The Table Briefing: Engaging The LGBT Community With Truth And Love

By Darrell L. Bock and Mikel Del Rosario

[Darrell L. Bock is Senior Research Professor in New Testament Studies and Executive Director of Cultural Engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. Mikel Del Rosario is cultural engagement assistant.]

Because they are afraid of being misunderstood, many people struggle to relate to others who see moral issues differently. This fear makes some Christians hesitant to engage people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. How do we maintain our convictions without ambiguity while obeying what Jesus described as the second greatest commandment—to love our neighbors as we love ourselves? How can we engage the LGBT community with truth and love?

In this Table Briefing, we consider the tension that arises in engaging with LGBT people, the difference between acceptance and approval, and how to challenge people well. We focus on the relational aspect of conversations with the LGBT community.

Tensions In Engagement

The church has been slow to engage the LGBT community. In many congregations, an unhealthy bifurcation between those who regularly attend church and those who do not has fueled a culture-war mentality that tends to drive people away. At a cultural engagement chapel on engaging with LGBT persons, Mark Yarhouse and Gary Barnes joined Darrell Bock to discuss the root of this mentality and a biblical starting point for humble engagement.

Yarhouse: I think there is an “us-them” mentality, that they’re all out there and we’re sort of hunkered down within our churches. And it lets us have an in-group and an out-group. It serves the culture war [mentality] because “they” are taking strides to damage things that are sacred to us . . . whether that’s around marriage or other issues . . . . That whole dynamic assumes that there are no people within our own churches who are dealing with this issue.

And when you say, “Homosexuality is a sin,” it’s not that theologically it’s incorrect to talk about homosexual behavior as sin. But when you use language that we often use from the pulpit, it actually intensifies and increases the shame the person in the pew feels, and it’s more likely to drive them away from the church. . . . Why would they stay with the church when the church doesn’t even know how to engage and talk with them and love them well?

Bock: I actually think that the cross is a great leveler: We all have the same needs before God. We may have different areas, but we all have the same core needs. We all stand in the same position of needing God’s grace. . . . We’re all stuck in Romans 3 to a certain degree: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” But what we gain in our relationship with God, we gain because he gives us and supplies us with what we need that we can’t garner for ourselves, that we don’t earn . . . . It’s something that we’re gifted with . . . , that levels out the playing field. That’s not “us and them.” It’s all of us together sharing the same need for God and what he has to provide.

Barnes: [The cross] is a good leveler, but if you really have great theology and go deeper with that, the cross is also a model and a motivator. Think about Romans 15:7, “Receive others as you have been received by Christ.” So how was I received by Christ? When I was different from him, even alienated from him, he took the initiative at extreme cost to himself to move toward me. It wasn’t me moving toward him. It wasn’t me getting to a place where he could move toward me.

Paul’s words are convicting and instructive in this conversation. Every human is born with the tendency to rebel against God in many areas of life. Reflecting on the atonement brings a humble recognition that everyone—including us—needs God’s grace and forgiveness. This realization can help believers develop sensitivity and lower communication barriers. Still, many in the church struggle with offering grace and truth, especially in this area. How does one love neighbors and hold Christian convictions?

Distinguishing Acceptance And Approval

When it comes to the same-sex conversation, believers often feel a tension between acceptance and approval. For example, some wonder, “Will I be compromising my stance on biblical sexuality by being accepting toward my gay neighbors?” Caleb Kaltenbach, who grew up immersed in the LGBT community and is now the lead pastor of Discovery Church in Simi Valley, California, joined Darrell Bock on a Table Podcast called “Grace and Truth in LGBT Engagement” to help distinguish acceptance from approval and explain his church’s culture of inclusivity:

Kaltenbach: There is a difference between acceptance and approval. I believe that we are called to accept everybody as an individual. That does not mean we approve of every life choice that somebody makes.

Especially parents of teenagers who come out . . . , Christian parents, or really any parents who may not agree with the choice to be in a same-sex relationship, would have a problem with that. So they believe, “Okay, if I accept my child, that means that I’m approving.”

My point is “No.” Every Sunday, anybody should be able to walk through my church doors when I preach and attend our church. I already know that I shake hands every Sunday with people who made life choices that week that I wouldn’t approve of. But that doesn’t mean that I accept them any less.

Our church really focuses on trying to be a church where you can belong before you believe, for lack of a better word. [I’m] not saying that we integrate people into the body of Christ without salvation. But we give people a chance to be a part of our community. And that’s where we really try to live out that acceptance versus approval.

If we are going to call people, eventually when they follow Christ, to primarily identify with the church community and not the LGBT community, we had better have them comfortable and ready to primarily identify [with the church], because I don’t think many people will leave one community if they don’t have another one to walk into.

There’s a real tension between acceptance and approval. There’s a tension between grace and truth. We have to own the fact that it isn’t our job to change somebody’s sexual orientation. It is our job to speak the truth into people’s lives.

We need to understand people from their perspective. If a missionary goes overseas to share the gospel with a particular culture, they have to do contextualization. They have to learn culture. They have to engage culture—not as a means to water down the gospel, but . . . to use culture as a vessel to share the gospel, to communicate it. . . . a lot of Christians are not, for one reason or another, willing to do that when it comes to certain people, including the LGBT community.

Bock: I like to make the distinction between [respecting] every person because every person’s made in the image of God. That’s the acceptance part. Approval has to do with signing off on everything that they do or say. That’s distinct. So, being able to keep that in place is important.

The other way I like to talk about this tension is that there’s a moral challenge for the way God calls people to live in the standards that he displays. [That is]: “The most efficient, effective, authentic way to live is to live this way.”

But you’ve got people who live differently. And the problem is that the people you want to challenge with those standards are the very people you want to invite into a new experience with God, which is the solution. So if you wall them off from going there, you’ve actually cut yourself off from the solution.

The tension between acceptance and approval—grace and truth—must be viewed in light of our role as ambassadors of Christ. As his representatives in the world, believers must develop the ability to see things from another person’s perspective and help people understand the gospel in their cultural context. While the church can never approve of sin, the ethos of accepting all people and loving them well mirrors Jesus’s example of both challenging people with truth and compassionately serving them. How can Christians navigate the tension of relating well to people while simultaneously holding biblical principles without compromise?

Engaging With Convicted Civility

Yarhouse explains the importance of a concept some call “convicted civility,” focusing on the relational aspect of cultural engagement in the context of conversations with LBGT persons.

Yarhouse: We have far too many Christians who are strong on convictions, but you wouldn’t really want them to represent you in any public way because . . . they do it [in a way that is] not very civil in its engagement and loving and caring for the other person. Then you have Christians who are so civil, so loving, so caring, that you have no idea what they stand for.

What does it mean to hold conviction on the one hand and civility on the other? Yarhouse explains what this can look like by sharing a story about a day he invited a protester to his presentation on sexuality. This remarkable meeting broke down stereotypes and led to meaningful conversation:

Yarhouse: I was making a presentation . . . and a local activist who would identify himself as a gay activist contacted our university and said, “I’m going to [be in attendance].” He did a YouTube video and he called for all of his gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other friends to come and just sit in the front couple rows and stare this “son of a gun” down . . . , so I invited them to come. [I thought], “He’s coming anyway, protesting me!” So I invited him to come and meet me and meet my students, and sure enough, they sat down in the front rows and stared at me as I was presenting.

But I talked with him afterwards. He made a video afterwards and said, “You know, I didn’t agree with everything this guy said, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.” And I’ve got to tell you, he was just eviscerated by people within the gay community who felt like he should’ve been tougher on me.

One of the guys who came to protest me, I went out for coffee with him a few times, and he shared [that] he was raised in a Christian home. He talked about his upbringing. He said, “Look, I thought when I met you that you were going to have smoke coming out of your nostrils and horns on your head. That’s the way you were depicted to me, and yet here we are having coffee and talking about this.”

The protestor in this case received more pushback from his gay friends than he did from a Christian community that embraced him. Yarhouse noted, “That gave him pause. . . . That’s part of what convicted civility does. It’s really relational. But it’s not like I changed my theological position in interacting with these folks.”

Indeed, relating to people on the basis of love may cause those who disagree with us on moral issues to stop and listen. Some may come to recognize that Christians with an extended hand offer something more than the mere tolerance and agreement the world demands. They offer that which is truly needed: the love of Christ.

Practical Advice On Engagement

How can Christians effectively engage the LGBT community with grace and truth? Consider these three practical tips:

1. Develop Compassion For LGBT People

The Scriptures reveal God’s compassion for hurting people. For example, the Gospels show God’s compassion in his saving and forgiving sinners (Matt. 18:27; Luke 15:20). Further, compassion was a key motivation for Jesus’s healing ministry. He even told a story about a Samaritan’s radical compassion for a wounded man, challenging an expert in Jewish law to have compassion on neighbors who were different from him (Luke 10:33-37).

Christians must develop loving compassion for LGBT people, especially in light of the negative experiences many have had with the church. Kaltenbach shares a sad story about how stereotypes can be formed when believers fall short of the biblical standard for cultural engagement.

Kaltenbach: When I was two, my parents divorced, and both of them came out of the closet. . . . In elementary school and preschool, [my mother] took me with her to gay parties and clubs and campouts and events. I even marched in gay pride parades. I remember at the end of one of these pride parades—and again, this is in the 1980s—there were all these Christians holding up signs saying, “God hates you. Go away. Turn or burn.” And if that wasn’t offensive enough, they were spraying water and urine on people.

And I remember looking at my mom, and I said, “Mom, why are they acting like that?” She said, “Well, Caleb, they’re Christians. And Christians hate gay people. Christians don’t like people that are not like them.”

I just saw this reinforced in so many different ways that I describe in [my] book . . . families ended up alienating their sons who had AIDS. We watched people in my mom’s community die of that. We watched Christian parents alienate them.

Christians must also develop loving compassion for their fellow brothers and sisters who struggle with same-sex attraction. Yarhouse shares one scenario that especially helps married Christians consider the experience of those in the church who commit to celibacy for the sake of Christ in this context:

Yarhouse: You have a young person in the church dealing with [same-sex attraction] saying, “You know, you get to go home to your spouse. You get to live this [dream] out. You’re with your best friend.” And I don’t even think most of us appreciate what they’re giving up or what they’re saying “no” to [in order] to be faithful to God.

Most of us get a pass in our churches for the things that we deal with. It’s not that our church teaches that what we struggle with is not sin, but we really get a pass when we struggle with our own stuff because we do it privately or we say, “Well, guys are guys,” or whatever.

Bock: We certainly act differently toward it. We certainly seem to have created a ranking where there are the “super sins,” you know, the sins on steroids, and then there’s the other stuff. And as long as you’re in the “other stuff” category, you’re okay. But if you commit one of the super sins, then you’re marked out. So that’s a huge sociological mentality that you’re dealing with that’s actually in need of some change.

2. Avoid Focusing Primarily On Sexuality

When people share deep thoughts on life and God, it provides a window into their souls. This is why listening is a key starting point to engaging someone as a person created in the image of God, rather than as one primarily characterized by sexuality. Indeed, beginning to understand spiritual motivations and the things that drive a person’s life allows for more meaningful interaction. Kaltenbach highlights the importance of engaging an LGBT person as a person rather than as an LGBT person. He explains:

Kaltenbach: The biggest cultural issue that we have in our society today—and maybe [that] we always have had—is the issue of identity. That’s why we have Bruce Jenner to Caitlyn Jenner, and that’s why we have the leader of the Northwest NAACP who was Caucasian, but she still says she identifies as African-American.

And you see this play out when conservative or evangelical Christians deal with the LGBT community. So, let’s say that there’s a guy named Joe, and Joe is in his workplace, and he knows that somebody he works with is gay. He thinks it’s his job to share [Leviticus and Romans 1] with that individual.

And the person on the receiving end, who’s gay, says, “You just reduced me to my sexual orientation. That which you tell me I shouldn’t do, you’ve just done. And you think that this is all that I’m about, when maybe intimacy is really the smallest [or] one of the smaller ways I identify as LGBT. You haven’t taken time to get to know me, my experiences, my hurts, my pains.” And they walk away hurt.

And I think that a better way to do it is Jesus’s way, spending time with people, having deep convictions about theology, but also having deep relationships, getting to know the whole person and helping them to primarily identify with Jesus. And as Jesus starts driving all the domains of their life, I believe that it’s within the context of trust and relationship that we can have difficult conversations about holy living.

After this conversation, Darrell Bock talked with David Bennett, a former gay rights activist who is now committed to celibacy for the sake of faithfulness to Christ and who believes homosexual behavior is sin. On a Table Podcast called “The Same-Sex Attracted Christian,” Bennett explained how authentic relationships were key in his spiritual journey from atheism to Christianity:

Bennett: Any person can receive Jesus Christ. And I think our first protocol is not to worry about someone’s sexuality. We want to answer that question, but before we do, [we must] talk about Jesus first, talk about God’s grace.

Bock: The image of God is more important than a person’s sexuality.

Bennett: My aunt said to me, “David, no matter what happens, I will accept you.” She said, “I don’t know what it’s like to be homosexual. It’s easy for me to read those verses in the Bible because I’m not homosexual. But you are and you struggle with that. And that is . . . really difficult. So I don’t want to hold anything over you. I just want you to know Jesus and to be filled with the Holy Spirit and for him to teach you.”

[We must] allow people to explore God and explore a relationship with Jesus first. . . . If you’re not one of the same-sex attracted [people], you’re not going to understand that issue as intimately. But I think that just your presence and just being there and not running away—and, you know, the girl in the pub [who] prayed for me, when I said, “You know, I’m homosexual, and I don’t want prayer.” She said to me, “I don’t really think that matters. Have you experienced the love of God?”

Bock: She was relating to you as a person, and the sexuality was just kind of this side thing over here that really didn’t enter into the equation of how she was relating to you, because she was going to relate to you as a person no matter what.

Bennett: That’s right. But she also . . . could tell it was difficult for me and didn’t force me. And she was saying, “Here’s an even more important thing: Do you really know what it means to be a Christian and to know the love of Jesus?”

Bennett appreciated his aunt’s priority on the gospel. Further, being challenged with the love of Christ before turning to the issue of homosexuality was a key part of his conversion to Christianity and his renunciation of a former practice. He appreciated the space to take time in reconsidering the importance he had placed on his sexuality. This highlights the need for patience and understanding in LGBT engagement.

3. Be Patient With People

In any ministry context, it takes time for people to yield more and more of their lives to Christ.

Bennett: People need to first have a heart change before they can understand fully what God is calling them to. I think letting that process actually happen—the true born again experience, allowing people to actually receive from Jesus that new heart, the new desires—[comes first]. And then from that, they, over time, as they walk through it, as they live, as they enjoy their life in Christ, it works itself out. . . . It requires patience and loving kindness, and it requires us really to be pres-ent and to really back up the words that we say with action.

Bock: I’m hearing the word “patience” a lot and really giving time. And what I’m also hearing from you, from your story and reflecting on it, is there was at one point . . . this radical change. It was like almost a 180-degree turn. But working that out actually took a lot of time on the other end. . . . Everything [didn’t] just drop into place.

Bennett: That’s right. . . . If I didn’t have the support from my family, and [if] I didn’t have the support from certain people in the church who were faithful, it would have been really hard. And that’s why the grace of God is so crucial. [We must] come alongside anyone that comes to Christ and help them and be there for them and bear their burdens.

Kaltenbach explains how the church can exhibit an inclusive environment that demonstrates love, patience, and kindness for those struggling with same-sex attraction:

Kaltenbach: When somebody walks through our doors, I don’t care who they are, what they’ve done, or what they are in the midst of doing. I want them in there to hear the gospel, to [let it] have influence in their lives. . . . Some churches, when they find out somebody who is visiting or . . . one of their members has just come out this way or is doing something, sometimes will overreact, and will act harshly, and sometimes will even alienate them. And I know that every situation is different, but I’ve seen this so much.

And I’m thinking to myself, “What about giving God a margin? What about allowing people not to be perfect? What about understanding that God is the best at changing lives, not us? What about the fact that it’s always taken God time and a process to break down pride around our heart?”

And I think that part of the principle of “belong before you believe” is not pronouncing salvation on people. But when somebody comes to our church, we give them a margin; we don’t expect them to be perfect. And we know that God, as long as they’re there, is in the process of drawing them to himself.

Bock: So your approach is to really challenge them to let God go to work, but to do it in a way that also wraps around them support that says, “We care about you; we love you. We love you enough to challenge you on the one hand, but we love you also enough to be there for you.”

Kaltenbach: Absolutely. Unfortunately, some people eventually get to the point where they run up to a barrier. And our barrier is our theological belief on sexual identity, on sexual gender, and the expression of sexual intimacy. And some people, when they run up to that barrier, they don’t like it. And other people, when they run up to that barrier, they understand it, and they stay there. And some people will leave. But even the people who leave, I praise God that at least they were there for a time. . . . And who knows, maybe God will bring them back, or maybe we planted a seed, and hopefully we haven’t hurt them.

Indeed, healthy engagement requires individual Christians to develop true compassion, avoid focusing solely on the same-sex issue in conversation, and exhibit patient kindness to LGBT people. But how can churches challenge people in their congregations well when it comes to issues of sexuality?

Challenge People Well

One key aspect of convicted civility is challenging people in an environment where they know the challenge comes from deep care and authentic relationship. Unless people know you care, they will not care about your critique. The challenge for churches, then, is to create a safe space where healthy confrontation and healthy reflection can take place. Moreover, churches must be willing to foster an environment of mutual learning, since there are many things churches can learn about and from interacting with LGBT people. Bock explains how to think about challenging people well:

Bock: We’ve got the biblical standard that says, “This is the way God calls us to live,” and we have a pastoral problem when a mother comes in with a child, [and she] says, “My child just came out as gay, what do I do?” . . . The pastoral problem isn’t met by simply saying, “Well, the Bible says . . . .”

The Bible doesn’t say, “Have nothing to do with them.” The Bible says, “Challenge them like you would any person who’s in need of being restored by God. Challenge them to be restored by God. Challenge them to be reconciled with God.”

Conclusion

Ministering to the LGBT community presents tensions involving grace and truth. Challenging people while loving them well mirrors Jesus’s example of proclaiming truth while serving compassionately. Effective cultural engagement requires balancing conviction and civility. May we develop true compassion, avoid focusing solely on sexuality, and exhibit patient kindness to LGBT people. As Kaltenbach says, “God has never called me to change someone’s sexual orientation or to resolve the tension. God has called me to point people to Jesus and walk in the tension of grace and truth.”