Chapter 1: Studying Homosexuality for the First Time
In the first chapter, Rogers basically sets the stage for the discussion. He shares his own history and upbringing, and shares what eventually brought him into the conversation concerning homosexuality and the church. While he was a member at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, the pastor was asked to put together a study group to discuss the possibility of the church becoming a More Light Church - a church that would ordain LGBT folk into all offices of the church, despite the denomination prohibiting it. Rogers ended up on that study group, even though he didn’t really want to serve in that role. Through the study that took place in that group, and in the years following, he eventually came to hold a completely different position than he previously had. Rogers writes:
“I have had a change of mind and heart. I had never really studied the issue of the status in the church of people who are homosexual. I opposed homosexuality reflexively – it was just what I thought Christians were supposed to do…I wasn’t swayed by the culture or pressured by academic colleagues. I changed my mind initially by going back to the Bible and taking seriously its central message for our lives” (15).
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled “The Bible & Homosexuality: Enough with the Bible Already.” It has leveled out now at 233 comments - which I think is a record at pomomusings. I think it was my claim that some people need to put their Bibles aside for awhile when dealing with this issue that brought out the masses. Pastor, theologian and author Jack Rogers left a comment on the post, in which he wrote:
“The problem of course, isn’t with the Bible, but with the interpretation that imposes a societal prejudice on texts that were not meant to address contemporary Christian people who are LGBT.” [Source]
He’s right. Obviously, as I mentioned in the post, the answer is not to throw out the Bible. However, we must look at the ways in which we have interpreted it that have brought us to our current situation. Rogers’s comment reminded me that I had picked up his “Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality” a few years ago, but never got around to reading it. I finished it over Christmas and found it to be a very helpful and important book. I had the chance to meet Jack four years ago at the 2004 Covenant Network Conference at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago; he was my small group leader for the conference, and it was an honor to learn from him and hear his perspectives. Rogers is an example of someone who used to hold the traditional, conservative belief about homosexuality; through in-depth study of biblical texts and relationships with gay and lesbian people in the church, he has since come to an open and accepting position. Rogers writes, “I did not arrive at my conclusions overnight. I do not expect you to do so, either…My desire is to reframe the discussion regarding people who are homosexual so that we can better understand one another, heal our divisions, and move forward together in our churches” (16).
Please continue the conversation on this post, but I thought you might be interested in seeing what the readers of the Youth Specialties’ blog are saying about this post here.
Now that I’m getting back into youth ministry again, it’s been an interesting process to get brought up to speed with some of the many new resources that are out there. Of course there are always going to be really great resources and ones that are just lacking. And naturally, there will always be some resources that certain people have theological issues with. But it seems like every now and then, you run across parts of resources or curriculum that are just simply inappropriate and should not be used in youth ministry.
YouthBytes has provided one such video. I don’t know much about YouthBytes or Chad Daniel, who seems to be the man behind the operation. YouthBytes is meant to be a discipleship tool to help fight one of the great enemies of the Church: “teenage boredom with the things of God.” And apparently for Chad, that means producing videos like this:
Every now and then, I find it’s helpful to mention I have a Commenting Policy at pomomusings. This is not an uncommon thing for blogs to have (e.g. ProBlogger and The Huffington Post), especially when there is a log of dialogue that occurs on the site. A few years ago, I created my Commenting Policy, after having to shut down comments for a few months. I didn’t like the direction the blog’s conversation was heading (primarily because of a few commenters who left once the the posts were closed for comments). After a few months, I opened the site back up for comments with this Commenting Policy. Below is the policy that I wrote a few years ago.
This is just a few shots from New Years Eve last night shot with the Flip minoHD. I think it did pretty well last night - a couple of times people were asking “Where’s the zoom?” which is an obvious downside to the Flip. But it is small enough you can maneuver it around however you want and get some fun close shots as well.
I was having some problems getting the edited video to export as HD video in iMovie’ 08 (I think I might have to try iMovie HD which people say is better anyway) - but did a quick search on YouTube and found a helpful video that explains how your settings need to be set to get it to export correctly. You can check out the video here.
My free Flip minoHD arrived yesterday and it’s been fun to play around with it a little bit. I’ll post a more thorough review later, but it’s super easy to use and the video quality seems to be really great. I’ve uploaded my first video to YouTube and it’s below.
This is really my first time working with video - and while the Flip is awesome…I don’t really know what to do with it. For those of you who have worked with video before, do you have any recommendations for what I could use this camcorder for? Any creative uses? I know there are plenty of those photography challenge sites (like ten on ten) out there where you have to take photos of certain things or take a photo each day. Are there similar sites for creative uses of video or filming? If so, please share. Thanks a lot - and Happy New Year to everyone!
It’s time for that requisite “Year in Review” post - there have been a lot of changes for Sarah and me in 2008, and here are just a few things that I blogged about in 2008 that I thought were noteworthy.
Sarah and I both graduated from Princeton - finally!
We got a free trip to the PC(USA) General Assembly (thanks to the Presbyterian Outlook) and I got a chance to be the official blogger for the Presbyterian Outlook
I’ve been sitting with this quote for over a year now - trying to figure out the best time to blog about it. I first heard Bob Dykstra, professor of Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary (and the best professor at Princeton Seminary, in my opinion) mention this in one of his lectures. I think it’s a very interesting take on the process by which we change our mind on certain issues - and what happens to us and to our worldview when thoughts and beliefs change. Of course, I have issues related to this post in mind with this quote, but I think it’s something that could be applied to many different situations in which it becomes necessary for some to change their minds:
“The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter….
“[Even] the most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity…. A new opinion counts as ‘true’ just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock…. [Even the most ancient truths were themselves once plastic.] They also were called true from human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found.”
From William James’s Pragmatism (1907), excerpts
What would it mean for us to view our beliefs and truths as more “plastic”?
[I know many will not agree with this post. I know many will say I'm on the slippery slope, have rejected Scripture, thus rejected Christ, and I am teaching things against the Gospel. Obviously, nothing I say will convince you otherwise, and I'm not interested in having 'debates' on this issue. I have many close friends, and family members, who will disagree with this post - and that's okay. Many of us have come to a place of understanding on this issue - we just disagree. But this is still something I feel like I need to say.]
Unfortunately, if you came to this post hoping to see a detailed exegesis of texts like Leviticus 20.13 and Romans 1.26-27, then you will be disappointed. There are certainly plenty of books written that go into great detail concerning the very few texts in Scripture that deal with same-sex relations. If you want to read a super-thick book that argues for a traditional/conservative view regarding homosexuality, then you might want to take a look at Robert Gagnon’sThe Bible and Homosexual Practice (520 pages!). There are plenty of people who hold a similar view and probably argue their point more succinctly and with more generosity and humility, but Gagnon is one who is often quoted. If you want to read a book from someone who has come 180 degrees in his thinking on this issue, and argues for acceptance for gays in the church, read Jack Rogers’s “Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality.”
But presenting a coherent biblical argument for why homosexuality is not a sin and why our gay brothers and sisters should be fully welcomed into all areas of the church and ministry is not my point here. I think many people have done just that (Jack Rogers and Stacy Johnson come to mind), but they are easily dismissed by many because they apparently don’t have a “high enough view of scripture.”
Well - if that’s the problem - then I say, “Enough with the Bible already!” [click to continue…]
I am preaching this Sunday, and we are going through a series of sermons based on characters of the Christmas story. So, my assigned character for this Sunday was Joseph and my sermon title (also assigned to me) was “Joseph, Unwavering Faith.” However, I made a couple changes to the bulletin, and it will appear as “Joseph: Unwavering Faith?” The texts I am using are Matthew 1.18-25 and 2.13-15. I know there are some different ways of going about writing an “open-source” sermon, but this week I’m just going to be writing it online. I’ll be drafting, editing and revising the sermon within this blog post. So, if you want to follow along and leave comments, that would be great! You can Subscribe to the Comments of this post to keep up with the conversation. I have no idea if this will work - or if this is even a good idea - but I thought I’d try it out for this sermon. Join the conversation & sermon-writing below.
He’s right. Obviously, as I mentioned in the post, the answer is not to throw out the Bible. However, we must look at the ways in which we have interpreted it that have brought us to our current situation. Rogers’s comment reminded me that I had picked up his “
Now that I’m getting back into youth ministry again, it’s been an interesting process to get brought up to speed with some of the many new resources that are out there. Of course there are always going to be really great resources and ones that are just lacking. And naturally, there will always be some resources that certain people have theological issues with. But it seems like every now and then, you run across parts of resources or curriculum that are just simply inappropriate and should not be used in youth ministry.
Unfortunately, if you came to this post hoping to see a detailed exegesis of texts like Leviticus 20.13 and Romans 1.26-27, then you will be disappointed. There are certainly plenty of books written that go into great detail concerning the very few texts in Scripture that deal with same-sex relations. If you want to read a super-thick book that argues for a traditional/conservative view regarding homosexuality, then you might want to take a look at 
Commenting Policy
by Adam on January 2, 2009 · 1 comment
in General
Every now and then, I find it’s helpful to mention I have a Commenting Policy at pomomusings. This is not an uncommon thing for blogs to have (e.g. ProBlogger and The Huffington Post), especially when there is a log of dialogue that occurs on the site. A few years ago, I created my Commenting Policy, after having to shut down comments for a few months. I didn’t like the direction the blog’s conversation was heading (primarily because of a few commenters who left once the the posts were closed for comments). After a few months, I opened the site back up for comments with this Commenting Policy. Below is the policy that I wrote a few years ago.
[click to continue…]
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