The complete article is available here.
Greg Johnson, the pastor of the church that hosted Revoice in 2018, possibly could have led a workshop titled “Coming out as a gay pastor” at the second Revoice conference in 2019. In an article in Christianity Today (CT) dated May 20, 2019, Pastor Johnson himself came out as gay. You can read his story here. In the article, Johnson is painfully honest, and only someone with a heart of stone would not feel for him, given his journey and the struggles he has experienced.
However, he is a spiritual leader, and his conclusions are dead wrong. This must be stated, for Pastor Johnson is leading people astray. Be aware: “Christianity Today and Johnson left their Bibles at home while crafting his coming out article. God’s Word gets not one word in it.” This statement in the article is especially significant: “While sexuality has a degree of fluidity in some people, the real change for me has not been in my sexual orientation but in my life orientation.” Pastor Johnson continues, “Jesus has rescued me. That’s everything.”
From what, one might ask, has Jesus rescued Rev. Johnson? Alarmingly, not his homosexuality or his SSA. He writes, “[A]t age 46 I’m still a virgin fighting a constant battle for sexual holiness. (Goodness knows, for the last 15 years I haven’t been able to trust myself with an unmonitored internet connection.)” While Greg Johnson has done well to remain celibate and to resist the temptations arising from the ever-present Internet, his problem is essentially the same problem that plagues the movement of which he is a part, and that he leads. We’ve stated it before. The underlying assumption of Revoice—and clearly that of pastor Johnson—is that a gay identity and a Christian identity are compatible. The Bible teaches unambiguously that they are not. Consider Pastor Johnson’s approach to his SSA in light of Paul’s instructions to Timothy regarding the qualifications of overseers and deacons in 1 Timothy 3:1-13.
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