You can be gay, but not do gay. (Bishop Carlton Pearson, “Come Sunday”) 

I remember a church in which I was active during my early teen years running a kind of “deeper life/holiness” week titled “Christ is the Answer!”

But I never really understood what the actual question was to which Christ was the answer. There didn’t seem to be one, as far as I could gauge.

Decades later, I still don’t know what the question was, because evangelical dogmatism seems to me to be very unilateral: “This is what the Bible says, and that’s how it is. No questions allowed — just accept that we know the answer.”

Being a South African manse kid during the 1960s and being gay [gasp!] I had to participate fully in the church, but under cover of being straight. And having to hear ad nauseam how being gay was an abomination “in the eyes of the Lord.” For those not familiar with the term “manse kid,”  it refers to one who grew up in a manse (a.k.a. a “child of the manse”), which is a house traditionally provided for a minister of certain Christian denominations, such as Presbyterian or Methodist. It implies a child who is hardworking and disciplined due to being raised with the Protestant work ethic (see “preacher’s kid”).

And sadly, the “Old Time Religion“ Jim Reeves sang about during my youth still hasn’t changed, 65 years on: LGBTQ-bashing still occupies a lot of pulpit and church council meeting time.

So below are some questions of my own that I’ve wanted to ask over many years, but seeing as communication in any church I’ve ever been in is strictly one-way — pulpit-socking-it-to-you, often with much screaming and froth — I’ve never really had the opportunity to do so. And I probably never will, because many years ago I gave up wasting my time in a church that only wants my tithe but not me. (It’s not that easy to separate/discard the “pink cash” in the collection plate.)

In what follows below, I distinguish between the institutional church (which “espouses” Christianity) and the actual Church — i.e., no specific denomination, but true heart-believers and doers — the koinonia church.

If I were to sum up my view and experience of the institutional church, I would do so by using the metaphor of a school playground: Little gangs of like-minded children shutting out other children who don’t fit in — or those who either question, challenge or disobey the gang’s rules — often bullying the dissenters in the process. And little people dogmatizing that their gang’s rules are the only rules and are therefore sacrosanct.

Which is life, I guess. And how we are made up — and often, how we survive. Submit or be erased. F**k Around and Find Out.

Spoiler: These 20 questions are all grounded in scripture

Here are the 20 questions I might ask the institutional churches if given an opportunity to help them rethink their position on LGBTQ+ people.

1. 1. Is the institutional church’s preoccupation with LGBTQ+ people not keeping it from its true mission — that of proclaiming to everyone, everywhere, the Gospel of Jesus Christ (Matthew 28:18-20) — and not just to “the rest of the world” (apart from “the homosexuals”), as at present?
   2. Jesus’ teaching is to love God, love our neighbors, and love ourselves. Is the institutional church making itself guilty of only loving God and “those who are like themselves” (i.e, playground gang members) to the exclusion of everyone else who is “unlike themselves” (i.e., the “perverts, heretics and reprobates” who are to be theologically bullied)?
   3. Did Jesus die on a cross for everyone, or only for those who aren’t LGbTQ+? Did Jesus say “whosoever believes” — or only “whosoever isn’t LGBTQ+”?
   4. In a country where apartheid became a hated policy, practice and word in the past, is the institutional church in South Africa now in danger of practicing religious apartheid through its marginalization of LGBTQ+ people based on their sexual orientation?
   5. Is the institutional church making itself guilty of proof-texting by using Bible verses to condemn homosexuality? According to Wikipedia, “The first known appearance of homosexual in print is found in an 1868 letter to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs by the Austrian-born novelist Karl-Maria Kertbeny arguing against a Prussian anti-sodomy law” — hence the concept of homosexuality doesn’t seem to have existed when any part of the Bible was written.
   6. In light of the theological doctrine of election/predestination, did God choose only heterosexual people for salvation? Have no LGBTQ+ people ever been saved or received mercy, love and protection from God in Jesus? How is the Bible verse “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies” (Romans 8:33) then explained away?
   7. Have those who label and condemn LGBTQ+ people based on “the Bible” ever considered the damage done to the feelings and self-esteem of those people on a purely humane level? Just as people other than whites were often treated as pariahs during South Africa’s apartheid era, so there is a risk today that LGBTQ+ people are being made pariahs by such institutional churches who deem a same-sex sexual orientation or transgender identity as being both sinful and an aberration. Such people are seemingly regarded as unworthy of full inclusion in the fold of those who believe (i.e., membership, with equal access to and administration of the full rites and sacraments of the church) — unless they accept a life of celibacy.
   8. Is the institutional church (knowingly or unknowingly) making the Gospel exclusive only to those who are heterosexual, despite the following occurring five times in the Old Testament? You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love to all who call on you (Exodus 34:6; Nehemiah 9:17; Psalm 86:15; Psalm 103:8; Joel 2:13, Jonah 4:2).
   9. How, if LGBTQ+ people are marginalized or excluded by the institutional church, will they then hear the Word of God? And be “saved”? (Romans 10:17)
   10. If proof-texting is okay for the institutional church, then could Isaiah 56:1-8 not also be God’s undertaking that LGBTQ+ people who believe and follow Jesus are included in His Covenant?
   11. The popular religious hierarchy of Jesus’ day seemingly caught a woman having adulterous sex in her own bedroom and brought her to Jesus, whose response to their hypocrisy was, “Let one who is without sin throw the first stone at her.” (John 8:7) Nobody threw any stones that day. Why does the institutional church seem so focused on other people’s bedrooms, to “catch and condemn,” and on throwing doctrinal stones at them, instead of on making disciples? (Also, what happened to the man she was with, and how did the synagogue hierarchy gain access to her bedroom? And how did they even know about what they were doing, and where they were doing it, in the first place?)
   12. Much of Jesus’ condemnation was aimed at the scribes, Sadducees and Pharisees (the institutional religious hierarchy of His day), and those who had defiled the Temple. He called them, among other things, a brood of vipers (Matthew 23:33); whitewashed tombs (Matthew 23:27); hypocrites (Matthew 23:3-4); blind guides who strain out gnats but swallow camels (Matthew 23:24), and children of hell (Matthew 23:15). Sobering words. How many bigoted preachers, child-abusing clergy, “fornicating” televangelists, and mega-church pastors who enrich themselves on widows’ mites (and so on) of today would this refer to?
   13. Jesus warned about removing splinters from other people’s eyes when there is a log sticking out of one’s own eye (Matthew 7:3-5). Does this not describe the whole approach (over years and years and years; it never seems to stop) of the institutional church towards the homosexual “issue” and LGBTQ+ people as a whole? What clear-thinking, self-respecting LGBTQ+ person would want to belong to such a “church” anyway?
   14. Why is a heterosexual orientation okay for the church, but homosexual orientation is regarded as being an aberration? An abomination? A label to be hung on a “sodomite.” Sexual orientation (orientation being vastly different from preference, the word some churches use to imply a choice) is just one facet of being human, and of one’s make-up. How many institutional churches see in LGBTQ+ people an actual person who has rights, feelings, ambitions, hopes, joy, sadness, love, talents, abilities and so on like they themselves do — or do they only see a pervert?
   15. Could the parable about the Good Samaritan that Jesus told also reflect how the institutional church treats LGBTQ+ people? It was the priest and the Levite who looked the other way so as not to be defiled by the man who had been beaten up; just as the church does to so many LGBTQ+ people today.
   16. Would today’s clergy have made time to talk with the Samaritan woman who came to draw water at the well as Jesus did, or would they have regarded her in the same light as they do LGBTQ+ people?
   17. Has any institutional church ever said that “pink cash” is tainted and therefore should not be placed in the collection plate by any LGBTQ+ people when it comes around? Similarly, I’ve often wondered that were a LGBTQ+ person theoretically to bequeath in his/her last will and testament a multi-million financial legacy to the church, would it be refused by that church because it came from an LGBTQ+ person?
   18. Did Jesus wash both Judas’ and Simon Peter’s feet at the Last Supper (John 13:5), knowing full well what both would do to Him later that night, or did He bypass them and only wash the feet of the other 10? What was His example to us when He healed the ear of the man Peter cut off later that night in the Garden of Gethsemane? Is there an example there for us all to follow?
   19. Is the institutional church today so busy straining out doctrinal gnats about “sodomites” and transgender folk that it has forgotten the example and teaching of Jesus (“Love one another as I have loved you”)? Did he exclude homosexually-oriented people from that? Would the Good Shepherd have gone after the one lost sheep if that sheep had been same-sex oriented or transgender? Did Jesus ever even mention LGBTQ+ people negatively anywhere in the recorded Gospels?
   20. Is the church denying LGBTQ+ people the right to express their love physically (the enforced celibacy of “you can be gay but not do gay”) while everyone else can do so freely and without censure?

Dave Reid

A translator by profession, Dave Reid lives in a rural town in a wine-producing area of the Western Cape, South Africa, where he retired with his partner in 2003 after living in Cape Town. A lifelong amateur church musician and organist, he spent most of his corporate career in leadership development and change management consulting.