Any Christian of any orientation who is seeking to be faithful to the Gospel is going to find stiff resistance from the world generally and possibly even from self-identifying as Christians. Living this out faithfully requires more than the solution to a question. There is a deep tension here that must be managed. It is a brokenness that must be carried, a burden that we must bear together. The point where truth and gracious love meet always seems to land within this tension, and that’s how it will remain until that final day.
I have compiled below some of the best and most usable resources I know of that can help you learn about the issues related to faithful Christian belief and practice and alternate sexual orientations. Hopefully this page will grow and be refined over time. Feel free to make suggestions if you know of something helpful I have overlooked or am not aware of.
In Part 1 of my letter, I talked about Paul’s teaching on the value of singleness. In order to understand how to live in our day and time, though, more needs to be said on the issue.
I’m told that one in seven people lives alone in the United States. That’s about 31 million today compared with four million in 1950. As your pastor, I need to say a number of things about this.
From time to time, I have a conversation with someone via email that gets at ideas that I think will be helpful for the broader High Point body. A High Point member recently came to me for advice about how to respond to a very difficult situation involving a family member’s homosexual wedding.
In other posts, I’ve discussed homosexuality and the specific dilemma of deciding whether or not to attend a friend’s or family member’s gay wedding. This post deals more with how to dialogue with love and candor with those who object to our objections.
I’m sharing this discussion with you, with the member’s permission, in the hope that it will help you as you think through a loving, Biblical response to issues like this which will inevitably become more and more a part of our normal experience. Continue reading Questions: On attending a homosexual wedding→
A lot of people are listening to TED Talks these days. I think it is because they are supposed to be smart and scientific. They are mostly just secular and progressive. I was listening to one about how monogamy does not work anymore and how we should be “Monogam-ish”— that is, mostly monogamous. The first part of the talk was full of all kinds of pseudoscience, but the main idea was that marriage is a worse than fifty-fifty gamble and it definitely needs an adjustment if it will have the potential to make us happy. And the thing we need to adjust is probably the monogamy part.
You may or may not think that’s particularly controversial. For my purpose here, this is just one example of a much broader phenomenon. It is part of the general unhappiness with the things that are supposed to make us happy, including human institutions that have lasted tens of thousands of years. The secular and progressive way of dealing with such a phenomenon is to blame the institution — the thing that was supposed to make us happy. If we are not happy in our marriages, then the problem is marriage.
A recent survey of new parents in Germany has suggested that the birth of a child is, on average, more traumatizing than divorce or even the death of a spouse. Nic asked me to write a bit about why this matters for us.
The survey was conducted as an attempt to shed light on the seeming discrepancy between couples’ stated desire to have two children and Germany’s persistently low birth rate that has rested at 1.5 for forty years. If the average couple says they want two children, why are so few doing so? Continue reading Self-Inflicted Trauma→
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