For evangelical parents who hold to the church’s long-standing doctrines on gender and sex, waking as much as the fact of LGBTQ children in our homes often marks the start of a difficult journey.
Often blindsided by the event, many parents feel ill-prepared for the work of discernment required to maneuver forward. They hunger for instruction and understanding. Above all, they yearn for relief from the burdensome fear of “getting it unsuitable” as they navigate uncharted waters requiring many selections, day after day, 12 months after 12 months.
This is the context that produces high turnout for events that attempt to help Christian parents find responses, beyond fight or flight, to their LGBTQ children—events like last 12 months’s Unconditional Conference hosted by the church of influential pastor Andy Stanley.
The conference was controversial since it featured several speakers who don’t hold orthodox evangelical views on sex and gender. To outstanding evangelical critics, the entire affair amounted to “a transparent and tragic departure from Biblical Christianity” (Albert Mohler) and a “profound failure of pastoral responsibility” (Sam Allberry).
Similarly, in a more moderen dustup, pastor and writer Alistair Begg, who holds to the historical doctrine on marriage, saw his popular radio show dropped by a conservative Christian network. It got here to light that he’d counseled a girl that she could attend her grandchild’s wedding to a transgender person, though she opposed the union on doctrinal grounds. Writing for First Things, theologian Carl Trueman argued that attending such a marriage is itself a doctrinal drift and “a really high price tag for avoiding hurting someone’s feelings. And if Christians still think it value paying, the long run of the Church is bleak indeed.”
As an evangelical parent of adult LGBTQ children myself, I followed each controversies with interest. I share a number of the detractors’ concerns, but I also consider that we American evangelicals who hold fast to Christianity’s historical doctrines on sex and gender—the standard or “non-affirming” position, per current lexical shorthand—need more, not less, conversation concerning the intensely practical questions of how you can be good neighbors to the LGBTQ people in our lives, be they in our homes, workplaces, or congregations.
There are some resources available for Christians in my circumstance, like Allberry’s Is God Anti-Gay? and the course for fogeys from The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender. But beyond books or online courses, we want real-life conversations about specific circumstances. Christian parents of LGBTQ kids, like me, thirst for a sustainable vision of day-to-day life with our youngsters. There’s definitely grounds to criticize the vision offered by Stanley and Begg, but simply restating right doctrine, while essential, isn’t alone enough to reply those questions of practice, of how you can live with our youngsters.
As parents, we’re already rooted within the understanding that God created humanity in two distinct forms that we call female and male, and that sexual intimacy is reserved for monogamous marriage between a person and a girl. Our query is how you can relate to our youngsters, especially adult children, after they select lives not rooted in that understanding.
We’ve made clear to them what we consider. Now what?
I think that much of the response to Unconditional and Begg is the results of worry that open consideration of those prudential questions will inevitably end in significant theological drift with dire consequences for the church and for those to whom it ministers. It’s a fear amplified by a culture war mentality, which has been present in evangelicalism because the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early twentieth century. This mentality tends to forged LGBTQ people as our enemies in that fight, enemies to be continuously confronted with statements of truth.
It is sweet to talk truth, yet adopting a permanently confrontational posture makes it unimaginable for us to heed the apostle Paul’s exhortation to the Roman Christians: “So far because it relies on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:18, ESV). And while trying to find answers to those practical questions of relationship has, for a lot of, been but a stop on a journey away from orthodoxy, that’s not the one possible end result.
The task at hand is one in every of correct practice (orthopraxy), which requires discernment, and discernment is a naturally fraught enterprise. What makes it fraught, after all, is our fallibility. For while God’s Word is wholly trustworthy, our application of it is probably not. Sometimes we decide to be lenient when we should always be firm, or severe when we should always be flexible. Regardless of our spiritual diligence and good intentions, there’s all the time a probability we are going to make the unsuitable selection. Add to this the sobering awareness that even correct selections can lead to pain for those we love, and discernment becomes downright daunting.
But ignoring the fact that discernment is essential just isn’t an option. The presence of risk doesn’t exempt us from doing the work of loving our neighbors. People need assistance, and decisions have to be made: Should Christians use preferred pronouns? Should we attend the same-sex weddings of our youngsters or coworkers? Should we allow our adult children in same-sex marriages to sleep in the identical bed after they come to go to?
For lots of us, these are usually not mere academic exercises but real situations with real people demanding answers, often without much lead time. These are the circumstances through which we must practice discernment, applying what we all know from God’s Word to the most effective of our ability, with great care and humility. These are the sorts of questions Christian parents like me (and grandparents, as within the case Begg addressed) long to have in-person help answering in conversations with our pastors and friends at church.
Sometimes we are going to get it unsuitable. Sometimes, as J. I. Packer put it in his seminal work, Knowing God, a “Christian wakes as much as the proven fact that he has missed God’s guidance and brought the unsuitable way.” But even then, the damage just isn’t irrevocable, Packer assured, and God is gracious enough to guard his sheep—including us—from our own fallible pondering. “Thus,” Packer concluded, “it seems that the proper context for discussing [divine] guidance is one in every of confidence within the God who won’t allow us to wreck our souls.”
Discernment requires exertions, much prayer, biblical reflection, and testing of spirits (1 John 4:1–6). Doing this in a culture with a rapidly shifting Overton window is incredibly difficult. But having to achieve this in isolation because fellow orthodox evangelicals are unwilling to speak through the sensible questions is even worse.
Victor Clemente is a contract author on faith and culture issues. His work has appeared in Christ and Pop Culture and Faithfully Magazine. Find him on X at @The_Wait_Room or Threads at @the_wait_rm.
