Did I Disqualify Myself at G.A.?
By Jim Pocta, October 27.
Since this past summer I’ve had a growing question in my mind that is somewhat concerning, “Did my admission of sexual brokenness in front of a couple thousand pastors and elders at the PCA General Assembly disqualify me for ministry?” This question has been put upon me because of suggested changes to our polity. There is a growing concern within the PCA about the cultural advance of the LGBTQI+ gospel, and with this concern, a felt need to do something about. I believe this felt need is appropriate, even God-given. Two Overtures have been put before the presbyteries of the PCA as an attempt to stem this advance. I believe there are godly and righteous men on both sides of the debate about these overtures. We are all impacted by the world around us. We are driven toward movement by our own Gospel, driven to do something to counter wickedness when we see it, driven toward justice, love, holiness, and compassion. With this drive there is also always a tension between being in the world and not of it. The question is not whether to do something, the question is what to do. My own story intersects significantly into this tension.
My Story
I had always known I was different. There was always a sense of being “other” when playing with my school friends. I was jealous of the neighborhood boys as if they possessed some quality I missed. I used to pray at night that God would let me wake up as a girl in the morning when I was as young as five years of age. I had six sisters with whom I felt I had much more in common. I never felt like I had what it took to measure up to culture’s or my father’s definition of masculinity.
When I was 14 or 15 I risked telling that violent, alcoholic, man that I thought I was gay (although there was no doubt in my own mind). He regaled me with stories of his gay-bashing youth and how he would set up and then beat those “queers” in downtown Cleveland. He then tried to convince me with a sneer that I couldn’t possibly be one of “them.” The shame was unbearable so I agreed. I would be kicked out of my home a year later.
I found solace in drugs at that time seeking to keep my disgrace at bay. I lived with a foster family whose mother was a teacher at the area high school. This was the only way I managed to graduate. I was failing my subjects due to the drugs and depression. I recall wanting to go to sleep and never wake up. So when I heard the Gospel through some friends around this time I came to faith.
I was both transgender and gay. I was informed by one religious camp that if I continued to behave in my old patterns I would lose my salvation and by another camp that it would be proof I hadn’t really believed in the first place. So as a newborn babe in Christ, I grit my teeth and tried harder, focusing on my belief and my behavior, white-knuckling it. But I kept failing and falling. Eventually, after enough shaming, I gave up and went back to my old ways.
I got involved in the gay community with abandon. I found community through my sexual adventure and camaraderie in cross dressing. My biggest relief was in the hope that someday I’d finally get that “sex change operation.” It was all I could do. I had to figure out how to make myself happy, after all.
But God wasn’t done with me yet.
I met a young man named Tom who wanted to meet with me and do a Bible study. I tried to tell him I’d been down that road before and that it didn’t work for me, but I was intrigued and eventually agreed. But this time I was more cautious. I kept my SSA secret from him and kept our study a secret from the young man I was involved with. I lived the perfect double life for years. Tom had me reading such books as Knowing God by Packer and The Sovereignty of God by Pink. It began to have an effect. A few years later, when I finally decided to try to follow Jesus, I got baptized in a large area megachurch. The well-known evangelical pastor told me what was now necessary: “Fake it ‘til you make it.” So I did just that. And did that for the next two decades.
During the next several years there would be many more shaming obstacles from the Church. I was kicked out of a Presbyterian pastor’s home for not agreeing that homosexuality was the worst sin of all. Tom, who was discipling me, and I had been invited for dinner but were now being escorted to the door and angrily told to leave. This mentality became familiar as the Moral Majority gained steam in Evangelicalism.
A little while later, finding no help from the church, I started a ministry to the gay community in response to an anti-gay political action committee stemming from a large evangelical church in Dallas. I was accused of being too angry at what I saw as abuse in the church. Young gay men and women were being tossed to us by pastors because they didn’t know what to do with them. I was only in my mid 20s and had no business being in ministry in the first place having never really dealt with any of my own issues. I also had no training whatsoever yet. In my mind, there wouldn’t even have been a need for ex-gay ministries in the first place if the church had been loving, reaching out, and discipling us. But it wasn’t. Instead, much of it was picketing us. Then the pastor who had taken me under his wing tried to convince me that I needed to have the demons of homosexuality cast out of me. At that point I was done. My family had disowned me. The church was nowhere to be found. I was hanging on by a thread. I was a lost sheep.
It wouldn’t be long before all this took a toll and I would eventually fall. I went to my pastor at that time for help only to be accused of self-sabotage. He offered no grace. I was hurting and was hurt by so many people. I felt like a failure on so many levels. I left the ministry. I left the Church. I left the Lord. I became even more incredibly depressed. What did the Lord expect of me? What did it mean to be part of a church that clearly didn’t want me? I no longer knew and I no longer cared. So one night when my boys were asleep and my wife was away, I sat down and wrote my suicide note.
My wife caught me by surprise by coming home early, just before blade met skin. We talked all night about the grief, the godly sorrow of a life full of sin and pain. That was the night I believed that there is blessing in mourning. I began, that night, for the very first time, to hope in redemption, that my story could have value.
Little by little God began to restore me. He began teaching me where I had erred in my struggling theology, believing that He was supposed to cure me, heal me, make me a heterosexual. Small step by small step I began to see that my goal is not to be “straight” but to worship Him. I was to express that worship through my sexuality, to be who He had designed me to be. I am not supposed to aim toward “heterosexuality,” nor “homosexuality,” but “Lindasexuality.” Linda is my wife. I am to aim toward glorifying God through my gender, which in my case means loving my wife well.
Now, I tell this story to pull back the curtain a little on a life affected by a church culture that is damaging to someone who struggles with sexual sin and brokenness. I tell it to let it be known that deep down there is no one who doesn’t know that being gay is a sin, as God has made that evident within them. SSA is shame-based, after all. There is also no secret to those outside our denomination that we, the PCA, believe that being gay and transgender misses the mark. We keep doubling down on the law part and just might be losing the grace part in the translation far too often.
An article written about me by Warhorn Media, after my being asked to be on the Committee on Sexuality, called me a “repentant sodomite” (which was a tad bit problematic in itself) because I got married. This exposes a deep misunderstanding of the issues. I got married, sadly without telling Linda my story, by the way, thinking it would make me straight. I wounded my wife deeply as a result. God brought healing and redemption into that wound, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it was both sinful and hurtful.
That kind of thinking that marriage will “fix” our sexuality is legalistic. It is a faulty approach to dealing with one’s gender and sexualtity. It sets people up to think in terms of success as behavioral only, when the heart hasn’t been dealt with. It’s classic Phariseeism. After all, it is a “theology of glory” not a “theology of the cross” that says we have to have it all together to belong in the Kingdom, let alone serve as an officer.
Jesus had words for those types of legalists: they were dead, dangerous, and demonic. As white-washed sepulchers they were dead inside, dangerous as vipers, and of another kingdom, the kingdom of the devil. They sure looked good though. We need to be very careful when dealing with our SSA congregants not to put a burden upon them that Jesus doesn’t. His burden is light.
In fact, I would submit we can learn much about spiritual worship from many SAA folks. Our lives depend on dealing with our hearts. If we don’t deal with the deeper issues we’re done for. I work as a biblical counselor, and once I had a man come into my office with issues of infidelity and pornography. He had been cheating on his wife and was not seeing success in stopping his porn use. After discussing this for awhile and feeling shame over it he piped up with “at least I’m not gay.” He hadn’t met me and didn’t know what he was in for. His heart was not touched as he thought his struggle was against flesh and blood.
I heard a pastor say not too long ago when discussing the overtures before us that he can't think of a better way to run off men than to give them SSA leaders. He said it seems like a prescription for feminizing the church. The shaming continues. And from the floor of GA this year we got to hear that ”we don't want to have pastors who are identifying as same-sex attracted Christians. That is exactly what we are talking about."
We need men of all backgrounds and issues to lead our congregations. We need men whose hearts have been radically altered by the Gospel through the Spirit of God to lead others well. When we pick and choose particulars, just where does it end? “And such were some of you” either means something or it doesn’t.
I like to think I have had a vibrant ministry to the men of New St. Peter’s where I shepherd. I have discipled many in the last 20 years. I love pouring my life into the men, husbands, and fathers with a Christ-centered, Gospel-soaked understanding of what it means to love friends, wives, and families. I learned how to do that because of my SSA, not in spite of it. This is how God has redeemed my story. “Where sin abounds grace that much more abounds.”
Having been transgender, my life depended on knowing what maleness meant and how to move into my world as one. My God-designed, gender-informed sexuality demanded that I learn how to move toward my wife well or my marriage was over. And that is what I get to teach other men, SSA or otherwise. If single, in their celibacy, they get to mortify their flesh and love their friends in a way that brings honor to Christ. It’s simply the Gospel - the power of God. I would submit we don’t deal with SSA or gender sin well because we don’t deal with any sin well anymore. We seem to have taken to a form of fundamentalism believing that the flesh can actually be changed. We have somewhere along the way become moralists. This is why the Study Committee gave so much space to sanctification in our sexuality report.
Back to the Overtures
Given the amount of space given to the issue of sanctification I think there is a legitimate question about the necessity and wisdom of Overtures 23 and 37. As a denomination we have already left no doubt as to where we stand. We are a clearly conservative Bible-based denomination. A few years ago we made the language of "one man and one woman in marriage” fully binding in the BCO. We then received the Nashville Statement to double down on our expression of what we want the outside world to know we believe. We would have done better to have our own people write a paper. So, that's exactly what we did. We made up a Study Committee creating a report on same-sex attraction and transgender issues. And I, being on that Committee, was immensely pleased with the biblical, theological, and pastoral nature of the final product. It was received and commended by the Assembly almost unanimously as a teaching tool for discipleship in our denomination. That was great.
Right after all that support, Overture 23 was voted in the affirmative. What it will do is add another section to chapter 16 of the BCO, that specifically prohibits identification as an SSA Christian. It is a shocking, unnecessary, and unhelpful inclusion. Also problematic is the language, “Those who profess an identity…” This is not Biblical terminology. The concept of “identity” comes from the therapeutic and political communities. “Identity in Christ'' terminology doesn’t even show up until the 1990s after all. It’s too ambiguous to be added to the BCO.
Then Overture 37 was also voted in the affirmative. This overture includes the phrases “known by reputation,” and “self-profession according to his remaining sinfulness.” This language is unclear, confusing, and possibly unbiblical. Language identifying people with their sin is replete in Scripture. For example, Jacob continues to be referred to as Jacob even after having his name changed to Israel. Paul admits to being a “wretched man” and “chief of sinners.” Rahab is called “the prostitute” in the hall of faith of Hebrews 11. The list goes on. Is my admission in front of a couple thousand pastors and elders at the General Assembly now my “reputation according to my remaining sinfulness?”
While I cannot speak for the whole committee, I believe these overtures go against the spirit of our report.
Our Scriptures, as well as our Confession and our Book of Church Order, are crystal clear about the godliness of our elders. First Timothy and Titus alone are beyond helpful in deciding who can serve. Adding more specific language to The Book of Church Order about SSA with especially vague language concerning identity and reputation is unhelpful at best.
Beyond this, this whole issue seems to be driven by fear. No one, absolutely no one, wants practicing gay clergy in the PCA. Yes, I believe nomenclature like "gay Christian" is problematic. We state as much in the Report. While it may not be wise language it never, absolutely never, means behaving sexually when and if claimed by a PCA pastor or elder. Besides, I don’t know of any who actually call themselves such. Are we really comfortable policing the language of men holding office in our denomination? Men who have already passed our biblically rigid standards of holiness?
“We have not been given a spirit of fear but of power, love, and sound mind." There is no slippery slope here. While there may be areas for scrutiny, this right now is not one. “The gates of hell will not prevail.” These are godly, righteous, men who struggle against SSA and who mortify it, live for Jesus, love others for His sake as officers in His Church and are glorious examples of walking by faith.
These Overtures are just one more way to let the world know we are against them and it feels like one more kick in the gut for those of us who have SSA as part of our stories, letting us know that we are under suspicion again and always. There is concern for us with these Overtures, that any honest and open discussion of our struggles would paint us as unfit for ministry. Which raises my question again, according to the language and interpretation of these Overtures, did I disqualify myself because of my honesty in front of the entire General Assembly? Maybe more ironically - Did I, by participating in producing the very report on sexuality so widely accepted by my denomination, disqualify myself by being open and honest about my own sexuality?
Jim Pocta, a Ruling Elder at New St Peter’s Presbyterian Church, PCA. Jim has been married to his wife Linda for 43 years and is a Biblical counselor in the Dallas area working with the sexually broken. Jim also served on the PCA Ad Interim Committee on Human Sexuality.
