The CHURCH ADVOCATE on Same Sex Marriage

As far as I can tell, very few people read either the eNews or The CHURCH ADVOCATE.  Mountaintoppers wish more people read them.  I read both--carefully--and, I suspect that the Mountaintoppers wish I wouldn't.

Faith's new pack of the latest from The CHURCH ADVOCATE arrived the other day and I began to dig into it this morning.  I strongly recommend that you look it over.  It definitely has some things to say worth reading.

I find the lead article, SOMETHING GREATER THAN MARRIAGE, addressing the Supreme Court's legalization of same sex marriage, to be edifying personally.  I also found it to be a strong condemnation of the ministry of those who lead the CGGC, and of our whole body, for that matter.

Here are a few thoughts I have about the article, having just looked it over:

1. It is a reprint of an article written by people from outside the CGGC.  And, to me, that's fitting.  To the best of my knowledge, no one leading the CGGC is actually doing anything about the legalization of same sex marriage.  Therefore, what a CGGCer would write to the body about the issue would, at best, be nothing more than empty "to talk is to walk-ism" and would be received by most CGGCers with the cynicism that is so typical of our body.
2. What it says is biblically rooted, a characteristic that is extremely uncommon among articles written by CGGC authors.  If you doubt that, read the articles written by CGGCers and count Scripture references.  You won't need all the fingers on even one hand.  (That faint rumble is John Winebrenner continuing to spin in his grave.)
3. Most significantly, the article's message viciously condemns CGGC leaders and all of us as a body.

I highlighted two crucial passages in the article as I read it.  First, the authors testify of their own conversions,

We accepted that following Jesus meant giving up everything.  We understood that [note the "R" word] repentance meant fleeing from anything that embodied the temptations that we knew best and loved most.

This is a message that is not spoken by anyone I read or hear in the CGGC.  It's a message that was the central message of the Church of God in its founding generation but has been absent for the better part of a century.

No one I know preaches, to CGGC congregations, that following Jesus means "giving up everything," though that message was once universally preached.

Here is what I believe to be the central challenge of the legalization of same sex marriage:

CGGC leaders want to preach self-denial and following Jesus to LGBTers but they refuse to preach it to CGGC pew sitters. 

They want to allow the people in our pews to continue to consume their spiritual products and services.  They won't call our own people to the denial of self as a necessity before a person follows Jesus, despite what Jesus preached in so many words. 

But...,

...they want to tell the LGBT crowd, as the article rightly does, that to follow Jesus means to deny yourself, take up your cross and, then, to follow Jesus.

This hypocrisy is core to the CGGC identity. 

The CGGC will have no ministry to LGBT until it turns from this hypocrisy.

With shepherd values leading our General Conference, our Regions and our congregations, I can't see that happening.  For that to happen the CGGC will have to jettison its current leaders and its leadership culture.

Also, as far as the authors saying, "... repentance meant fleeing from anything that embodied the temptations that we knew best and loved most...." is concerned, I have what I believe to be an important observation to make.

Since Lance ascended to the mountaintop, I'm hearing chatter about repentance from Lance and from others.  What I am not hearing from anyone at all, Lance included, is a call for repentance.

This chatter barely qualifies as classic To Talk is to Walk-ism.

We need to be calling our people to repent and not stop calling until repentance happens.  Talking about repentance is time wasted unless we preach repentance.

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Second, I highlighted this:

...will we point people--whether married or single--to a life of costly discipleship pursuing the embodiment of love, Jesus Christ himself?

Amen!

This is a question I have been asking since I began to itemize the characteristics of the CGGC Brand.

 Item 13 is:

Cheap Grace.  The CGGC calls people to easy-beliefism. Jesus said that anyone who doesn't hate his father and mother isn't worthy of Him. There was a time, in its founding generation, that the Church of God called sinners to a radically changed way of life.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who coined the phrase, cheap grace) could have been viewing today's CGGC when he wrote: "...cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ."

 The core problem facing the CGGC, as Western culture dumps Christian values, is that it still refuses to address the reality that the false Gospel it proclaims assumes cheap grace as its foundation.

We can't preach costly discipleship to the LGBT crowd and continue to enable cheap grace among the people who are currently part of the CGGC.  If an LGBT person accepts our call to costly discipleship, s/he will turn tail and run as soon as s/he sees what takes place among CGGC people.

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We need to seriously change.

We need to repent and turn from our sin.