*UPDATE* WORLD VISION U.S. TO HIRE “GAY CHRISTIANS IN SAME-SEX MARRIAGES”
By Ken Silva pastor-teacher on Mar 25, 2014 in Current Issues, Features, Homosexuality/"Christian"
UPDATE: WORLD VISION REVERSES DECISION TO HIRE GAY CHRISTIANS IN SAME-SEX MARRIAGES
I’ve told you before here at Apprising Ministries that there’s a very dark and threatening same-sex storm looming just barely off the coast of your own local evangelical church; and it’s, right now, beginning to approach hurricane force. Professing Christians in the mainstream of the church visible will ignore this at their own peril.
You may recall a couple of years ago in Jay Bakker, Homosexuality, And Gospel Reductionism I reminded you that gay affirming “pastor” Jay Bakker, who’s the son of the infamous Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and a close friend of the Emerging Church anti-theologian Tony Jones, has forged a friendship with Andrew Marin.
If you don’t know, Marin is the President and Founder of The Marin Foundation and author of the book Love Is An Orientation. What’s important to understand about Marin is that he still has the reputation of taking a conservative evangelical view concerning homosexuality, despite his sending quite obviously mixed signals.
Be that as it may, let’s ask why Andrew Marin would wish to promote someone like Jay Bakker, who shouldn’t be teaching a Sunday School class—let alone be considered a pastor, and his horribly misguided teachings about homosexuality and God’s grace. The reason just might they find common ground on same-sex marriage.
From where I stand, it appears as if they look forward to the day same-sex union becomes more widely recognized as a legal marriage; and as I see it, this only a matter of time in the United States. Then the argument people like Marin and Bakker will advance is that homosexual relations within “marriage” cannot be considered sin.
To those who hold such a view, it becomes their escape clause from homosexuality being a sin of sexual immorality. As more and more states within America make same-sex marriage legal, you are then going to find that younger evangelicals will be reveal they’re completely in agreement with those like Jay Bakker.
So, what’s really at stake here truly concerns the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As I pointed out in Homopression is al least as bad as Homophobia, it’s dead wrong, not to mention downright cruel and unloving, to withhold the truth from precious LGBT souls for whom Christ died thereby leaving them in the prison of sin.
If one affirms that same-sex sexual relations, even within a so-called marriage, is not a sin of sexual immorality then you aren’t going to offer the Gospel of repentance and forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ name to those practicing homosexual relations. You will deny them their only way to be saved out of that deviant life.
Just look at how the powerful homosexual lobby is currently dividing and ripping apart mainline denominations world around. That’s why recently in On Contemplative Spirituality and Charismania I took you through the pitiful pattern followed by those now dead and/or mortally wounded churches as to how they got there.
You need to know that mainstream evangelicalism is following the exact same progression even now. Do you seriously think that the results will be different? I will say again that, in my opinion, in the near future a major evangelical figure will come out of the closet to detonate this debate within mainstream evangelicalism.
It’s against this backdrop that I pray you’ll see the bigger picture as I now point you to World Vision: Why We’re Hiring Gay Christians in Same-Sex Marriages, a report that went on yesterday ChristianityToday,com from Celeste Gracey and Jeremy Weber. They begin by telling us:
World Vision’s American branch will no longer require its more than 1,100 employees to restrict their sexual activity to marriage between one man and one woman.
Abstinence outside of marriage remains a rule. But a policy change announced Monday [March 24] will now permit gay Christians in legal same-sex marriages to be employed at one of America’s largest Christian charities. (source)
Gracey and Weber also inform us in this “exclusive interview, [that] World Vision U.S. president Richard Stearns” believes:
other Christian organizations with faith-based hiring rules should follow World Vision’s lead. Stearns asserts that the “very narrow policy change” should be viewed by others as “symbolic not of compromise but of [Christian] unity.” He even hopes it will inspire unity elsewhere among Christians. (source)
Sadly, apostatizing organizations will likely drop into lockstep with World Vision. However, as we can already see in the mainline denominations, such compromise of God’s Word only brings more division. The Christian cannot come into unity with people like Stearns who’re actually encouraging people to continue on in their sin.
And in this case I fully agree with Franklin Graham who stated emphatically yesterday:
I was shocked today to hear of World Vision’s decision to hire employees in same-sex marriages. The Bible is clear that marriage is between a man and a woman.
My dear friend, Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse, would be heartbroken. He was an evangelist who believed in the inspired Word of God.
World Vision maintains that their decision is based on unifying the church – which I find offensive – as if supporting sin and sinful behavior can unite the church.
From the Old Testament to the New Testament, the Scriptures consistently teach that marriage is between a man and woman and any other marriage relationship is sin. (source)
Those LGBT people who’re not Christian desperately need to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ; we must love them enough to tell them the truth. Yes, as lovingly, gently, and as often as they’ll listen, but tell them the truth we must. And if such a one is a Christian (Christians can do a lot of stupid things) then:
Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:1-2)
In closing this, I offer that what you’ll read in the CT interview from Richard Stearns, president of World Vision, also represents perfectly the views of the younger sectors of evangelicalism. Tragically, through the influence of the Emergent Church, long ago they turned away from sola Scriptura to fickle feelings of the love of the self:
But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self. (2 Timothy 3:1-2)
You’d better hold on tight because the waters are about to get very rough for faithful Bible-believing Christians…