Weeks after Pastor Greg Johnson and the elders of Memorial Church in St Louis, Mo, announced their intentions to leave the conservative Presbyterian Church of America, the results of finding that they can no longer support sound doctrine and instead want the freedom to preach their particularly noxious brand of subversive sexual theology, Johnson explains that one of the best ways to make gay people in our congregants know we care about them is to preach more positive illustrations about homosexuals from the pulpit, using illustrations that intentionally note people’s sexual deviancy and sexual sin, even if it’s not relevant to the story.
Speaking to Martin Helgessen on the to the Apologia – Centrum för Kisten Apologetik channel on October 27 2022:
Question: What do you think we should do at our church to make LGBTQ people know that we care about them
Is homosexuality only discussed in the context of discussing everybody else’s sins? You know, because you don’t ever want to pick on- you don’t ever want to preach on one sin that the whole congregation doesn’t experience and make one or two people who do feel horrible.
But it’s things like that that you can do, making sure that positive stories of gay people make it into the pulpit. You know, if you’ve preached with illustrations, you know, there’s one story that I’ve been telling for years.
I had a very small little Honda Civic in the late 1980s, and we had a horrific snowstorm…so I was trying to get out of my alleyway to get to school, grad school, and my car had gotten stuck in the snow, so that my wheels were spinning, but they weren’t touching the ground anymore. And I remember just thinking, ‘this is horrible. How am I going to get out of here?’ Like, ‘how long will it take for snow to melt under me? Will that even happen?’
He continues:
And then a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud pulls up, something from the 1930s, this expensive antique car and out pop three gay men. And two of them have shovels, and the other one has a top hat and a big fur coat.. and he tells his friends to dig me out. And meanwhile he’s talking to me he’s like, ‘so what do you do? Are you a student?’ Like, yeah, I’m a student. ‘What do you study?’ Historical theology.
But the point is, the Good Samaritan was the gay man who, in a snowstorm, got out his 5000 pound Rolls Royce and two of his buddies to drive around shoveling theology student’s cars out of ditches, you know? Who’s the Christ figure? It’s this gay guy.Tell stories from the pulpit like that. I have probably a dozen or more stories like that in my book. Talk about CS Lewis and his gay best friend Arthur, you know, and their friendship as a model of what friendship could be. You know, there’s stories to be told. And also just make sure that there would never be anything said up front that would make someone feel targeted. Stay out of politics.
