, at what point then, like, because clearly we have now way more homosexual, transgender people, at least manifesting this publicly than we ever have in this country.

01:43:13

And the church has loosened up on these stereotypes over the years.

01:43:18

So, I mean, this just doesn't seem to make sense. Like, wouldn't it seem like at the time, times past when there were more, even more rigid kind of understandings of what a man is, how a man should dress, how a woman should dress, that were less androgynous than they are today, that you would get more of these expressions outside the church, but you didn't.

01:43:40

And so it's just an odd thing to say. Again, like there's no evidence. He just says this and it's not even reasonable.

01:43:47

Like I could just say, actually the church upholding more narrow standards for what a man is and what a woman is that are rooted in scripture, but rooted also in nature.

01:43:58

God gave us natural revelation too, that, and this is more just a natural pattern of life.

01:44:04

You know, the church softball team is going to probably be men, right? So if you have that kind of thing, like if you're going to have a potluck, it's probably women who are going to bring most of the dishes.

01:44:12

Like it's, you don't even have to like create rules for this kind of thing. It's just like the way it organically happens.

01:44:18

What you have to create rules for now is to impose on these activities. Well, now men must bring the dishes and now women must play on the softball team.

01:44:26

Like that's what you have to do. That's what Preston Sprinkle, I think is introducing is now you're going to be rigid.

01:44:31

The rigid rigidity wasn't there before. It was more natural, right? Not saying every church, but in general, these things just kind of manifest themselves.

01:44:41

So yeah, I think I've made my point, but again, it's blame the church and because the church has been wrong on these things, the church must change.

01:44:50

And it's just buying into the cultural things. No, it's just assuming what the Bible assumes. Men and women are different. They're going to do different activities.

01:44:56

And it's just rich that the main thing the Bible across the board assumes about men and women is that they should have a desire for the opposite sex.

01:45:03

And that's the one thing that Preston Sprinkle wants to like argue against. It seems like that that shouldn't necessarily be something we accept as normative or that we shouldn't expect people to fall into these two things.

01:45:19

Hi, my name is Lori and how I identify, I like actually a slew of words, but how

01:45:26

I prefer to identify is as a broken, beloved child of God who, when she struggles with lust, it's toward women.

01:45:35

I'm Kat. I have found that identifying as transgender has been extremely freeing for me.

01:45:42

Let's seek increased unity with God. And let's work on community.

01:45:48

Let's become a church. Let's look like heaven.

01:45:55

And let's keep on inviting people into this thing. There's just been so many times where it's been a rough week.

01:46:05

It's been a rough day. And we get together and hang out, not just you and me, but like the kids slash like family dinner.

01:46:11

And you just leave. It's just being together on mission.

01:46:20

A family dinner was community and the church. And we're just here hanging out and trying to be a picture of what the church looks like.

01:46:29

And that means I'm part of that with my own brokenness and my own sin and whatever I bring to the table, just because it doesn't look like the same thing that everybody else is bringing to the table.

01:46:39

I just hadn't really experienced people in the LGBT community. Certainly no Christians who were

01:46:45

LGBT. So I just was intimidated to say the wrong thing. I really,

01:46:51

I didn't want to hurt anybody. We each piece and reflect who God is differently.

01:46:57

And so to pull more people together and to, yeah, just be running after the same

01:47:04

God. Okay. So for those watching, you didn't or listening, you didn't see this, but you have these different people that are introduced to us.

01:47:13

So Bethany is a heterosexual, cisgender female. And Lori is a same sex attracted, cisgendered female.

01:47:23

And Angela's heterosexual, cisgendered female and Kat's transgender. And it actually brings in these labels and identifies these people by these particular sexual desires and gender ideas about their own gender.

01:47:39

And what you find, this is the fascinating thing to me. That they call it family dinner.

01:47:45

And I looked this up online just briefly. And I guess certain crew chapters and stuff, they'll have these family dinners, things that they do.

01:47:51

And that actually, that means something. When you say family dinner, what do you think of? Like a mom and dad and kids, right?

01:47:57

They're having a family dinner. Maybe extended families there too, if it's Sunday or something, right? Family dinner, Norman Rockwell picture of the wife bringing the turkey.

01:48:06

Well, in this though, it's like, it's like, it's all these friends who kind of get together and they have their own family dinner.

01:48:15

This is the family, right? And in so doing, they're trying to become the church, to look like the church, look like heaven.

01:48:22

And you could hear Bethany, I think it was crying about this. You know, let's just bring people into this thing.

01:48:29

And you have Angela, who's walking on eggshells at first, trying to. And so they seem positive about like, oh, we're talking to people who are different than us.

01:48:37

And this is forming connections and bonding and this kind of thing. But like, it's the fascinating thing is, this is a substitute.

01:48:44

If you really think about it, like they're calling it family dinner. This isn't like a traditional family, right?

01:48:49

This isn't what I described before. This is all these different people in a friend's group who have these different sexual inclinations and gender ideas who have come together.

01:48:59

And they're all, you know, they're all Christians. I guess they're claiming to be Christians at least. And they're saying that this is like what the church is to be.

01:49:05

Like all these different people who have these different identities.

01:49:11

And in reality though, when you read scripture, what you find is the assumption is the commands given are to husbands and wives and family units, right?

01:49:21

There's labor relationships. There's government and citizen relationships, civic relationships and so forth.

01:49:26

But you don't find this. You don't find this anywhere in scripture where, you know, you might find Jesus, you know, eating with tax gatherers and people, well, people who want to repent of their tax gathering and their prostitution and stuff.

01:49:40

But it's not called family dinner. There's no delusion. There's no assumption that this is a substitute for anything or this should look like something in the real world.

01:49:50

The thing in the real world is the family, right? And so I just find this kind of rich that like we're not supposed to have these assumptions, these stereotypes.

01:50:01

And yet here you are mimicking what a family dinner looks like. Isn't that cultural? Isn't that something that's, it's not in, we don't find in the

01:50:09

Bible what they're doing exactly, right? We find families, but like even some of the cultural things coming with that.

01:50:17

You have a table, you have chairs, you have a certain way of setting them up with plates and meals. And it mimics that like Norman Rockwell family.

01:50:24

And somehow that's acceptable. That's fine. That's good. That's positive. That's how you be the church. That's how you accept people.

01:50:30

That's how you include them. And the more differences in this, the better, but you're still calling it family.

01:50:36

It's just, it's sad to me. It should be sad to you too. Like it's one thing to invite someone in to your family dinner.

01:50:43

You're having a family dinner and someone's there to observe. I've seen this many times.

01:50:49

People who are even homosexuals who observe, this is the standard.

01:50:56

This is what's supposed to be. This is a family. I want that. And I don't have that. And man, what can

01:51:03

I do? How do I get out of this sin trap that I'm in? That can be a real testimony, but instead you find, let's just kind of like redefine,

01:51:14

I guess what a family dinner is and still keep the name family dinner. All right.

01:51:20

We're getting close to the end here. I know this is a very long, long episode, which hopefully some of you are listening to this in parts.

01:51:28

She was afraid of how other Christians might respond to her if they knew that she was gay. I did not want to reinforce her fears by jumping into that topic right away.

01:51:39

When I approach talking about Cruz stance on same -sex romantic relationships and sexual sin,

01:51:46

I do it in the same way I do with any student who is living in sin. I gently explain that an athlete who is not experiencing victory in the area of sexual wholeness is not in a position to lead others spiritually yet.

01:52:02

I know that Claire knows the gospel and has a relationship with Jesus. I also know that she understands sexual wholeness.

01:52:10

Rather than condemning her for being in this relationship, I'm praying for her and trusting the

01:52:16

Holy Spirit to do the heavy lifting in this area of her life. Okay, so there's a student named

01:52:22

Claire. I think this is an Athletes in Action and Crew and she apparently loves

01:52:27

Jesus, but she's come out as gay. The consequence to this that she's told by her crew leader is that she can't lead others.

01:52:38

That's the negative side of this. And so we're not to condemn that if you're a crew leader, you don't condemn her when she does this.

01:52:46

You still assume that she's a Christian, still assume that she's, I guess, walking with Jesus. She's walking with the Lord, but she just can't lead others.

01:52:53

And this is so watered down. This is what I was talking about earlier that I was concerned about was that when you have these vague, kind of like don't be judgmental things, instructions given, what you end up doing when you apply them is you do this.

01:53:07

You don't tell them the truth that I think if you persist in this, you're in danger.

01:53:13

If you think this is okay and this is sin that you're accommodating sin. This is first step of church discipline right here.

01:53:19

I'm confronting you. And if you don't repent, I'm coming with someone else. And if you don't repent, we're going before the church. And if you don't repent, we treat you like a

01:53:26

Gentile and a tax gatherer, right? We treat you as someone who's not a believer at that point because you're not bearing the fruit of the believer.

01:53:34

And that's scary. That's a scary place to be. And you wanna be a leader, right?

01:53:40

You're a leader in this somehow. You wanna lead others. I mean, Jesus said, depart from me, I never knew you. Workers of iniquity.

01:53:46

Like this is a real thing. And so there's none of that though in the six hours of video from crew.

01:53:55

You don't get any of that sense. And that's biblical. It's the consequences. You just can't lead others. So I guess you could still be a

01:54:00

Christian in good standing. You just can't lead others. And you don't condemn, let the Holy Spirit do its work. Now there's situations that vary depending on the student and who you're.

01:54:08

But like, again, do you correct or chase in or do you come down with the law of God on the person who is breaking his law, the unruly?

01:54:23

Or is everything just help the weak? And you just assume everyone's just weak, help the weak, help the weak. No, this is someone who's blatantly in sin and continuing in that sin.

01:54:32

And so this is a problem if this is the way ministry is going in crew. And if you're a donor to crew, this is something you wanna consider.

01:54:39

Is this what you wanna fund? Is this the kind of ministry you want out there? And it's nothing against these people on a personal level.

01:54:46

It's just, many of them are probably doing what they think is right, but it's just not. It's, this is not the picture that we see when we look at scripture.

01:54:56

In this opinion article, she was asking for our removal from campus because we represented inequality and depression.

01:55:04

I decided to focus on a posture of love and apology. And so I apologize for the way that the church has treated the

01:55:11

LGBT community in general and then focused on our desire to really love more.

01:55:18

The LGBT group on campus hosted an event called Question a Queer. Kimberly introduced me to Brandon who was the president of the organization.

01:55:27

He invited me to come to their meeting the following night where they would be sharing their coming out stories. The vast majority of the men and women sharing had grown up in religious homes and one after another shared their tears, bitter anger, smug triumph, or even sarcastic hurt, how they were rejected by family, friends, church, or all three.

01:55:47

They were all done. There was some time for questions. I tentatively raised my hand and said, as a Christian, I just want to apologize to you for how you have been hurt and rejected.

01:55:57

What was done to you was wrong and not Christ -like and I am so sorry. Seth and I went to church together.

01:56:04

I first met him when he shared his story with the church during a series called Jesus is Better. Seth shared his story of being gay and choosing to say, no matter what my feelings tell me,

01:56:16

Jesus is better. I'm going to pursue Jesus and live a celibate life. That was where our friendship started.

01:56:23

But it got complicated two years later when he said, I just can't do this anymore. And he walked away, not from his faith, but from his relationships within the church who were rightly trying to hold him to what he professed before the church and Jesus.

01:56:38

We stayed in touch, not because I necessarily agreed with his decision, but because I wanted to pursue him. I kind of viewed my role in his life was to be a bridge to Jesus.

01:56:47

I'm a close friend now and we talk about everything, his relationships with other guys, his sexual trauma, movies, music, faith.

01:56:55

He recently came and visited for a weekend and I've finally earned the right to ask hard questions like,

01:57:01

Seth, have you ever asked Jesus if he's okay with you dating other men? We want our student leaders and volunteers to agree with and to live out our theological teachings, both side

01:57:12

A and side B theology, and to joyfully submit to the Lordship of Christ.

01:57:18

So that was three different people. We had Jeremy, we had Rob, and then we had one of the attorneys that works for Crew.

01:57:25

Jeremy and Rob both apologized for the church, which that's kind of a dangerous place to be.

01:57:30

If you're apologizing for the bride of Christ, the true church, then you want to make sure you're being accurate. And that certainly does not characterize the church.

01:57:38

Like the true church has just always been, or it was characterized by sinful.

01:57:44

We don't know what it is. It's vague. Sinning, I guess, being mean to gay people. If you're talking about everyone who claims to be a

01:57:51

Christian, I don't know if you want to take responsibility for all those people, because that's what you're doing when you apologize on their behalf.

01:57:57

This is just a very cringy thing to do. And you kind of buy into the stereotype that the world has of the church.

01:58:07

And you're admitting, hey, the world assessment of us is true. We are those bigots. But guess what? Maybe for 2000 years, we were like that, but not now, not in 2024.

01:58:16

We have changed. Which sounds just comical. Like, if you're part of something the world considers to be a hate group, right?

01:58:23

And you're saying, but not us, we're different now. It comes across as disingenuous.

01:58:30

So that's what they do though. That's the strategy they take. And there seems to be this kind of like sense of success that they have when someone who's gay gives them approval, right?

01:58:43

They get approval from someone who's homosexual. And that means that they must be doing right. And there's such a fear of offending them.

01:58:51

Like you have this guy who he leaves the church. He walks away from obedience.

01:58:58

He's living as a homosexual. And yet you hear Rob Hudson say, well, he didn't walk away from the

01:59:06

Lord. Well, yes, he did. He went out from us because he's not of us. If this is a continual pattern that keeps going and he's rejecting the truth.

01:59:14

And he had, Rob had to work up. Apparently he hasn't walked away from his faith, this guy. But Rob had to work himself up to the point of earning the right to confront him on this.

01:59:23

And the confrontation was just like, do you think God's okay with this? Like that could have been like the first conversation when he left the church.

01:59:32

Hey, you're in sin. You know, this is church discipline territory, not like walk on eggshells and wait forever.

01:59:39

So as the person is, if they are a legitimate Christian, they're eaten by wolves.

01:59:45

No, you confront it right away. And so, and then you have, of course,

01:59:50

I wanted to just show you that this attorney for crew mentions, hey, side A and side B. Whenever parents come to me and say, hey, my child just came out as gay or lesbian or transgender.

01:59:59

And, you know, I'm trying to navigate this. My first two questions are, how's your relationship with your child? And do they love

02:00:06

Jesus? Everything else is secondary. Those are the two primary things that you need to keep at the center of your relationship.

02:00:13

Don't keep harping on gay sexuality or homosexuality. I wouldn't even focus too much on the sexuality question, unless your child really wants to talk about it.

02:00:21

Focus on, do they love Jesus? Do they cherish Jesus? Are they walking in faithfulness with Jesus?

02:00:28

Yes, some gay people may be called to celibacy. I also know a lot of gay people who, and I gotta be careful here, but I know a lot of gay people who enter into a healthy opposite sex marriage.

02:00:43

You see, sexuality can be more fluid than people realize.

02:00:49

I know several gay people who got married to somebody of the opposite sex. They sort of fell in love with them as sort of like falling in love with your best friend,

02:00:57

I guess. And then later on, or through time, through the relationship, romantic and even sexual desires were cultivated through that relationship.

02:01:05

And, you know, to their own surprise. And again, I'm not saying this is a guarantee, like, oh, if you just marry somebody of the opposite sex, you'll totally get attracted to them.

02:01:13

I am not saying that at all. Because I know other relationships of this sort that were really destructive because people weren't honest, they weren't upfront.

02:01:20

It just didn't work out. But I think we cannot close the door on what's called mixed orientation marriages.

02:01:28

I do think that it's a real possibility. Our sexuality is more unpredictable than people realize.

02:01:33

It is possible for a gay person to marry someone of the opposite sex and to have that be a flourishing marriage.

02:01:40

Not a guarantee, it's a possibility. You can truly hold onto a traditional view of marriage and truly, and truly love and honor and accept

02:01:48

LGBT people. All right, well, that's the end of the video montage here.

02:01:54

So a few things to say about this. When your child comes out as gay, you should ask the child and focus on whether they love

02:02:04

Jesus and they're walking in faithfulness. Now, this is, it's odd because the obvious answer is there's a break.

02:02:17

There's a problem with their relationship with Christ if they are identifying themselves by their sin and wanting to embrace this in some way.

02:02:30

So their relationship with Jesus isn't good. So you kind of have to talk about the sexuality of it.

02:02:37

Like you really do have to get into that. I don't know how else to do it.

02:02:43

Like, it seems like it's a tactic in beating around the bush, but it's also with this assumption that you can be somehow invested in a sinful pattern or desire while also being invested in Christ.

02:02:55

And you really can't. So I think this could provide false hope for parents. And then he talks about gay people and opposite sex marriages.

02:03:02

But the weird thing about it is he talks about how fluid and unpredictable sexuality can be.

02:03:08

And this is where Preston Sprinkles starts sounding like the LGBTQ people, right? But he'll run back to like marriages between a man and woman, there's only two genders.

02:03:17

But like your sexuality can be just so fluid apparently because it's all based on, I guess these desires, these feelings that you have.

02:03:25

And you could have these mixed orientation marriages. Talk about a new category being introduced.

02:03:31

Does the Bible ever talked about mixed orientation marriages? No, no, it doesn't. If you are married to a man and you are a woman, or if you are a man married to a woman in your heterosexual marriage, the kind of marriage that you see in scripture, then there's no reason to say that you are gay or you are homosexual, or you have this sin pattern or any of that.

02:03:56

I have these thoughts every now and then about, okay, so you have some thoughts now and then that you need to mortify.

02:04:02

Does that make you now, does that affect your orientation? Does that make you categorized in a certain way that you're taking this sinful inclination and you're saying that's part of who you are?

02:04:15

How about you just mortify those thoughts and you learn to love your spouse in the way that God has designed and you just keep in your sanctification process.

02:04:25

And if you're not married, then you look for that. You want to, you try to cultivate that.

02:04:32

You seek help and counseling and through prayer and scripture. And it might be hard for some people.

02:04:38

It really might. It might be something that you, for a long time, you battle with this. And you know what?

02:04:44

It's worth it. Have you struggled unto death? As Paul asks, right? So this is the thing, like he's just so caught up in feelings and navel gazing and what am

02:04:55

I feeling for this person and for this gender and this and that gender. And instead of just focusing on what is

02:05:01

God's design for me? I'm a man. God's design is for me. If I'm going to be sexual to be with a woman.

02:05:10

Okay. I don't always feel that way. I don't have a woman in mind. Who I am attracted to.

02:05:18

I need to take steps so that I can get to that point. And this is going to be a spiritual battle, but it's also going to be a physical battle perhaps.

02:05:28

And an emotional battle. It's the whole part of you. Every part of you is involved in this process.

02:05:35

I know several guys who are friends of mine who have, who are living in these lifestyles and are

02:05:43

Christians now and living in holiness and faithfulness in marriages, have children, all of that.

02:05:50

And I've asked many former homosexuals, what was it? How did, and the answers range a little bit, but a lot of it really just comes down to, it's like a diet.

02:06:02

Like there's good, there's work. There's discipline involved. There's, it's not going to be easy and you shouldn't expect it necessarily to be.

02:06:08

For some, it was easier than others. It's different stories for different people, but it doesn't, like we would never say about any other sin, like, well,

02:06:17

I guess it's who you are. You're a drug addicted Christian. And you just don't take them, but that's who you are.

02:06:23

Like that, it makes no sense, right? You're living a sober life, but we know you're an alcoholic inside or something.

02:06:29

This is like Alcoholics Anonymous, right? Maybe they're one of the organizations that introduced this kind of idea of this innate kind of, that's the other area that we do have this sort of orientation language almost that we use.

02:06:41

About a sin pattern, but there you go. That's the crew. Those are some snippets from the videos of crews training.

02:06:50

And again, you can go to the info section, check out the longer versions of these things, the six hours of video, the written materials and see for yourself what crew has been putting out there.

02:07:00

My encouragement, if you're from crew and you're listening or watching any of this is you just got to repent.

02:07:05

You got to admit we made a big mistake and to call some of this heresy is not, it's not wrong.

02:07:13

These are fundamental things we're dealing with. To take sin, to take sinful desires, right?

02:07:20

Things that the Bible identifies as sinful desires and to take those things and normalize them and make them acceptable to Christians is a very dangerous thing to be doing.

02:07:32

This is, it's wrong on such a fundamental level because like I said before, this is something that is intrinsic to God's design for men and women, right?

02:07:41

It doesn't say in scripture that you have to throw a football as a guy, but it does say if you're going to be engaged in sexual activity, it better be with another woman that you call your wife, right?

02:07:51

So very serious things that we're dealing with here and the assumptions behind them.

02:07:57

There's definitely an attractional model going on here. There's definitely some blaming of the church that I think is inappropriate and really just not seeing the sinner for like, that's like the one person it seems like you shouldn't blame in this whole thing is the people who are cultivating in some cases, these desires.

02:08:20

Like you can never blame them, it seems like. They're never culpable for these things. It's like the church is always the problem and needs to do something to change and be more attractional and all of that.

02:08:31

So I've talked too much probably. This has been a very long podcast, but I hope this is helpful for you all in an organization like Crew.

02:08:40

Now, I do have one thing I wanted to say at the end of this. I'm glad to have someone who, a good sponsor for this particular podcast, and that is

02:08:49

Tiny Bibles, Tiny Bibles. If you go to tinybibles .com,

02:08:55

check it out. You can get New King James or King James Bibles. It comes with a magnifying glass.

02:09:00

It's kind of like a novelty in my mind, but of course some people think you see a picture there, fingernails, and that's how big these are.

02:09:09

They're very small. But this is something that would be helpful perhaps for times of persecution.

02:09:15

And there you have like an outlet, the tiny Bibles in the outlet. But I actually have a tiny

02:09:20

Bible with me right here. So there you go. That's how small it is.

02:09:26

And I'll show you the print that's next to my finger. You can see that. The camera will focus on it.

02:09:34

I don't know if the camera will focus on it. I'm trying, but it doesn't seem to want to. So, but you can see even in the blurriness, how small this really is.

02:09:43

I cannot hardly read it with my eyes. You really do need the magnifying glass that comes with it, but check it out.

02:09:50

You can just go to tinybibles .com. That's tinybibles .com.