Conference bio, Joe Dallas: Joe is an author, public speaker and conselor who serves as the program director of Genesis Counseling in Orange, California. He has served as the president of Exodus International from 1990 to 1993 and is the chair for the Committee on Human Sexuality for the Orange Country Family Impact Council.  His books on homosexuality include Desires in Conflict and A Strong Delusion.  Joe and his wife, Renee, life in Orange Country, California ,with ther two sons.

Selected links:
Joe Dallas' Testimony
Responding to Pro-Gay Theology
 

John Paulk: 
Joe Dallas is an author and public speaker and counselor who serves the program - I'm sorry - who serves as program director of Genesis Counseling in Orange, California.  He was president of Exodus International from 1990 to 1993 and is the chair of the Committee on Human Sexuality for the Orange County Family Impact Counsel.  His books on homosexuality include Desires in Conflict, A Strong Delusion.  Joe and his wife Renee live in Orange, California with their two sons.  Please welcome Joe Dallas.

Joe Dallas:
Thank you.  I love listening to John speak.  I love seeing John speak so openly in a church environment with people of all types who have a concern to hear about such a difficult issue.  It has not always been that way.  I remember about 11 years ago, the first time I was asked to address a congregation on the subject of homosexuality.  When the understandably nervous young pastor approached me beforehand and said, "Well, now, Brother, before you speak, keep something in mind.  There are going to be some people here who think you ought never to speak of such a thing in mixed company and that you're far too conservative but we've also got some rather liberal people here who are going to think that well, you're even taking the left too far to the left.  And there are going to be some teenagers coming who can't stand homosexuals.  But, we have some parents coming who have gay teenagers and we just got word there's a gay activist group that's going to come and heckle you.  So now, listen when you speak, remember, don't offend anybody."  I think that says it all.  To take a position on homosexuality is to invite controversy. 

We invited controversy today.  We didn't mean to offend anyone.  But I would challenge anyone to take an open position on a subject like this without engaging in controversy.  Well, then, good grief, why do it if it's going to be controversial?  Hank Henecraft of the Creation Research Institute says it very well when he says that controversy for the sake of controversy is a sin.  But controversy for the sake of the Gospel is a divine mandate.  Now, the church has a divine mandate as she has always had to address the controversial issues of her time and if controversy erupts as a result, so be it.  It is not what we seek but it is something that we accept.  And that really is in the best tradition of the Christian faith.  The body of Christ has always had the mandate to speak clearly and compassionately to the issues of her time that she faces.  We can see this when the church had to face the evil of slavery in America.  We see this in Christians who survived Hitler's Europe and had to make a decision and take a stand against Nazi tyranny.  We see this today as Christians take a stand for life on the abortion issue, as we address the issues of poverty and racism and sexism and in this case, of course, the issue of homosexuality.  Martin Luther King put it very well when he said the church must be reminded that it is neither the master of the state, nor is it the servant of the state, but rather it is the conscience of the state.  And I would suggest that if the conscience of the state cannot speak clearly and compassionately on the issues the state faces, there is very little hope for the state itself, but it is not enough that we address the issues.  As the body of Christ we are not given the luxury of addressing issues out of our own passions, out of our own opinions, representing our own biases one way or another, but rather, we have the mandate to represent a viewpoint that adequately expresses God's heart and his mind towards a particular issue. 

Paul put it very well in  when he said we are Christ workmanship, the Greek word for that being xxxxx .  From where we get our word poet.  As if Paul is saying that God is seeking to express himself through his people much as a poet would try to express herself or himself through her or his work.  And so it is mandatory not only that the church speak but that the church speak in a way that accurately expresses God's heart toward the homosexual person and God's mind toward the subject of homosexuality.  So that ideally, if a nonbeliever wanted to know what Jehovah God thought of homosexuality, that nonbeliever would have to look no further than the body of Christ, the visible representation of God on Earth and say, ah-hah, that's the way they feel about homosexuals so that must be the way God feels, and that's the way they think about homosexual behavior and the homosexual condition, therefore, that is what God thinks of homosexuality.  Clear representation.  His workmanship. 

And when God's people fail to accurately represent his heart and his mind, traditionally he calls them to do two things.  He calls them to repentance.  He calls them to recommitment.  You can see that in the Old Testament.  Israel would go into idolatry, neglect the poor, become arrogant.  God would send the profits to His people, call them to repent to recommit.  In the Revelation, most of the churches that Jesus addressed, got a commendation and a rebuke when the Lord would say to them, I know your works, I know your labor, but I have something against you.  I call you to repent and to recommit in some areas. And I believe that if we are to properly respond to the issue of homosexuality, to take and utilize the information, the stories, and the pain, that we've been exposed to today, it must be first with an attitude of repentance and recommitment if we are going to successfully address the issue, it must be with an attitude of repentance and recommitment.  And I believe today that God would call His people to repentance and recommitment in three areas that I'd like to address as we close.

Call to Repentance

Well, first of all, before we address the issue of homosexuality in our culture, I believe would call his church to repent of whatever immorality exists within her own walls and to recommit herself.  [APPLAUSE]  Well, may I say, with delightful surprise, that is not normally the point the point that gets an applause.  And He would call us to recommit ourselves to Biblical standards of holiness.  God would first call the body of Christ to repent of whatever immorality exists within her own ranks first, before we would go out and attempt to correct the moral problems of the world.  Remember Samson, BOP, authoritative, strong.  And evidently his strength lay not just in his muscularity, but in his adherence to his vow of separation to God.  And you notice, that that vow of separation, which included a vow not to get a haircut.  Why, as long as he kept that vow intact, he retained his strength, but the second he compromised his vow of separation to God, he lost it.  He was overtaken.  Now, I'm not of the belief that having a full head of hair is necessary for having some degree of strength.  I hope that that is not the case.  But it would seem that inherent in that vow not to take a haircut was obedience to a basic vow of separation.  Don't you ever wonder why our impact on the moral climate in America seems so negligent when compared to the potential we ought to have.  Our television programs, our radio programs, our mega-churches, our political allies, for goodness sakes.  Time Magazine just ran a cover story of Jesus Christ and named him as a the singularly most influential figure in Western culture today.  Now, you would think with that kind of a foundation, Western culture, recognizing Jesus Christ as the centrally most important influential figure in history, would pay strict attention to what his followers were saying, but in fact, as we take a public position on morality, we find ourselves, and more important, we find the position held up to ridicule, skepticism, contempt. 

And so the pornography industry in American thrives.  And the unborn are murdered.  And the nuclear family is, in many ways, a mess.  Now, there are many reasons for that.  I'm sure we could invoke a last days scenario.  There is the reality of living in a fallen world.  I know that.  But we might also consider that, to some extent, the moral decay of a country reflects the moral impotence of the church within that country.  And I believe that by the moral compromises existing in 1999 within the body of Christ, we may well have lost our credibility and our moral authority to address the moral issues of our times.  When the divorce rate in the Christian community nearly parallels that of the secular community, when the use of pornography is epidemic among Christian men, when the scandals in our own leadership rival, and at times exceed, what we see in Washington, then we have to take very seriously what Cal Thomas wrote when he said, why should the majority of Americans adhere to a moral standard that its own proponents seem unable to adhere to.  So Jesus said, before you go out and take that spec out of your brother's eye, you're going to have to do something about that log in your own.   Or to put it more bluntly, when he wrote to the Romans and said, you know, you who call yourselves God's people, if you say you should not commit adultery, do you yourselves commit adultery?  If you say you should not lie or steal, do you yourselves lie or steal?  And then he made a terrible pronouncement when he said, because of this, because of duplicity and hypocrisy, the name of God is blasphemed among the unbelievers, because of you.  Now, Peter said the time has come that judgment just begin at the house of God.  And so I believe first, God would call his people to repent of immorality existing in our own ranks and recommit ourselves to Biblical standards of holiness. 

Now, Biblical standards of holiness surely do not mean perfection.  Nor do they mean immunity to sexual temptation.  Sexual temptation has always been a reality to God's people under both covenants.  So the flesh is still the flesh.  Becoming a born again believer does not negate the ability to enjoy erotic arousal - praise God.  It's still there - not always going in the right direction, but it exists.  So the problem is not that we're sexually tempted.  It think the problem rather is that we are so loathe to admit that sexual temptations are a reality for Christian people.  One might be able to gauge the level of safety we feel with each other by listening to our prayer requests in our prayer meetings.  It feels rather comfortable to say I need prayer for my unsaved aunt.  My kid needs a job.  My wife has the flu. 

When is the last time we heard somebody say, you know, I am two steps away from having an affair with my secretary.  I stepped into an adult bookstore last week and I cannot get the imagery out of my mind and I swear I feel compelled to go right back there.  I am homosexually tempted.  My God, I've fallen in love with another man at the church.  What do I do with this?  Somebody help me, pray for me, hold me accountable, be with me.  Now, like you, I feel angry, disappointed when one of our own falls into overt sexual sin.  We expect more out of each other.  We hold each other to a higher standard than that.  And we should.  But we must also ask ourselves, when the person who has fallen to sin, scandalized the church and let us all down, made that fatal decision to fall into that sin, did that individual feel that she or he could come to us and admit their temptation towards that sin before they finally gave into it?  After all, sexual sin doesn't happen in a vacuum.  People don't just wake up one morning, say, gee, I think I'll get a little fornication in before lunch.  We think it over.  There's titillation, there's consideration, there's that maybe I will, maybe I won't, I think I want it, no, I don't want that.  There's that period of striving with it and if at that point people felt comfortable enough to confess to the rest of us, you know, I am considering this.  It has a pull and a hold on my heart and on my passions and I need help. 

Think how many tragedies we could avoid.  Think how many marriages would stay intact if only the people who were sexually tempted felt within the body of Christ they could admit those temptations came to fruition and turned into tragedy.  About 14 years ago I was waiting tables.  I was not an actor.  I was preparing to be a therapist.  I trust there is a difference.  And if you've waited tables, you know that part of the job means taking drink orders.  You have to take drink orders so you go into the bar and fill the orders and I started to see in the bar what you see in every bar - the regulars.  Every bars got them.  You know.  The same people who cluster together about the same time to drink for a while.  And at first I thought, oh, how depressing.  Ahh, nothing better to do in the middle of the day than sit around and get drunk.  But after a while, I came to notice something these people had that I really came to envy and that was their easy camaraderie with each other.  Yeah, you'd see them swing through that door of the cocktail lounge, look at each other and say, oh, thank God, it's just you.  Here I can be honest.  Here I am safe.  Here I can really be authentic and say what I feel and be what I am and not have to hide and repress and pretend and I begin to think, why can't the body of Christ be more like a bar?  In some ways. 

Would it not be a wonderful thing if in all of our churches when we came walking down the isle we could honest to God look at each other and say, oh, thank God, it's just you.  With you after a whole week of having to deal with an unreasonable public and with a tyrannical boss and with a wife that's nagging or a husband that's nagging or kids driving me crazy.  Life is hard and high pressured and I have to do so much out there that seems so unnatural.  Ahh.  I'm safe with you.  Not, so that I can compromise, so I can have somebody tell me black is white and white is black and I can call sin anything other than what it is.  Not so I can be sleazy but rather so that I can be comforted, known, and held accountable, as I seek with you to strive for something better.   said, confess your faults one to another.  Pray for one another that you

And I have often thought, in looking at people in therapy, that they are frequently coming to the therapist for what they ought to be getting within the body of Christ.  It seems that all of the healing potential for the homosexual person as well as all the sexually broken, lays within the body of Christ.  If the body of Christ only knew.  And so in stating that type of authenticity with each other and creating an environment in our churches where we all basically say, all right, games up, we are sinners!  Big surprise.  And as such, we lean on each other.  We communicate.  We are forthright and vulnerable so that we might be, as the as the Scripture says, provoked to love and to  and with that model, then we have something to show the world and say you know, this works.  We know it's hard.  We know what it is to wrestle with a variety of sexual feelings.  We have by no means ascended the power of the flesh.  But we've found in community and support and in deep, deep love, and  by the grace of God, we can find the ability to authentically overcome sexual sinning. 

With that model then we have something credible to offer the world.  They have seen the Pharisees telling them that in the name of Christ we are above the types of things that they do and they don't believe it anymore.  They have seen the wimps saying God doesn't care what you do.  He loves you no matter what and will approve of anything as long as it feels good to you.  Thank God many of them are still refusing to buy that.  Now is the time to try the model of authenticity.  A few years back I heard a Baptist pastor interviewed on TV and he said, you know, my message to the homosexual person is, it's a sin.  So come join us as we all struggle against.  I know of no one who is so first I believe God would call the church to repent of her own immorality and recommit to Biblical standards of holiness. 

Homosexuality and the Church

And secondly, I believe God would call the body of Christ to repent of hostilities towards homosexual people and he would call us to recommit ourselves to.  [APPLAUSE]  He would call us to repent of hostility.  There is a time for anger.  There is a place for anger.  But not , not for hostility.   said the wrath of man does not work the righteousness of God.  Anger seeks to correct a problem.  Wrath seeks to destroy its opponents.  And it is that wrath, that hostility existing in the body of Christ that must be repented.

Remember Jonah, unique prophet with a unique calling, who went to unique and extraordinary means to get out of his calling.  After which God went to even more unique and extraordinary means to bring him back into his calling and the prophet .  But even then, when he went to the Ninovites, who he loathed, Jonah preached what must go on record as being the world's worst evangelistic sermon.  Destruction's coming, destruction's coming, destruction's coming.  Good night.  No .  No follow-up.  Just basically, you're going to burn and I love it.  Not only that.  He got himself a front row seat to watch the barbecue.  Said, I relish the destruction of these people.  And low and behold, after that Johnny one note message, of all things, from the king on down, Nineveh repented.  And Jonah went ballistic.  And he ends his book by saying, God, I don't believe this.  I did what you said.  I preached to these miserable Ninovites.  I waited for your destruction to come and you led them into repentance.  Take my life now.  I'd rather be dead.  The prophet cared more for the destruction of the people he loathed than he cared to see them redeemed. 

So how many Christians today are afflicted with the Jonah syndrome?    To listen to some of us talk, you'd think it's more important to defeat these people politically then it is to see them won into the Kingdom of God.  And that ought not to be.  And my wife and I are unapologetically politically active.  We are unapologetically a part of that vast right-wing conspiracy.  But we are also aware of what Jesus himself said, having been presented with a political out, a short cancellation of what he was facing.  My kingdom is not of this world.  There are more important things than defeating the gay rights movement.  There are the souls of the lesbian women and homosexual men themselves, of infinite value to God, of much more value than any political gains we may make or losses we may suffer.  [APPLAUSE]  And so when the short term success of the church's goal becomes more important to the church than the external well-being of the people she is responding to, the priorities are skewed. 

There is a truly unfortunate trend that developed in Christianity about 20 years ago when the conservative church began addressing homosexuality publicly over the airwaves, the radio waves, Christian journalism and so forth.  It seemed as though we wanted to take a public stand against the normalization of homosexuality and that was good and right.  I celebrate that.  But in taking that stand we seemed to feel it was more important to convince people that homosexuality was wrong than it was to speak the truth.  So in addition to simply saying the Bible condemns this behavior, it's unnatural, we're not built for it.  These people are engaging in something they ought not to engage in.  We needed to pepper our statements with lurid, sometimes very false exaggerations and stereotypes about homosexual people themselves.  I remember when I was an active part of the gay community, both with the gay church and involved in several same-sex relationships and promoting pro-gay ideology in the late 70s, sitting in a gay bar, heard some laughter at the end of the bar and I went on down to see what was so funny and a lot of the guys were gathering about a Christian tract entitled, I kid you not, "What Homosexuals do to Each Other." And in this Christian material, put out by a ministry, were rather acrobatic descriptions of the things that we all were supposed to be doing to each other.  Some of them seemed biologically impossible and many off them activities a lot of us had, honest to God, not even heard of.  And we found this stuff to be hilarious.  We saw nothing of ourselves in that material.  Only lurid exaggerations about what we allegedly did and indeed there are many homosexuals who engage in a myriad of sexually perverse behaviors, as there are many heterosexuals who do.  I would not whitewash homosexual promiscuity.  It's a reality.  And yet it seemed to us, that the material we were looking at was poised to underscore with a point with its readers that would cause them to look at us and be grossed out. 

And we came to two conclusions; one of them not new.  The first being, Christians disagree with us.  We knew that.  But secondly, we began to think, and in addition to disagreeing with us, they are quite willing to speak about us to their constituencies in ways that are false, misleading and sometimes outright damaging.  They don't just disagree with us.  They loathe us.  Now, suppose you were a part of some subculture and you read some material written about you put out by people who were saying that all people like you are left-leaning Communists trying to take over the universities, that all people like you molested children, and children were not safe in your presence, that all people like you have had 67,372 sex partners last Tuesday, and then the same group came to you and said, oh, by the way, we'd love you to join us for church .  Would you go?  Good grief.  I wouldn't walk into a room full of people who thought that of me.  And if that type of irresponsibility raised itself in the 70s, it showed itself strong and mighty in the 1980s when something really unfathomable started to happen in our ranks, something none of us in our worst nightmares would have conceived.  When we started hearing rumors, horror story rumors, some guy out in Florida was running a low grade fever and couldn't get over it, finally checked himself into the hospital.  Doctors couldn't find out what was wrong with him and low and behold, he died.  Ah, there's another guy up in New York City.  Same thing, he started wasting away, but he also developed this weird purple stuff on his head.  Man, yeah, I heard of somebody up in San Francisco, a  guy, .  And nobody was talking about it.  It didn't have a name.  And all we knew was that young, otherwise healthy gay men who had nothing in common other than the fact they were gay, as far as we knew, were coming down with this strange, dreadful kind of disease and we didn't know.  Is it in the water?  Is it in the dope we're using.   or breathing or what?  We were disoriented.  We were bewildered.  We were so scared.  So honest to God scared. 

And that Time Magazine article on the influence of Christianity in the 1990s.  The author talks about how the tradition of Christianity was to override the moral indifference of the culture around it.  So that when people came down with the plague, it was the Christians who recognized that this life wasn't everything anyway, who went to the people with the plague and said to them, if I die, I will be here for you.  It was the Christians rescuing babies that were not wanted by the aristocracy because they were female and Christians saying we value life, we'll take you in.  I've often thought if there was ever an opportunity for the body of Christ to make a significant statement, a lasting statement, and get a foothold in the homosexual statement, it would have to have been at the advent of what of course we know now, is the AIDS epidemic.  And so many young men and women were facing mortality at a time when life they never thought they'd have to think about such things.  So vulnerable.  So many of them thrown out of their homes, rejected by families and lovers, left alone, unable to access medical care of even the basics of life.  An opportunity.  To be that population that would come in and say "we don't know what you have.  We don't know how you got it.  We don't know if we'll get it.  But we will be there for you.  What can we do?  Do you need medical help?  You need blankets?  You need somebody to be with you?  Whatever.  We are here."

 And I trust that there are Christians who did that.  I don't know.  But unfortunately for all of us, people who speak loudly in the name of Christianity are assumed to be speaking for all of us and at that time instead of the voice of grace and heartbreak we heard derision. Over the Christian airwaves, in the churches, in the magazines, well, the judgment of God has finally fallen on the homosexuals.  You reap what you sew.  You deserve it.  Keep them out of the nursery and don't give it to anybody in my church. I remember in the early 1980s watching a Christian TV program where the Christian host was saying to a live audience, [chuckles] the gays, they've got AIDS and AIDS ain't gay.  And the whole studio audience laughed and applauded. 

And so a wall of hostility and mutual mistrust escalated and a message was sent then that they will never forget.  Now, is the hostility between the church and some factions of the gay community all the church's fault.  Oh, of course not.  Don't even get me started on their duplicity and some of the games they play and some of the dishonesty that they also employ.  But you see, we are not responsible for the way they respond to conflict.  We are responsible for the way we respond to conflict.  We can't say because they do it, we're going to do it too.  [APPLAUSE] 

And so the church must repent of hostilities toward homosexual people and recommit ourselves to bold love.  Now, bold love seeks the spirit without compromising.  Bold love is Jesus willing to feed the multitudes without ever compromising his basic message to them.  Bold love serves without compromising.  It doesn't wimp out on either compassion or conviction. 

The pastor back East developed a real burden for AIDS patients.   member of the moral majority so we're talking conservative.  Middle aged guy, was on his heart to go love AIDS patients.  So he started doing that on his own.  Most of them happened to be young, homosexual men.  He just got to know them, pray with them, talk to them, be with them, whatever.  Local gay radio station found out what he was doing and called him up, said, hey, pastor, we hear you're ministering to gay AIDS patients.  He said, yeah.  They said, well, where do you stand on homosexuality.  He said, well, I think it's a sin.  They said, well, we don't like that, but we like you.  Why don't you come on our show and talk a little about your ministry.  So here this middle aged, former moral majority pastor is sitting across the microphone from a gay radio host on a gay radio program.  At the end of the show, they gave out the name and address of the church.  And low and behold, lesbian and gay people started coming.  Not necessarily to repent, just to hear what this guy had to say.  And the congregation got nervous.  They said, Pastor, the homosexuals are coming.  They're coming down the isles.  They're coming by twos.  They're sitting next to us.  What are we going to do about that?  He said, oh, I guess they can take a seat next to the gossips and the idolaters and the liars and the fornicators.  It's a big church, plenty of room.  [APPLAUSE] 

Now, he said from the pulpit, when I teach on sexual ethics.  I will not compromise the word of God.  I won't shun to give you the full gospel of God.  Anything short of God's intention for sexual union in the context of a man and a woman in holy matrimony, anything less than that is a sin; homosexuality, adultery, fornication, pornography, whatever.  And I will say that plainly.  I cannot bless a homosexual relationship in this church.  I cannot offer you a official position in this church if you're involved in any form of unrepentant sexual immorality.  But if you're here and you're gay, I'm so glad.  Thank you for joining us. 

That's the credibility of service, you see.  It's a little hard to argue with Mother Theresa some six years ago when she went to that Washington, DC prayer breakfast and stood up in front of Congress, God, Bill Clinton and everybody and said no nation that condones the killing of the unborn can call itself a Christian nation.  Do not murder your children.  Give them to me.  I don't know.  How do you argue with Mother Theresa?  What do you say to a woman like that?  She carried the mantle of the credibility of service.  That wasn't some politician trying to raise money.  That was a woman whose whole life was dedicated to service.  She carried the authority, the credibility of service.  She had proven in practical, tangible terms that she loved the people that she ministered to.  There was evidence of that. 

And so we are desperate for Christians to take on and carry the mantle of the credibility of service to the homosexual community via AIDS ministry by being the first to speak out loudly, uncompromisingly, passionately when a homosexual is beaten, assaulted or murdered.  [APPLAUSE]  And on a smaller scale, by being willing to listen.  To engage in people and listen to what they have to say.  I think the days are gone when we can see people won into the kingdom of God by handing them a copy of the four spiritual laws and say read it and pray.  People are looking for community, they're looking for connection.  They're looking for someone who takes an interest in them and says you know, let's start somewhere here and try to develop something.  I'd like to know about your life.  What is it like being gay?  How do you feel about the church?  How do you feel about me?  Where are we going?  The service of listening. 

Because if we are going to use that very well worn cliché and it's not bad - I think it's Biblical that we hate the sin but we love the sinner.  That's fine but you know if you're going to use words as long as hate and love then the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence of those two very strong emotions.  If we say we hate something we should have evidence that indeed we do and if we say we love someone, there should be tangible evidence that we do that as well.  Now, I think we've got the hate part down.  [LAUGHTER]  I think we've got plenty of good, verifiable, clear evidence that we hate the sin of homosexuality.  Very good.  We are seriously wanting clear and verifiable evidence - not in our words only - in our actions.  As John said, let's not love the word but in deed and in truth that indeed we love these people.  And finally, I believe God would tell the church to repent of a one-dimensional approach to homosexuality and recommit ourselves to appropriate responses. 

Let's remember that Jesus responded not according to stereotypes but according to need.  In fact, the very name Jehovah has that wonderful resonance of appropriate response, Jehovah the becoming one, becoming what we need.  We need provision - Jehovah's got it.  We need healing, we have Jehovah lapah. We need peace, he's Jehovah Shalom and so Jesus responded to people according to their need and his visible representation on Earth can afford to do nothing less.  I would suggest there are 3 primary types of homosexual people we are likely to be dealing with and let me briefly comment on each and what an appropriate response might be.  We will certainly continue to deal with militant homosexual people.  We will deal with moderate homosexual people.  We will deal with repentant homosexual people and our response to each must be tailored to the need of each. 

We throw the phrase militant homosexuality and militant homosexuals around a good deal.  I think it begs definition.  I define a militant homosexual as a person who has a rigid agenda to normalize homosexuality.  That's the  part, a rigid agenda to normalize homosexuality.  Combining with intolerance for opposing viewpoints.  A rigid agenda to normalize homosexuality combined with intolerance for opposing viewpoints and it is the latter that scares me, not the former.  Everybody's got an agenda, to an extent in this kind of a group.  When we talk about the gay agenda.  I mean there is the Christian agenda.  There's a Joe Dallas agenda.  There's a - an agenda for everyone.  We all want something and we work towards that end.  There's no crime there.  It's the intolerance to opposing viewpoints that is truly frightening. 

Conservative  John Hamilton  church in San Francisco, California was scheduled to speak at an evening service and when gay militants found out they surrounded the church, vandalized the property, terrorized the people trying to get in, banged on the doors with people trying to speak and the police department went on record saying, there are political realities in this city that keep us from taking action that we would normally take in a case like that.  Rigid agenda combined with intolerance for opposing viewpoints.  We saw Dr. NIcolosi ministering here today to what I would assume is a very receptive, respectful, loving crowd.  You should have seen him standing in front of the arena when he went in front of the San Francisco School Board meeting and could barely speak for the din of activists shouting and hooting and drowning him out until finally one of the moderators got on a megaphone and said, okay, people, we need to let him talk.  I know it's hate, but the sooner you be quiet the sooner it'll be over with.  Okay, come speak.   But gay militancy doesn't just show itself in guerrilla theater.  It can show itself in the white collar as well. 

You give it just a few more years and if current trends continue it will be literally impossible for a psychiatrist, psychologist or psychotherapist in American to treat a homosexual who wants to change without losing her or his license.  That too is gay militancy. 

Now, this is nothing new.  Whenever the Gospel is preached, somebody gets inconvenienced.  What happened?  It was a great revival in Rome when Paul went and preached there.  And a lot of the people in the city turned away from idolatry and turned to the living God and brought out the little artifacts that they worshipped in their homes and they had a big bonfire in the city.  Well, that's great.  Unless you're the guy that manufactured the little artifacts.  Man, when the  found out about that, he raised a mob scene against Paul and had him arrested.  The Gospel was preached.  Somebody got inconvenienced.  And while it is true that we must tone down our rhetoric, express compassion and balance and clarity and respect, it is equally true that no matter how gentle, no matter how loving, no matter how kind and respectfully we take that position, a position will always be, odious to people whose agenda it is interfering with.  That is the reality.  We can't undue it.  Nor can we shy away from it. 

But the temptation when we are met with gay militancy is to respond in one of two extremes.  The first is just to wimp out.  It's too scary, too messy, it's to intimidating.  The other I find to be more common and that is the temptation to become exactly what they say we are.  We get pushed so far for so long, so unfair that you get worn down and you finally want to say, okay, you want to see homophobia, I'll show you homophobia.  You know.  And then of course we have lost.  When we become what they say we are, hateful, mean spirited, bigoted, we have surely lost the war - not just the battle, the war.  No matter what other gains we make, if we become less than Christ-like we have lost because we will have failed to represent him accurately.  And so in responding to the militants, God calls us to defend what is rightfully ours, what he has given us to defend without attacking those who would take it from us.  That's Godly warfare.  You defend what God has given you without attacking those who would take it. 

Had the privilege of talking to the Promise Keepers about six years ago and several gay militant groups converged on the stadium there to disrupt the conference and they had made press conferences and announcements and threats and everybody knew they were coming and several of them were coalescing to make one big statement and you had Act Up, Queer Nation, the new group The Lesbian Avengers and several others that were all going to come in and really raise hell.  Well, it so happens that year the conference was in Boulder, Colorado.  We had a lot of guys from the Denver Broncos who had come down to help us out.  We said, great.  Before the demonstration began, the leadership of Promise Keepers posted signs around the stadium saying please treat the demonstrators with respect.  As the demonstrators started showing up in the area that was designated for them to demonstrate in, a lot of the guys who were in security just kind of locked arms and formed this sort of testosterone wall that basically said, here's the line.  Respectful, quiet, strong, defending what was rightfully theirs to defend.  In fact, as the evening went on, some of the guys doing security thought maybe some of the protesters would get a little hungry or thirsty.   went into the speaker's room, got some water and coffee.  Quite a sight, these hulking football players wading out into a sea of gay demonstrators in fishnet stockings and banners and bullhorns, saying, no, you're not going to disrupt out conference, but have some cookies while you're here.  I thought, that's hot.  That's Godly warfare. 

Over was 30 years ago  felt a vision to go out and preach in New York City and he met a young man Nicky Crew and he loved him.  And he confronted Nicky with that love and Nicky said, I hate you.  Get out of my face.  And  went back to him again and said, Nicky, I love you.  I want you to know Jesus.  And Nicky said, I'm a gang member.  This is the life I want.  Get out of here.   tracked him down again and Crew said, don't you know I could take this knife out and cut you into a thousand little pieces.  And  said yes you could.  And every little piece would say I love you.   speak truth to you.  I won't let you push me to hate you.  I will, as the scripture says, overcome evil with good.  We deal with militants.  We deal with moderates.  And I think that describes most lesbian and gay people.  They're not shoving an agenda down our throat.  They live basically as we live, work 9 to 5, pay the bills, mow the lawn.  There are differences of course but the differences really don't supersede our commonality.  We have more in common with them than we have differences. 

And there we must be to them what Jesus was to the Samaritan woman, someone else in sexual brokenness who he really didn't seem obsessed with presenting sexual ethics to.  He knew a story.  The subject came up.  He said, get your husband.  She said, well, I'm kind of between husbands now.  He said, yeah, I know.  But you're on number 5 now.  You're not even married to him.  Now lets get to the real issue.  I want you to live.  I want you to know who the messiah is.  You're talking to Him.  I want you to drink of water that will cause you never to thirst again.  If you haven't read John Paulk's book, there's a wonderful turning point in there.  His friends witness to him and begin talking about some of the generalities but then the man really got to the point and everything just seemed to go into slow motion and the guy said, I see you carrying more than you an handle.

That's the point.  Not that someone is homosexual, but that they're dead in sin.  Now, good grief.  If we could convert every homosexual into a heterosexual in this whole darn country, well, people can go to hell heterosexually just as nicely as they can go to hell homosexually.  The issue is the cross.  Where do they stand?  Are they dead in sin or are they alive in Christ.  That must be the issue.

And finally we will and continue to deal with repentant homosexuals.  Homosexuals who will hear the message of the Gospel and will say, yes, I respond to that.  I know God intended something different for me.  And I want that.  I agree with that.  So here I am.  Now what? 

Over 30 years ago a pastor in Southern California looked at a group of people who celebrated the sensuousness and anarchy and immorality and he loved them because he saw past the brokenness of the behavior and saw wounded individuals who were so hungry and he and his wife would hold hands in their car and pray as they drove past the beach and saw these aimless hippie kids wandering around, stoned, sleeping around, drifting and said, oh, God, they're so hungry.  They need you so badly.  What can we do?  Bring them to you.   God brought them to himself via the man's church.  And many people believe that the Jesus movement actually floated in 1969 when Chuck Smith at  Chapel opened his door to repentant hippies who came in.  Who he had virtually nothing in common with, at least on the exterior, but whose behaviors he could look past and see the brokenness behind it. 

I remember when I was 8 or 9 years old, being warned by my mother, don't ever go to this part of the city.  There are men there who will want you.  And I thought, oh, far out.  I didn't know what she meant by wanted but I knew what I meant.  I thought somebody was going to want me.  My God, I was hungry for that.  And so I hopped on a bus, went straight to the theater she warned me not to go into and it wasn't I think another 15 minutes before a man signaled me into the restroom and I learned what it is to be wanted. 

And in that very potent lesson, there lay some sort of a remedy to pain of feeling unwanted that I would go for again and again and again and again until after having gone in and out of the church, in and out of the ministry, and in and out of God knows how many different people's bodies I said, this can't be right.  I will come back into the fold but when I called back into the body of Christ it wasn't in victory.  It was in brokenness, saying, here I am.  I haven't the slightest idea what you're going to do with me. 

I needed somebody to look past the scandal of what I had done and look at the brokenness that was behind that.  The need and understandably, many people couldn't relate to that sin.  I wouldn't expect them to.  But I was so fortunate that there were those who tried to connect with me though everything they saw in my prior lifestyle was abhorrent to them. 

It should be remembered that before he was Paul the Apostle, one of our most revered church figures, he was Saul of Tarsus, a killer, a man so maniacal in his zeal that he thought he was doing God a favor by hauling people off to have them killed.  Thank God when he was converted, there was a Barnabas in the bunch who said, hey, I want you here. 

In that, we must take a cue from the abortion industry and the Pro Life Movement.  The abortion industry has concocted a mechanism that has made it easier and easier over the years for women to put their children to death.  The Pro Life Movement has learned it's not enough just to tell pregnant women, don't kill your baby.  We've also learned we have to walk alongside these women to help them do what is right.  So we have within the churches Christian counseling for women in crisis pregnancy so they can learn about their options.  We have support groups for women who've had abortions where they can grieve that decision and find support and healing and so it will be as we go into the year 2000 if we are to successfully address the issue of homosexuality. 

We must remember it will never be enough to just say to the gay community, you are wrong.  We must also say to them, and we will walk with you if you seek to do what is right.  How important is that?  A few years back the Christian entertainer, Sheila Walsh, was speaking live on the 700 Club that she co-hosted at the time and she felt lead to pray for homosexual people and she looked into the mike and said, if you're gay, I want you to pray with me.  I want you to say the sinner's prayer and receive Christ.  And so she, on live TV, said the sinner's prayer and said, now, if you did that, I want you to do 2 things.  Go to your local church.  Tell the pastor there what you've done and who you are and where you've been and ask him what to do next and then write to me.  I want to know how you're doing.  She got a letter.  Young man wrote to her and said, Sheila, I've been gay all my life.  But I saw you praying on television for homosexual people to be saved and I said the sinner's prayer with you and I was born again and I did what you said.  I went to the local church and I said to the pastor after the service, Pastor, I've been gay all my life but Sheila Walsh was praying for homosexual people on television and so I said the sinner's prayer with her.  She said I should come see you and ask you what to do next.  And the pastor said, well, now, there's no room for fags in this church.  He said, Sheila, I'm sorry.  It won't work.  They don't want me.  This is why a different voice has to go out from the body of Christ that is unsparing in its conviction that homosexuality is wrong and equally uncompromising in its passionate, aggressive love for homosexual people. 

Will that stop the Gay Rights Movement in its tracks?  I don't know.  It could.  But more important than that, we will surely answer for the way we have responded to the issues of our time.  May God help the church in 1999 that when we stand before the body of Christ and the judgment seat of Christ and we are asked how we responded to this issue, we will be able to hear Him say, well done, good and faithful   Thank you.
 

John Paulk: Someone I Love is Gay, What Can I Do?
 Workshop at the Focus on the Family Love Won Out conference in Memphis