October 13, 2019, gave the look of every other Sunday. And it was—until it wasn’t.
My sermon that day on Genesis 1:27 unexpectedly made national headlines, changing my life, our church, and the connection our church had built with our community.
Since then, I’ve reflected on what transpired and the way the things that we learned might help other churches as they prepare to show on sexuality and gender.
In the autumn of 2019, we began a yearlong preaching series through Genesis. We take a team approach to preaching, so we discussed how we desired to handle Genesis 1:26–28—an incredibly necessary passage with profound implications. Dave Cover, who cofounded The Crossing church with me, preached on the image of God, and the plan was that I might preach the following week on what it signifies that humans are created female and male.
Knowing the sensitivity of the subject, I asked Dave and other pastors to read the sermon ahead of time and provides me feedback. The final version was a team effort to talk truth in love. And the reality is that Genesis clearly teaches that God created people male or female. What people often derisively call the “gender binary” isn’t rooted within the patriarchy or Victorian ethics. It’s rooted in God’s design. Sex and gender aren’t social constructs.
It’s also true that transgender people will at all times be welcome to attend The Crossing. In the sermon, I told parents that in case your child involves you and says they’re trans, the correct response is to hug your child, tell them you like them, and assure them you’ll work through it together. I said that if someone visited the church, I’d use the name they shared with me. I would like to construct a relationship with people, not win an argument.
Right before I went up to evangelise this sermon for the second of three services, I used to be told that a girl—who used to attend The Crossing but had since left not only our church but in addition orthodox Christianity—had posted on Facebook that she’d listened to the sermon and that I (and our church) was transphobic. She had a young child who was within the strategy of socially transitioning, so this was an especially personal issue for her.
That was only the start of the blowback. There were threats against our safety, so we heightened security on the church, and the police were more visible in my neighborhood. On Monday morning, some people’s coworkers confronted them asking how they might remain at The Crossing after such a hateful sermon (which many had only heard about secondhand).
We would go on coping with the aftermath of that sermon for years to come back. In the method, I learned seven lessons which will help other churches.
Sometimes teaching biblical truth is expensive.
Perhaps probably the most painful consequence of the sermon was the rupture of our relationship with the True/False Film Festival. This local festival had developed a national repute, attracting a number of the world’s best documentary filmmakers, and The Crossing was a financial sponsor. We’d spent years constructing friendships with the festival’s founders, who were smart, talented, and really irreligious. Many people within the church volunteered in the course of the festival and lots of more attended movies.
What made the partnership unlikely is identical thing that made it special. Organizations with very different beliefs worked together for the common good. The New York Times and Christianity Today said it was the nation’s only partnership between a movie festival and an evangelical church.
But after the sermon on Genesis 1, the festival’s leadership decided they couldn’t partner with us. While the church and the community eventually healed, the partnership never did. This pales compared to the costs other Christians have paid for being faithful to Jesus, but being misrepresented in online arguments or called names is rarely fun.
You can say every part “right” and still be offensive.
Could we’ve got crafted a more truthful and loving sermon? Always. But was it a good-faith effort? Absolutely. My sermon wasn’t designed to fire up controversy but to show and shepherd the congregation.
It helped me to keep in mind that Jesus said all the correct words at the correct time with the correct tone, they usually crucified him. Sometimes Christian truth is offensive irrespective of the way it’s said.
You can act in good faith and still make avoidable mistakes.
I made the error of not talking with any transgender people before preaching the sermon. I listened to podcast interviews that featured trans people and browse loads of books on the subject but didn’t have a private conversation. Would which have modified anything in my sermon? I don’t know. Maybe not. But it might have been clever to take heed to trans people in my community before talking about them.
The way you raise the themes.
When you preach through books of the Bible, you don’t get to avoid hard topics like sex and gender, but neither are you able to be accused of choosing texts to choose on one group of individuals. We addressed the subject because Genesis does, not because we desired to jump into the center of the culture war.
Prepare for tough questions upfront.
When the controversy began, it became obvious that we would have liked to offer the church more instruction than might be included in a single sermon. Within just a few days, we’d emailed a brief document responding to questions we’d been asked and false claims we’d heard locally.
That email went out by the center of the week, but those intervening days were rough for people in our church. We must have anticipated this need and posted the document online as soon as our services finished on Sunday.
Clear your schedule to satisfy with people.
The week following the sermon, I reached out to the individuals who were criticizing me and the church, including the lady whose Facebook post began all of it. My wife and I met together with her and her husband at a neighborhood coffee shop. Once we said hello and sat down, I opened my notebook and asked what they wished I’d known before I preached that sermon.
I asked the identical query of every one who was willing to satisfy with me head to head: What do you would like I’d known? What do you would like I’d said in a different way? What do you’re thinking that I would like to learn? While I actually didn’t agree with every part they said, I learned loads and walked away with more compassion.
Regardless of the scale of the congregation, pastors have to put aside time to get along with people who find themselves confused, feel hurt, or simply disagree with a controversial sermon. Meeting with people and answering their questions demonstrates humility and respect. If you sit down and have interaction in good faith, should you focus more on listening than lecturing, you’ll learn something and, in the method, may win people to the reality.
Respond to critics with grace.
What do you do when people say your sincerely held Christian beliefs cause “tremendous pain in our community”? How do you respond if you’re told that your church “discriminates or explicitly devalues LGBTQ+ residents”?
One morning a few month after my sermon, my phone began blowing up with texts from friends telling me the local NBC affiliate had interviewed an independent bookstore owner who was sponsoring a lunch discussion highlighting books with transgender characters. The intention behind the event was clear when the owner ended the interview with an invite: “Pastor Simon is welcome to attend.”
I could tell everyone was surprised after I walked into the bookstore. Heck, I was surprised I used to be there. But I knew that we couldn’t hide. If we disappeared, it might communicate that we were embarrassed or knew we were mistaken, and neither was true. If we showed up, if we humbly engaged, it might be much harder to write down us off as hateful bigots.
We asked our staff and congregation to make use of their social media platforms to precise appreciation for the True/False Film Festival even after they ended our relationship. We encouraged people to proceed to volunteer and attend.
Just a few weeks later, one in every of the festival’s cofounders told us that the church’s response was a master class in grace and asked why we did it. We couldn’t take credit. The truth is that we desired to punch back. We’d even give you snarky comebacks and ways to spin the story in order that we were the nice guys they usually were the bad guys.
Instead, we told him that we decided we just couldn’t respond that way. We follow Jesus. He loved us after we were his enemies. If we offered a master class on grace, it’s only because our master first showed us grace.
The conversation around sexuality has modified since I preached that sermon back in 2019. I doubt the identical sermon would draw as much attention or be as controversial today. But the necessity to preach on culturally sensitive topics with truth and love won’t ever change.
Keith Simon is a pastor at The Crossing and coauthor with Patrick Miller of Truth Over Tribe: Pledging Allegiance to the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant and the upcoming Joyful Outsiders: Six Ways to Engage a Disorienting Culture (Zondervan, 2025).
