This week's review will be a little bit different from most reviews. In most reviews, we look at part of or a whole article written by a person. But in this article, we are reviewing a report on an event. The description of the event is brief, but the event and what was said is rather complex.
The event is that the Church of England has apologized for its treatment of those in the LGBT community. Certainly apologies to the LGBT community by all religiously conservative Christians, such as myself, are well overdo. But at the same time, we have to be specific as to what we are apologizing for from what we should remain firm on regarding the sexual mores that should exist in the Church.
As reported by the Religion News Service (click here for the article), in a report to be released later, the Church of England apologizes to the LGBT community for its, what seems to be, direct interaction with those in the LGBT community. The Church of England apologizes to the LGBT community for how it has acted with coldness and its homophobic reactions to those who came to the Church. At the same time, the Church of England was firm on its views that marriage should be a heterosexual union. And so the Church offered somewhat of a compromise in terms of what it would offer to the LGBT community. That compromise includes a celebration of a same-sex wedding but only after such an event occurred in a civil ceremony.
There is good, bad, and missing in this apology. Yes, the Church of England, and most, if not every Bible-believing church must apologize to the LGBT community for its treatment of them. But what should we apologize for? Like what the Church of England did, we should apologize for being cold and homophobic. We should also apologize for being cruel and hateful. But unlike the apology from the Church of England, our apology should revolve around how the LGBT community has been treated in society. We should apologize for that because the Church has provided the main impetus for how society has regarded and treated the LGBT community. It was during the time of Christendom in the West that western nations made laws that punished and marginalized those in the LGBT community. Our treatment of the LGBT community has been very harsh.
In short, we religiously conservative Christians have refused to stand shoulder to shoulder with those from the LGBT community as equal partners in society. And that refusal to do so also indicates a certain ugly self-righteousness on our part. By refusing to distinguish the laws that should govern the Church from those that govern society, we have arrogantly imposed our sexual mores on those from the LGBT community. And for all of that, we should be in a continual state of repentance as well as being apologetic.
The internal scars that we have forced on many of those from the LGBT community have been prolific and profound. And it is quite natural for our victims to be so deeply harmed that they struggle to distinguish the rules by which the Church must govern its members from the rules we imposed on those who didn't share our beliefs. This is evident when they see Church rules regarding sex as threatening as they see the laws our government had previously passed.
There is another group of those who fail to distinguish those two distinct set of rules. The other group consists of those of us religiously conservative Christians who, like some in the LGBT community, cannot distinguish Church rules for its members from the laws we should have in society. But not only have we failed to distinguish between those two sets of rules, we have been belligerently oblivious to the harm that imposing our rules on those who choose not to share our beliefs has done.
We, however, cannot apologize for what is in the Scriptures. We cannot apologize for calls to repent from sexual immorality, whether it be homosexual or heterosexual immorality, in our evangelism or in the rules that determine whether one is a member in good standing in the Church. The Scriptures are clear on this matter.
Some of us also might need to apologize to those in the LGBT community for how we have shared what the Scriptures say about sexuality in our evangelism or our enforcement of God's Word in the Church.
The apology by the Church of England reported in the article cited above both fails to go far enough and goes too far. There are far more actions and attitudes to apologize for to those in the LGBT community than described in this article. At the same time, the Church of England, if it wishes to remain true to the Scriptures, should not have services that celebrate same-sex weddings even though they were civil ceremonies. We should fully support the allowance for same-sex marriages in society, we cannot promote full equality for the LGBT community with supporting same-sex marriage society. But we cannot support such marriages in the Church. That is because the Church is the place where the Gospel should be preached and God's Word should be taught. The Church must not become a mutual self-help group that encourages its members to follow God in each in their own way and according to their own beliefs when those ways and beliefs go against the Scriptures.
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