On being honest and resting in God

Don't just pretend to love others. Really love them.



"Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good." Romans 12:9

Here is what Jim Naughton wrote today on the Episcopal Cafe:

One argument that gets made against the Episcopal Church's efforts to fully include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Christians in the life of our church is that this initiative entails compromising the vaules of the Gospel with the values of permissive Western culture. Another argument sometimes offered is that our efforts at inclusion matter place the interests of a privileged class of western activists ahead of those of the church in the developing world.

There is, at the heart of both of these arguments, a willingness to ignore the fact that our purportedly permissive culture is in many cases quite hostile to LGBT people, that this hostility in some instances has lethal consequences, and that church leaders both here and in the developing world often fan the flames of this hostility.

In the wake of the bullying-related suicides of recent weeks, it is time for Episcopalians to make it clear that they are not surrendering to the prevailing culture, but attempting to transform it through the love of Jesus Christ. We are small in numbers, and our example may not posses the power we would like, still--if judged by the expensive ferocity of the resistance it has encountered--it counts for something.

We have, on occasion, compromised the authenticity of our voice, by seeking to placate those who have argued either that we were moving too far, too fast, or that we were heading entirely in the wrong direction. But we did not move fast enough to save any of the lives of the young people who killed themselves in recent weeks, and there is no moral equation in which tranquil relations within our own church multiplied by the good opinion of the leaders in other parts of the Anglican Communion counts for more than the lives of bullyed children.

Here are some important resources:

http://community.pflag.org/Page.aspx?pid=566

http://www.welcomingresources.org/communityorg.htm

http://www.integrityusa.org/

Believe Out Loud:

http://bolec.integrityusa.org/

http://believeoutloud.com/