The Gay Threat to the PCA
By Greg Johnson, September 26, 2021.
Theological Progressivism, Homosexuality & a Sad Departure
After many decades of faithful witness, the congregation of a historic Presbyterian Church voted to leave its denomination rather than continue with that body's seemingly inevitable slide down the drain of theological progressivism. There were a number of reasons leading to the departure. Denominational seminary professors seemed less and less concerned with biblical doctrine and morality or confessional theology. Young pastors seemed more enamored with social issues and liberal politics than with evangelism and discipleship. For years, the congregation had been a grassroots kind of church, networking with other like-minded conservative congregations, while denominational agencies seemed increasingly out of touch and increasingly centralized.
But one topic stoked the biblical concern of the congregation more than any other. The church and many like it was particularly concerned about the ordained status of a certain Reverend Johnson, a self-avowed homosexual pastor. The congregation had watched as the moral norms of society had rapidly changed. First came a sexual revolution that had upended biblical—and human—norms of marriage and sexuality. Then the culture began to accept homoeroticism, once nearly universally condemned. And now homosexual pastors were finding leadership positions within a once orthodox Presbyterian denomination.
There seemed to be no alternative but to leave. By a nearly unanimous vote—there was one abstention—the congregation voted to break ties with the denomination.
The congregation of which I speak is, of course, the Memorial Presbyterian Church of St. Louis, the church in which I have pastored since 2003. The vote to leave our denomination was in 1980, when we left the United Presbyterian Church in the USA, the northern mainline denomination then entering into union with the southern PCUS to form the PC(USA). The Reverend Johnson in view was a Reverend Walter R. Johnson, a practicing homosexual pastor ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1972. Johnson had been cited as a positive example by the United Presbyterian Church's majority report on homosexuality in 1978. That committee’s majority recommended that “self-affirming, practicing homosexual persons” be candidates for ordination within the denomination. That was one of several last straws for us at Memorial. We left. Two years later, we entered the Presbyterian Church in America, stopped ordaining deaconesses—after a century of ordaining them—and continued a lengthy court case in which the U.S. Supreme Court eventually put an end to the liberal mainline presbytery’s attempt to confiscate the church building and property. At one point during that process, volunteers from liberal Second Presbyterian Church had even stopped by to measure for window coverings.
A Real Threat
The gay threat in 1980 was real. Theological progressivism—a trendier name for liberalism—was real. Capital Union Presbytery had ordained a teaching elder who denied the doctrine of the Trinity. The denomination's majority report on homosexuality had recommended that people engaged in unrepentant homosexual practice be ordained as pastors and elders. The denominational seminaries were not teaching the inerrancy of the Bible or our Confession of Faith. An amendment then working its way through the presbyteries would place all church property in the hands of liberal denominational leaders. Church leaders were neglecting evangelism and discipleship in the name of liberal politics, including denominational funds going to support abortion.
Fears were very well grounded in 1980. We at Memorial left and never looked back.
A Familiar Ring
If you thought I was writing of a church leaving the PCA in 2021, your mistake might be understandable. One PCA pastor I spoke with this week mentioned perhaps a dozen elders with whom he had spoken who believed that pastors in the PCA were contemplating ordination of practicing gay pastors. Given the hate mail my church administrator receives on a weekly basis—she trashes it before I see it—many of them seem to think I am one of them.
I am not. I remain a man who believes that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible, authoritative, sufficient and perspicacious Word or God. I subscribe to the system of doctrine set forth in the Westminster Confession of Faith and catechisms. I believe that God intends sexual desire to be cultivated only in the context of a marriage between a man and a woman. I believe in mortifying indwelling sin and in progressive sanctification. I've been arrested blocking the doors of an abortion clinic. I have busts of Martin Luther, John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards in my church office. I'm still a virgin, never having so much as held hands. Even my Covenant Eyes report has been clean.
Certainly any time I feel even the slightest hint of homoerotic attraction, I know that I am dealing with indwelling sin to mortify, not a morally neutral identity to celebrate.
I know of not one PCA elder or pastor advocating for the ordination of men engaged in homosexual practice. Yet I have read that at our recent General Assembly “the PCA voted to uphold the Christian sexual morality of the last two millennia, rather than that of merely the last two decades.”[1] I never realized anyone in the PCA was arguing to abandon the sexual morality of the last two millennia.
The PCGay?
The narrative I keep hearing is of a PCA that has been sliding down a chute toward apostasy. I’ve read that at a previous General Assembly I “stated that [I] was born same-sex attracted ... and that there is no sin in this,” and I wonder which other Greg Johnson said that—because I never did. [2] I’ve read that “TE Johnson likened unnatural sexual desires to conditions that are in themselves morally neutral,” when I am on record stating that they are not morally neutral. [3] I've read about the hope that the PCA will “witness departures by those who were not ‘of us’” — the quote marks are original — and wonder why the author references 1 John 2:19— a passage about antichrists who were not really Christians. It's not hard to put two and two together and see what is being said. [4]
I've read that I’m “deciding that a particular besetting sin is no longer sinful,” and I’ve been left staring in bewilderment because I’ve stated just the opposite more times than I can count. My presbytery documented that falsehood, yet certain actors who know better keep repeating the claim for reasons I cannot understand. [5] I’ve read that “our own Teaching Elders … continue to make the claim that homosexual desires are … not a moral problem…. they deny that homosexual attractions are sinful.” [6] I wonder who these officers might be, given that my presbytery has previously communicated to the article's author that their investigation found this to be a false accusation. I read of my “recategorization of SSA as an untouchable identity” and of “Johnson’s new doctrine of sanctification.” [7] I do not recognize myself in such descriptions. I wonder what motivates all this inflationary and misleading rhetoric.
I've read that, “a growing number of our ministers and churches are conforming to the world’s values, attitudes, and ideals, especially as it concerns homosexuality…. The future doesn’t look good for the PCA. Frankly, the future looks pretty bad.” [8] Such words certainly seem to suggest that the PCA is where the UPCUSA was in 1980. [9] I read cries about the PCA's “theological progressivism” and remember what theological progressivism meant in 1980. I’ve read about “Liberal Christianity 2.0” and its “persistent and penetrating movement of Progressive Christianity within … the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).” [10] Such rhetoric leaves me wondering who in the PCA is denying the inerrancy of the Bible, the deity of Christ, or the biblical sexual ethic.
One PCA pastor comments unironically, “I wonder how much longer before denials of orthodox trinitarianism, substitutionary atonement, justification by faith alone, the necessity of the new birth, etc will be deemed in some Presbyteries as ‘not striking at the vitals of our religion.’” [11] Another emphasizes, “What is at stake in this controversy is nothing less than the commitment of our denomination to the truth of God's Word.” [12]
In a sermon he preached to my congregation on February 12, 1926, single and celibate Presbyterian forefather J. Gresham Machen explained to our flock that not even the compromised liberalizing denomination of which we were both then a part was a “synagogue of Satan” despite “the hostile forces within it.” He lamented those who “reject the authority of the Bible and take the commands of God with a grain of salt” who had ordained a “minister who actually refused to affirm even the Virgin Birth of our Lord.” [13] Given what I've read about the PCA, one would think we find ourselves again in the same position as we did then.
The gay threat in the United Presbyterian Church was very real in 1980. One wonders whether the gay threat in the PCA smacks of a fabricated narrative built on misrepresentation and inflationary rhetoric. One would expect a narrative of decline toward unbelief to resonate within the PCA. It's a narrative that has played out with fierce reality in the surrounding culture, including the American churches.
A Culture Hostile to Sexual Orthodoxy
Western culture has experienced an unprecedented breakdown in its former consensus on matters of sexuality, gender, marriage and the family. As I explain in a new book this year with Zondervan:
Christians [have] faced strong and rapidly changing headwinds that [have] radically reordered cultural values surrounding sexuality in general and homosexuality and gender in particular. These changes came with a speed and thoroughness in which our surrounding culture abandoned biblical sexual norms and began celebrating all things queer. On top of this, mainline denominations started ordaining people in active same-sex sexual relationships and performing gay weddings. Many evangelical churches stopped teaching about or providing discipline for sexual sin, whether heterosexual or homosexual. These have been seismic shifts all around us. [14]
I have borne the scars of these shifts. We at Memorial PCA were denounced in the local LGBTQ media in St. Louis in 2018 for supporting what they called “Conversion Therapy 2.0” — meaning, sexual chastity in singleness. Activists threatened to picket our church. They tell us our faith is homophobic. Being Christians in a secular northern city makes us suspect. Any vestige of Christendom is long gone here. Like in western Europe, our battle is to help our non-Christian neighbors see the credibility of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The irony is not lost on me. For many in the PCA I’m the poster boy of “the gay liberal threat” inside the PCA. But, on account of my publicly stated biblical convictions, I am regularly accused by secular LGBTQ activists of “internalized homophobia” on Twitter and social media. I have been accused of encouraging LGBTQ youth suicides because of my embrace of the biblical sexual ethic. Despite the ongoing false statements (and often nameless accusations) about me on PCA blogs, the reason I have spent the past thirty-one years daily turning from homoeroticism to Jesus is because I share the concerns of my brothers in the PCA that we not slide down a slippery slope of theological progressivism and turn a blind eye when God says that those who engage in homosexual practice “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). Souls are at stake in this discussion of sexuality. By my life of chaste singleness, I and others like me are declaring to a confused world that there are more important things than sex and romance. We are declaring that Jesus is everything. He is worth it.
The Threat in the Churches
It is true: The threat isn't just out there in secular society. Once hallowed evangelical institutions have shifted their sexual ethics to more closely align with a surrounding culture that's gone nuts on sexuality.
Western Seminary's James Brownson in his 2013 Eerdman's book Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships develops what William Webb terms a redemptive-movement hermeneutic—together with an argument from cultural distance—to make an exegetical argument for same-sex marriage in the church. [15] Karen Keen follows similar reasoning in her 2018 Eerdmans book Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships. “The biblical authors don’t write about the morality of consensual same-sex relationships as we know them today,” she argues. “To say that the biblical authors object to prostitution or pederasty is not to say that the authors object to monogamous, covenanted relationships.” [16] I have personally seen four acquaintances enter into gay sexual relationships after reading Brownson and Keen. Mine has been one of very few voices tackling their arguments. I have argued that such hermeneutical moves are functionally a denial of biblical authority. [17] If you have been led to believe that I am a threat to the PCA, please, I urge you, read that last sentence again. As I stand before God, and having been exonerated by a presbytery investigation that I requested myself: What you have probably heard about me is not true.
Many in evangelicalism have found Brownson's and Keen's 'affirming' revisionist line of reasoning or something close to it convincing, including evangelical left leader Tony Campolo, former Christianity Today editor David Neff, evangelical Anglican bishop David Atkinson, ethicist David Gushee of the Center for Faith and Public Life, popular author Jen Hatmaker, Sojourners magazine founder Jim Wallis and the late Rachel Held Evans. Nondenominational churches increasingly are embracing an agnostic stance on same-sex marriage in the church.
A friend of mine in ministry in the Christian Reformed Church has shared his own struggle to remain in that denomination as a sexually abstinent believer who has experienced same-sex attraction his entire life. While the majority of CRC leaders still oppose gay marriage in the church, they show little interest in disciplining those who support it. He knows he will have to leave.
Within the PCA
Even in our own denomination, we all watched in horror as Fred Harrell lost his theological moorings fifteen years ago, taking himself and San Francisco's City Church out of biblical sexual ethics and out of the PCA. One positive sign, though. When Fred Harrell started to go off the rails, everyone in the PCA tried to stop him. That was a presbytery and a denomination doing its work well. The fact that he couldn't remain in the PCA is evidence of biblical discipline.
It wasn't that long ago that an officer in my own church had to demit his office because he did not in good conscience agree with our confessional commitment that a Christian marriage be only between a man and a woman. A musician in our worship band left our church when he wrongly concluded that same-sex sexual unions are biblical. A woman in my church resigned her membership and left rather than face the certainty of judicial process because of sexual sin. While these losses all saddened me, they are again examples of PCA churches—even supposedly “suspect” ones like my own—holding the line on biblical sexual orthodoxy. The Memorial Presbyterian Church of St. Louis has proven to be faithful when it comes to the Bible’s teaching on sexuality. It feels awkward and self-promoting to say it, but given the fake news about me, I feel like I need to also say that I, Greg Johnson, PCA pastor, have never hesitated to call sin sin especially in the area of homoeroticism.
Yes: There is much at stake here. But I fear that we have been misled about the “Gay threat in the PCA.”
A Cause for Lament
I remember filling the pulpit of a small country church in Missouri twenty years ago. It was a PC(USA) church of perhaps fifty people. As I preached, a frail World War II vet sat in the back pew and wept the entire time. Afterward, he told me it was the first time in half a century that he had heard the gospel in that pulpit. I felt ashamed, yet strangely honored. What he had been praying for all those decades had happened. There is more at stake here than sexual ethics. Our posture to the Bible when discussing sexuality will be our same posture toward the Bible on everything other topic, including even the very gospel itself. My own congregation knows that denominations can fall away. It happened before. We had to leave. The danger is real.
These are all cause for lament. Never in history has an entire civilization—the global West—so rapidly shifted its mores. Churches can easily fall. I share your concern. Indeed, given my own story and the sheep I have been called to shepherd, I share it more deeply than most could ever imagine. Just as Paul trembled for his fellow Jews and wished he could be cut off in their place, so I feel similarly burdened for people whose experience of their sexuality has been similarly affected by the fall. Without Jesus, we have no hope.
We have reason to worry about the next generation. But within the PCA, my bigger worry is not about sexuality. If that surprises or shocks you, please remember all that I have said above about my and Memorial Presbyterian Church's confrontations, interventions, and discipline with regard to congregants and friends who have departed from biblical fidelity and orthodoxy on these matters. Remember what I said about how we have been attacked by secular LGBTQ activists. Remember that, and hear me say: as a denomination, I fear the PCA has straddled the line between Reformed evangelicalism and a harsh and adversarial fundamentalism. Our erring has not been on the side of homoeroticism.
‘Do Not Be Deceived’ … On being Discipled by the World's Political Values
If there is reason to worry that once solid churches could fall into worldly patterns of thinking about sexuality, there is added reason for concern. If recent maneuvering in the PCA around this topic has opened my mind to anything, it is this: we are even more at risk of another threat.
Scripture warns us, “Do not be deceived: Neither men who have sex with men … nor … slanderers … will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). In our cultural moment, our eyes and minds are drawn to the “men who have sex with men” part and we miss the “slanderers” part. As I listen to the elevated rhetoric, as I read blog posts and articles online where we misrepresent our opponents, when I see PCA pastors refuse to take down or correct misleading information, when I hear suggestions that PCA pastors want to ordain men engaged in homosexual practice, I grieve. Slanderers will not inherit the kingdom of God. Where is the concern about that?
I worry that we have opened the door to let in the world and its political values. Our ethos and dialogue is as twisted and slanderous as the cable news channels that drive us crazy because of their spin.
I see the toxicity of American politics, and then I look at the way we treat each other within this denomination. I fear we have become a denomination of political consultants jockeying for power. I fear we are willing to harm another's reputation in order to win a vote. I fear we might be resisting Jesus when he wants to season our speech with grace and gentleness. I worry we shut him out when he tells us that “love always trusts” (1 Corinthians 13:7). I fear we are conforming ourselves to the pattern of this politically contentious world.
When I look at the PCA, I fear we “have been completely defeated already” with our adoption of the world's political posturing—the very pattern the Bible forbids (1 Corinthians 6:7). With all our focus on building a fence around law with respect to brothers who are denying and actively mortifying homoerotic temptation, I fear we have left the door wide open and allowed a pagan world to disciple us in another area. It wants to teach us its ways of disagreeing. It wants to disciple us in how to misrepresent your opponent. It wants to train us in its pattern of conflict. It wants to show us how to dispatch one's opponent.
And that too moves me with concern for the next generation. When they see our adversarial posture, our misrepresentations and our slander—”Do not be deceived”—they will think this is what Jesus is like. Then they will either become just as fearful, angry and adversarial as us, or they will conclude that Christianity itself is ugly and walk away. It will be tragic yet understandable if churches feel they have no option but to seek out a less toxic denominational alignment. We have the good news of God's love and redemption in Jesus Christ to share with a broken and desperate world. We can and must do better. We really can. Let's forsake false fear and put on the outward faced, Spirit empowered courage the gospel can give us.
Lastly, I covet your prayers for me and for Memorial Presbyterian Church. While we have an active and positive Christian witness within the LGBTQ community—rare for a PCA church—we are regularly attacked from two very different sides. There are secular LGBTQ activists who are furious in their attacks on me and Memorial Church because they accurately understand our commitment to obeying the historic and biblical orthodoxy with regard to the Bible’s teaching about sexuality. This we expect from image bearers who haven't yet experienced the grace of Jesus. And yet, tragically and ironically, we are also inaccurately and perpetually maligned and slandered by many within the PCA and American fundamentalism who have either believed lies about us or have perpetuated inaccuracies and untruths about who we are, who I am, and what we believe and stand for. This we did not expect from our spiritual brothers. And their attacks have been fierce, vicious and unrelenting these past four years. We are the Lord's frontline troops battling for a positive Christian vision of biblical sexuality. Yet we risk being decimated by the unrelenting 'friendly fire' of those who claim to follow Jesus, yet prefer political jockeying and fearmongering to gain denominational advantage.
Dr. Greg Johnson is the Lead Pastor of Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, MO. He is the author of The World According to God: A Biblical View of Culture, Work, Science, Sex & Everything Else and the forthcoming Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality.
[1] Carl R. Trueman, “At the PCA General Assembly, the Little Guy Stood Up,” First Things Online (July 8, 2021): https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/07/at-the-pca-general-assembly-the-little-guys-stood-up.
[2] David Martin, “The Biblical View of Gender and Sexuality,” Aquila Report (June 26, 2021): https://www.theaquilareport.com/the-biblical-view-of-gender-and-sexuality/.
[3] Ryan Biese, “The 48th PCA General Assembly: Actions and Reflections,” Aquila Report (July 8, 2021): https://www.theaquilareport.com/the-48th-pca-general-assembly-actions-and-reflections/.
[4] Ibid.
[5] David Garner, “A Response to Greg Johnson’s Interview: The Gospel and Christian Identity,” Gospel Reformation Network (June 24, 2021): https://gospelreformation.net/a-response-to-greg-johnsons-interview/.
[6] Todd Pruitt, “A Clear Message from the 48th General Assembly of the PCA,” Reformation 21 (July 5, 2021): https://www.reformation21.org/blog/a-clear-message-from-the-48th-general-assembly-of-the-pca.
[7] Garner, “A Response.”
[8] Jon Payne, “The PCA’s Very Slippery Slope,” Gospel Reformation Network (December 14, 2021): https://gospelreformation.net/the-pcas-very-slippery-slope-part-1/.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Harry Reeder, “Historic Biblical Christianity & Contemporary Progressive Christianity,” In Perspective (July 16, 2021): https://harryreeder.wordpress.com/2021/07/16/historic-biblical-christianity-contemporary-progressive-christianity/.
[11] Todd Pruitt, “The PCA Must Reject God-less Ideologies,” Reformation 21 (March 4, 2020): https://www.reformation21.org/blog/the-pca-must-reject-god-less-ideologies.
[12] Richard Phillips, “Revoice and the ‘Idolatry’ of the Nuclear Family,” Reformation 21 (September 25, 2018): https://www.reformation21.org/blogs/revoice-and-the-idolatry-of-th.php.
[13] J. Gresham Machen, “What the Church Stands For,” Washington and Compton Presbyterian Church, St. Louis (February 12, 1926).
[14] Greg Johnson, Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church's Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality, Zondervan, 2021, 204.
[15] James Brownson, Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships, Eerdmans, 2013.
[16] Karen Keen, Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships, Eerdmans, 2018, p. 355.
[17] See Greg Johnson, Still Time to Care, Part 3: The Rising Challenge to a Historical Ethic. Ed Shaw of Living Out calls it a “culturally-sensitive defense of traditional sexual ethics.” Richard Winter calls it “a strong challenge to Christians to reflect deeply on how we have drifted away from a truly biblical approach.” Front matter.
