Former pastor Alistair Begg recently doubled down on his controversial advice to a grandmother in 2023, which advised her to attend her grandchild’s wedding to a transgender-identifying individual.
Begg, whose radio ministry “Truth For Life” is carried by nearly 1,800 radio stations nationwide, drew backlash that 12 months when comments he made went viral on social media after he shared his advice to the Christian grandmother that she should attend the marriage and buy a present to avoid reinforcing “judgmental” stereotypes about Christians.
Touching on the difficulty again during an interview published this week by the Christian podcast “Expositor’s Collective,” Begg said he was attempting to be compassionate along with his advice.
“If people said, ‘What do you understand about Begg?’ I do not think compassion is necessarily the primary word that they might use,” he said.
“I’m not attempting to be unkind to myself,” he said regarding how others might assess him. “I feel, realistically, they could say he’s very direct, they could say he’s funny. They could say a bunch of stuff, but I do not think they’d say ‘compassion.'”
“So now, in my one attempt at compassion, I must have known higher,” he added, because the audience laughed. “I do not do compassion. I do compassion, all hell breaks loose against me.”
Begg, who has been in pastoral ministry since 1975 and have become senior pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1983 before stepping down last 12 months, echoed the sentiment he expressed in a sermon within the wake of the controversy, during which he said he feels no have to repent over his advice.
“I repent for a foul attitude, or an unkindness, or whatever it is perhaps, but I’m not going to repent for giving anyone compassionate encouragement in relationships,” he said.
Begg said he first thought the grandmother’s letter about her grandson’s transgender wedding was “a foul joke” until he realized it was “a fearful thing.”
“It was a woman that had already begun to grow facial hair,” he said. “It was [a] very sad-looking picture.”
Begg nevertheless pushed back against accusations that his advice to the grandmother was an endorsement of gay marriage.
“I had just finished doing Jude, for crying out loud,” he said. “And I had done Romans, Chapter 1 within the previous months as well. I believed I used to be going to be torched from one other department, but I never thought it will come this manner.”
Begg went on to assert he was attacked by his own friends for being compassionate, with some turning on him over the difficulty without first reaching out to him.
“I had guys that I played golf with, Christian guys, who went on and did podcasts and [were] throwing me under the bus,” he said. “But they never, ever picked up a phone. They never verified anything in any respect. That’s distressing.”
The late pastor John MacArthur, who noted he knew Begg well enough to have known his son when he was an infant, publicly rebuked him for his advice and suggested his ministry could be defined by his stance on the transgender wedding.
Days after his comments went viral, Begg was scrubbed from the website of the Shepherd’s Conference, which is a ministry of MacArthur’s Grace Community Church.
“I’d never say that, because you may have to calculate the associated fee of that,” MacArthur said last 12 months of Begg’s advice. “And how do you calculate that? The price for that is basically epic, it’s really epic.”
“There’s so rather more about him that’s wonderful and faithful and his ministry, just passed 40 years of pastoral ministry in that church,” he continued, adding the church had just celebrated Begg’s milestone in ministry.
“And now he’ll be defined by that. I do not know the way you calculate doing that for that reason, unless there’s some very personal relationship with someone you are attempting to win over or protect, but that is really speculation in my mind.”
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