"Let’s be clear: I am not saying that same-sex parents are automatically guilty of any kind of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse to the children they raise. Nor am I saying that LGBT people are less likely to take good care of children.
What I mean is this: Even the most heroic mother in the world can’t father. So to intentionally deprive any child of her mother or father, except in cases like divorce for grave reasons or the death of a parent, is itself a form of abuse. (Though my mother raised me with the help of a lesbian partner, I do not feel I was abused, because I always knew that my mother didn’t intend for my father to divorce her.)"
"It is abusive to tell a child, “We are your moms” or “we are your dads,” and then expect the child never to feel the loss of such important icons, in addition to the injury of having been severed from at least one, and possibly both, biological parents—not because it was necessary, but because the two adults insisted on the arrangement. The lessons children learn from this undermine selfhood: might makes right, little people are subject to the whims of self-serving parents, and powerful people can impose “love” on weaker beings with money or political influence over adoption agencies, family courts, sperm banks, and surrogate mothers.
None of these problems would arise if we lived in a world where gay people saw children not as a commodity for purchase but rather as an obligation requiring sacrifices (i.e., you give up your gay partner instead of making your kid give up a parent of the opposite sex, because you’re the adult.)"
Last year Lopez wrote a more personal article detailing his own struggles for emotional health and the choices he has had to make concerning the members of his own family. Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children's View is even more compelling than the first article cited. Both articles appeared on the Public Discourse website from The Witherspoon Institute.
Homosexual Behavior And Fornication: Intimate Bedfellows by Jerry Walls: Why are same-sex relationships finding increased acceptance among younger Christians? Jerry Walls believes that one factor among many is that younger Christians engage in premarital sex. They won't admit it publicly, but because of their own behavior, younger Christians don't develop an attitude that same-sex relationships are sinful. However, the day is coming when heterosexual sin will have its defenders from within conservative, evangelical churches. From the School of Christian Thought webpage from Houston Baptist University.
Rachael Held Evans' Why Millennials Are Leaving The Church made quite a buzz on the internet. No, this is not a recommendation. I do recommend what I believe were the best responses to her:
The Rise Of The Chicken Little Evangelical Blogger by Jake Meador. Meador is not impressed with Evans' notion that the Church's refusal to accomodate itself to millennial attitudes spells doom for the Church. After all, remember what the Church has endured for centuries. The Church has not only survived, but thrived. A quote from Meador's article in Mere Orthodoxy:
"...we’ve been burned, beheaded, disemboweled, and flayed alive and come through it all. We’ve been killed by our brothers and sisters in Christ, we’ve fought wars, we’ve been sent off to concentration camps and gulags. There have been many times in our history where the greatest hindrance to joining the church was that getting baptized could lead to imprisonment, torture, or even death. And through all that, the church has endured. But in the minds of certain Christian bloggers, privileged white millennials and their nebulously defined intuitions and impulses pose a greater threat to the long-term flourishing of the church than the Colosseum."
Would Jesus Attract Millennials? by Allan Bevere: He would attract some, but the content of his message would repel most. See John 6. As most millennials are extreme individualists, they would see the Church as irrelevant for their lives. Especially as secular institutions are able to meet the needs Evans claims the Church must meet to retain millennials. HT: The Methoblog.
How To Keep Millennials In The Church? Let's Keep Church Uncool by Brett McCraken: Millennials, instead of expecting everyone else to listen to you, why don't you take time to listen to older Christians and previous generations who labored for the Church throughout much struggle. Older Church leaders, quit being obsessed with what everyone else thinks about the Church. Wow! An interesting article actually appeared on the Washington Post's On Faith blog.
When We Are Born That Way: Casting Stones vs. Permitting Sin by Marian Green: This was written before Evan's article was posted, so it is not a direct response to her. Yet it is a perceptive critique of millennial Christian attitudes. Here is an excerpt:
"Here is my manifesto: I don’t know how to speak to people about the transformation of Jesus Christ unless I give them the hope and promise of change. I cannot give people food without telling them that what they have been eating is toxic to the soul. I cannot give them clean water unless I will also tell them the filth they have been bathing in will kill them. I cannot clothe them without confessing to them the intricate glory of the Creator who made them.
Homosexual Behavior And Fornication: Intimate Bedfellows by Jerry Walls: Why are same-sex relationships finding increased acceptance among younger Christians? Jerry Walls believes that one factor among many is that younger Christians engage in premarital sex. They won't admit it publicly, but because of their own behavior, younger Christians don't develop an attitude that same-sex relationships are sinful. However, the day is coming when heterosexual sin will have its defenders from within conservative, evangelical churches. From the School of Christian Thought webpage from Houston Baptist University.
Rachael Held Evans' Why Millennials Are Leaving The Church made quite a buzz on the internet. No, this is not a recommendation. I do recommend what I believe were the best responses to her:
The Rise Of The Chicken Little Evangelical Blogger by Jake Meador. Meador is not impressed with Evans' notion that the Church's refusal to accomodate itself to millennial attitudes spells doom for the Church. After all, remember what the Church has endured for centuries. The Church has not only survived, but thrived. A quote from Meador's article in Mere Orthodoxy:
"...we’ve been burned, beheaded, disemboweled, and flayed alive and come through it all. We’ve been killed by our brothers and sisters in Christ, we’ve fought wars, we’ve been sent off to concentration camps and gulags. There have been many times in our history where the greatest hindrance to joining the church was that getting baptized could lead to imprisonment, torture, or even death. And through all that, the church has endured. But in the minds of certain Christian bloggers, privileged white millennials and their nebulously defined intuitions and impulses pose a greater threat to the long-term flourishing of the church than the Colosseum."
Would Jesus Attract Millennials? by Allan Bevere: He would attract some, but the content of his message would repel most. See John 6. As most millennials are extreme individualists, they would see the Church as irrelevant for their lives. Especially as secular institutions are able to meet the needs Evans claims the Church must meet to retain millennials. HT: The Methoblog.
How To Keep Millennials In The Church? Let's Keep Church Uncool by Brett McCraken: Millennials, instead of expecting everyone else to listen to you, why don't you take time to listen to older Christians and previous generations who labored for the Church throughout much struggle. Older Church leaders, quit being obsessed with what everyone else thinks about the Church. Wow! An interesting article actually appeared on the Washington Post's On Faith blog.
When We Are Born That Way: Casting Stones vs. Permitting Sin by Marian Green: This was written before Evan's article was posted, so it is not a direct response to her. Yet it is a perceptive critique of millennial Christian attitudes. Here is an excerpt:
"Here is my manifesto: I don’t know how to speak to people about the transformation of Jesus Christ unless I give them the hope and promise of change. I cannot give people food without telling them that what they have been eating is toxic to the soul. I cannot give them clean water unless I will also tell them the filth they have been bathing in will kill them. I cannot clothe them without confessing to them the intricate glory of the Creator who made them.
I cannot give them Jesus and tell them to continue to live in sin."
This is the approach William and Catherine Booth followed when they began the Salvation Army. They met physical needs while preaching holiness, in their case, a Wesleyan holiness message. John Wesley correctly saw that holiness leads to what he termed social holiness. Yet holiness must precede social holiness. See also Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion. Green's article is from her Uprooted and Undone blog. HT: I cannot recall.
I apologize for the appearance of some of these articles. At the present time, my access to computers is limited. Articles written on the computer I am now using are published with a variety of font sizes, especially when quoting other articles through cut and paste. I do have access to other computers, but time considerations mandated that I compose and publish from this computer.
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