Pastor, author, and apologist Sam Allberry has resigned from his position at his church and from the Keller Institute after revealing that he had been involved in an inappropriate relationship with a man several years ago.
Allberry, a gay Anglican priest who endorsed celibacy for the same-sex attracted, served as associate pastor at Immanuel Nashville Church alongside leaders such as Russell Moore, Ray Ortlund, Gavin Ortlund, Barnabas Piper, and T. J. Timm. According to a statement from The Gospel Coalition:
A statement from Immanuel Church about Sam Allberry reveals they knew he engaged in an inappropriate relationship with another man in 2022 but didn’t believe it rose to the level of being disqualifying, and still decided to bring him on as pastor. They later discovered new information about this relationship that was previously undisclosed, and then terminated his employment.
In addition to his apologetic work, he wrote several books, including Is God Anti-Gay?, Biblical Manhood, One with My Lord: The Life-Changing Reality of Being in Christ and What God Has to Say About Our Bodies. He was a prominent partner and editor with The Gospel Coalition, the founding editor of Living Out, a ministry for those struggling with same-sex attraction, and one of the key architects for the acceptance of same-sex attraction within evangelical circles.
SSAC is the movement within the larger evangelical movement that narrowly defines the sin of homosexuality to include only acting upon one’s sinful desires, and defines the sinful desires themselves as simply a part of a person’s identity and something God is content with not changing in the heart of the believer.
The false beliefs of the SSAC movement include:
- Same-sex attraction is not a result of early childhood abuse and is always unchosen.
- Same-sex attraction only becomes sin if it is acted upon.
- Homosexual acts are no different than other sins.
- Christian regeneration has no influence over same-sex desire.
- The church is guilty of oppressing this group instead of helping them bear their cross of unchangeable same-sex attraction.
Pastor Shawn Mathis on X (@ShawnMathis1972) reveals troubling elements of Allberry’s past ministry, whose ideology may have played a part in his actions, writing:
Back when Allberry was a writer and eventually an editor at @TGC, he used his status to soften the churches’ resistance as I show below.
Will they recant from using and endorsing him, participating in the queering of the American church?
He denied personal attraction to gay sex was wrong & was OK with being gay while teaching that “David was a pretty boy.”
1. OK with personal attraction to sex w/ men: “So, I would be uncomfortable with saying same-sex attraction is sin.” Interview on White Horse Inn, Sept. 2015
“I think if you say to someone that their same-sex attraction itself is sin you are effectively saying you need to repent of being fallen. And I am not quite sure what that means or what that looks like.” Sam Allberry, “Is Same-Sex Attraction A Sin?” @ Moore’s ERLC website
2. OK with being gay: Questioner: “If you could be shown the roots of your same-sex attraction …and you could be brought to complete heterosexuality, would you be open to that?”
Allberry: “Would I be open to it? I mean yes and no actually. There are times I would think, “Actually I would like to be a husband to a wife and a father to a kid”…But in another sense, I really don’t mind…”—2017 interview at Lansdowne church.
While working at Living Out (which he founded), they published an article stating this: “Godliness is not heterosexuality – in fact, we would say that we are perhaps more godly due to our homosexuality than anything else.”
3. OK with breaking gender stereotypes: “in contemporary language, David was a ‘pretty boy’ [1 Samuel 16:12] and he was someone who spent an inordinate amount of time playing the harp and writing poems about his feelings.” He based this absurdity on a double error. He wrongly assumed that music and poetry are not manly pursuits and misapplied the Old Testament Hebrew word.”
“He knew what it was like, if I could put it this way, to have body image issues because we are told in Isaiah 53 that people turn their faces away from him…there was no greater dysphoria than when He who knew no sin became sin for us. That is the ultimate experience of being in the wrong flesh.”
Allberry: “Am I saying that transgendered people are all futile in their thinking, foolish in their hearts, and darkened in their minds? No. I am saying that is true of all of us, without exception. Paul is making those comments to the human race…None of us, not a single one of us, is qualified to determine our own identity. And whatever identity we come up for ourselves will not be a good fit.”–“How Can I Know My Gender?”
