We somehow seem to have forgotten the earth-shattering reality of that which we await. Advent is more than just a coming; it is the breaking in of the divine into the everyday patterns of this world. It is the hope of the future incarnate in the present making all things new. To live expectantly into the incarnation is to affirm the eschatological hope of the future while at the same time be transformed by that very hope already at work in the present. To observe Advent isn’t simply to reenact a memory of the past or look towards a second coming someday, for both would implicitly assume a present absence of the divine. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, forever transforming possible modes of being in this world. To anticipate the fulfillment of this hope is to accept the new way of being that broke into our world with the incarnation of the long expected Jesus.

It is safe to in remembrance await the coming of a powerless child or to simply tinker with the language and rituals that comfort us with the promise that the liberating hope of Christ is something we can only await. What is seemingly far more difficult is to actually live into the alternate reality that the advent of Christ ushered into the present. To anticipate hope by actively going out to meet it. To await the coming of the Kingdom of God by living in it right now. To declare that the status quos of injustice, oppression, and suffering have no place in the transformed new creation of Christ.

We are not the ones creating hope, but neither are we the ones simply awaiting a future hope. Advent reminds us that hope in the form of Jesus has already broken into our world. To live in expectation of that hope is to live into it – to embody the alternate reality Jesus made possible. The world and even the church may resist this subversion of the status quo even as they incant the very refrain “Come thou long expected Jesus,” for they have safely bracketed off hope in the past and future. Expecting to encounter the transforming and liberating hope of Jesus in the present is the far more difficult aspect of the incarnation to await.

Not just in November, but every week, Christians around the world gather for official Thanksgiving celebrations. Eucharist, which means thanksgiving, is a celebration of praise and thankfulness to God situated in the memory of a death. When we gather, we hear the story of what happened on the night Jesus was betrayed and partake in the broken body and shed blood, for we believe that “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” Our process of giving thanks involves the retelling of a sacrifice – a confession of acts done on our behalf. To do so in remembrance implies that the past, however painful and uncomfortable, cannot be forgotten. We gather not only to give thanks and praise, but to remember the events of the story that we find ourselves in.

Participating in this ritual of thanksgiving and remembrance shapes us. We in the church not only partake symbolically of the body of Christ, we are the body of Christ which believes that sharing the bread and the cup represents the communion we have as a body. We are not individuals who happen to gather once a week, but integral parts of a body that depend on each other in order to function. We remember the sacrifice of Jesus by caring for each other’s needs – living sacrificially for one another as part of that act of remembrance and thanksgiving. Within that communion many of us pray as part of our very act of thanksgiving words of confession and repentance for what we have done and what we have left undone, including our failure to love our neighbors as ourselves. Those aren’t (or shouldn’t be) just perfunctory words; for to enter into thanksgiving involves placing ourselves in community and not only confessing the ways we have failed to remember the sacrifice of Christ as part of that community, but repenting of those ways by seeking reconciliation instead.

Thanking God for all God has done for us without acknowledging the parts of our body that are in pain or even the ways we have caused harm to that very body is to fail to remember Christ’s sacrifice. The first Thanksgiving is not just a tale of blessing (if it is even that at all), it is also a tale of the failure to love our neighbors – a failure that gets perpetuated every year mourning and reconciliation are avoided in the name of a celebration. Participating in Eucharist, in thanksgiving, involves acknowledging that because of Christ our lives are intricately bound up in each others’. We rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn because we are all one body. There should not have to be a separate National Day of Mourning to call us to repentance for the injustices caused by things done and left undone. Pleas for the confession of our failure to love our neighbor should not be silenced for being too inflammatory or met with armed police for getting in the way of official celebration. Thanksgiving for the body of Christ should by its very nature involve mourning as well as celebration and confession as well as praise.

The Thanksgiving table is also the Eucharist table where we can partake only in lived remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice.

I am equally uneasy with the tendencies in the church today to either shy away from theology altogether as the over-intellectualized inapplicable pursuit of the elite or to alternately make a claim to pure theology for theology’s sake. I hear the first all the time in the church. People proudly claim that what they write or speak about isn’t theology but simply what it practically means to serve God. They decry theology as getting in the way of following Jesus or of our ability to really worship. I even overheard a fellow seminary student recently complaining about having to study theology and philosophy in seminary. As he protested, he came to seminary so he could serve in the church not be bothered with all this intellectual stuff. But then at the opposite extreme there are also those who announce that what really matters is pure theology, untainted by the trivial mundanities of the world. Often assuming strict divisions of the human and the divine, they are quick to dismiss any attempts at practical Christianity as too profane to matter and the people who do such theology as misguided. This quote by Karl Barth sums this stance up nicely,

“Those who urge us to shake ourselves free from theology and to think – and more particularly to speak and write – only what is immediately intelligible to the general public seem to me to be suffering from a kind of hysteria and to be entirely without discernment. Is it not preferable that those who venture to speak in public, or to write for the public, should first seek a better understanding of the theme they wish to propound? … I do not want readers of this book to be under any illusions. They must not expect nothing but theology.” (4)

Obviously both sides are reacting to the extremes of the other. I agree with Barth that theology does matter – we do need better understanding of the God we claim to follow. To assume that theology can be abandoned just because some find it boring or elitist or difficult to understand does a disservice to those striving to be faithful. How we talk about God matters, but precisely for the everyday practical reasons some are so quick to reject. Theology is elitist if it exists for its own sake, or for the sake of a very few. If all theology does is attempt to prevent God from speaking into the lives of people today, then it has set itself up in place of God. If understanding God doesn’t transform our lives, bringing the hope of God to earth as it is in heaven, then theology is just an artifact or a clanging gong, useless for the communion of the church.

At the same time pretending that one’s faith isn’t shaped by a theology – by a conversation of the faithful with the scriptures as well as the philosophies of the world about our understanding of God – is to allow the theologies of the loudest voice to dictate what one believes and how one lives. It is easy to turn the life of faith into, say, a mirror of a particular political and economic system if those in the pews are conditioned to believe they shouldn’t bother thinking about what teachings are shaping what they believe. Insidious theologies take hold when the people are taught to believe that theology doesn’t matter. It’s like that great scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep’s character explains to Anne Hathaway’s character about how high fashion affects her bargain basement shopping decisions whether she is aware of it or not. Meryl Streep says, “It is sort of comical that you think you have made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.” If we think we can exempt ourselves from being shaped by theology, all we are doing is mindlessly allowing others to determine how we think about God and our faith for us without bothering to hold those ideas accountable to anything.

I appreciate James Cone’s perspective on the significance of what we believe – “The resurrection conveys hope in God. Nor is this the ‘hope’ that promises a reward in heaven in order to ease the pain of injustice on earth. Rather it is hope which focuses on the future in order to make us refuse to tolerate present inequities.” Theology speaks to that hope of God, a hope that is not limited to this world or confined to divine realms. For theology to convey that hope has to be deeply reflective and properly intelligent while at the same time have feet so to speak. Theology cannot be dismissed or exist in a vacuum apart from the very embodied body of Christ it exists to guide. So when I hear preaching against the need for theology or hear embodied theologies dismissed as profane, I can’t help but cringe. God has blessed us with the gift of coming to know Godself, why would we either throw away that opportunity or alternately claim that the gift is meaningless for human existence?

So on the morning of September 11, I arrived at the country club where the retreat was being held and situated myself at the conference table in a room with a panoramic view of the far west Chicago suburbs. We dove right into discussing the submitted articles, but about an hour later when the waitress came in with more coffee and danishes she mentioned that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. We all assumed it was another personal plane incident like the one that had flown into the Empire State Building a few years before and continued working. When we broke for lunch the head editors called the office and then quickly left. The rest of us stayed on and even watched a Bibleman episode for possible review, fairly oblivious to the events of the day.

It wasn’t until I left the country club in the late afternoon and turned on the car radio that I began to have an inkling of the magnitude of the day. I rushed home to my tiny basement apartment which had no TV reception and tried futilely to get online but the dial-up lines were all busy for hours. I recall going out to get the special evening edition of the newspaper and crashing the Wheaton College student lounge (with their TV and cable hookup) just to get some idea of what was happening. The next day I was scheduled to host my church’s table at the Wheaton College ministry fair, which meant I spent the day surrounded by not only college students but also representatives of every church and parachurch ministry in the Wheaton area. It was a surreal day as people attempted to process the shock and openly shared the subsequent anger and hatred that had started to develop. That evening my church held a prayer meeting, and I recall praying that this act of terror would not lead to people lashing out against the innocent as a form of revenge. I was informed afterwards that my prayer was inappropriate. Three weeks later I heard back from Christianity Today informing me that they had a hiring freeze and the position I was applying for was eliminated in favor of restructuring the department.

It’s strange to reflect back on the day the world changed. And a bit eerie to recall that I spent the afternoon of September 11 watching the Bibleman episode about how good Christian students need to stop hanging out with their non-Christian peers because they can be a bad influence on their faith and then spent the next day listening to Evangelical leaders responding to their enemy in hate. I couldn’t have know it at the time, but within those first two days after the attack I caught a glimpse of how the events of Sept. 11th would shape the church over the next ten years. The world has irrevocably changed – despite the ongoing attempts to pretend that that the false security and pride of American exceptionalism is still a viable option in a globalized world. Over this past decade this new world has forced me to abandon a naïve faith that cared only for the state of my own soul, and embrace the fact that I am connected to others as a child of God. Who I am is as much dependant on how I honor the image of God in them as it is on any acts of ritual or piety I engage in.

Perhaps it took 9/11 and the response of fear and hatred I found in the church to push me to finally realize that my faith had to be more about God than myself. I don’t know if I will ever know for sure, but it has assuredly been a decade of change from which there is no going back. And sadly, constantly living in a culture of fear has prevented many in the church from wondering what sort of people we are being changed into. But the questions need to be asked. Are we more Christ-like now? Is God’s Kingdom more visible ten years later? Maybe simply asking those questions this Sept. 11th can help us turn a day that could easily kindle new waves of hatred into one that pushes us outside of our all-consuming selves and back to the sort of people Jesus calls us to be.

Now while I have complained in the past about why imaginative challenges to oppressive orders in our world only seem to happen in speculative fictions, the genre still remains my favorite – often for that very reason. As this recent comparison of women of sci-fi vs. women of prime time shows, there are just so many more substantial ways of being in the world than the status quo generally allows for. Speculative fictions not only present the possibility that the dreams we struggle for now could someday actually be realities, they are also the prophetic voice calling us into that world.

In many ways these fictions take up the task that the church has nearly completely abdicated. Churches don’t use their collective voice and energy to challenge the existence of a world where God’s ways are not allowed to reign. Oh, churches fight for their rights, but rarely are the ones helping build a better world for all. Churches instead help people feel fulfilled, spiritually connected, and generally as comfortable as they can. The church is often nothing more than a support group or vendor of experiences to help us feel like we belong. God is tacked-on to make our experiences feel meaningful, but not to challenge us to subvert the constraints to the sovereignty of the Kingdom of God. So we go to church to feel connected to a tradition, we go to get an “I’m okay, you’re okay” affirmation, we go to hear why we are right and everyone else is wrong, we go to feel safe and secure amidst likeminded people – but rarely do we go to imagine how everything could be different. Dreaming of better world is apparently only for those sci-fi/fantasy geeks.

But it was the role of the biblical prophet to imagine alternative ways of living in this world that reflected the ways of God. As Walter Brueggemann wrote about the prophetic, it is “an assault on public imagination, aimed at showing that the present presumed world is not absolute, but that a thinkable alternative can be imagined, characterized, and lived in. … Thus, the prophetic is an alternative to a positivism that is incapable of alternative, uneasy with critique, and so inclined to conformity.”
Churches are inclined to comfort and emotional well-being, and so therefore to conformity (read a fantastic article about that here). Prophetic voices are dismissed as too political, too extreme, or just a quirk of personality. Heck, in many churches even science-fiction and fantasy are banned because they are too subversive. Churches don’t bother imagining a better world where God’s ways of compassion and justice reign because we are too comfortable with the world we have now. We don’t want a prophet to challenge our comfort, or force us to look outside ourselves, or (heaven-forbid) start caring about the things God cares about.

The church has shut the door on imagination.

Which is why so many of us are desperate for the hopeful imaginings offered in speculative fictions.

I listened incredulous to this conversation (which was loud enough that everyone at the pool couldn’t help but hear) and finally just left because the hate speech was escalating to the point that I would rather not expose my kids to such things. Listening to her rants though made me think of a talk I had just heard about the dangers of acedia. The term is most often associated these days with the sin of sloth (one of the seven deadly sins), but it goes much deeper than mere laziness to describe the state of not caring or being concerned with one’s position or condition in the world. It’s a spiritual apathy that turns one inward instead of outward in a life oriented around loving others. In the talk I heard, it was compared to compassion fatigue – not having the spiritual resources to care anymore. In the talk I heard the advice that was given to combat acedia was to focus on my own relationship with God – which was defined as incorporating rituals of prayer and reflection into my days and disconnecting from the electronic world.

That’s advice I’m hearing a lot in the American church these days. Feeling overwhelmed and far from God? Then do more for yourself – reconnect (or disconnect as needed), get healthy, then you will have something to give back. Another talk I heard recently advised people to never do anything because they think they should. It’s okay not to care about poverty or kids dying in Africa if those aren’t the passions God has given you. God gave us gifts and passions so we should spend our time on only the things that fill us with joy. In other words – my relationship with God is all about me. I as an individual must be happy, healthy, and whole – that is why I was created and that is how I am to live. I must not feel guilty about not serving God or others if such things don’t make me happy, I should only do the things that feel comfortable to me.

I hear this kind of stuff over and over with reminders that the Christian life cannot be just about action and service but must contain contemplation to be balanced. I agree with that, but every time I hear that line I have to ask if there really is such a dire and pressing danger that the church in America is focusing so much on action and service that we are neglecting contemplation? In truth, I see exactly the opposite at work. We are instead so concerned with our own individual spirituality that we rarely if ever engage in serving others. We like hearing talks that tell us to think more about ourselves and not feel guilty about not serving others. At my church recently there even was an audible collective sigh of relief when the pastor explained that while “blessed are the poor” can refer to the physically poor, it also refers to the poor in spirit which includes our own spiritual needs and struggles. It’s far easier to care for ourselves than others.

Maybe most of the church isn’t so caught up in themselves that like the woman I heard at the pool they argue for not helping others at all (although that is a becoming a common response these days), but it seems like the greatest commandments these days are “love myself then love God” instead of “love God, love others.” But in reality, our acedia, our spiritual fatigue, isn’t to blame on us not pampering ourselves with enough quiet times or devotional moments, but on our rampant self-absorption. Constantly hearing that we need to focus more time on ourselves simply adds to the problem. It’s not that I don’t see tremendous value in contemplation or think that we all need to practice self-care, but that perhaps we need to alter the most basic ways we view ourselves in the world. We are not rugged individuals dependant on getting our own relationship with God right; we are members of the body of Christ, existing in relationship with God and others at all times. Our gifts are meant to be shared eucharistically in community. It is a way of living that the philosophy of Ubuntu that Desmond Tutu writes about refers to. It is living not for oneself, but as a member of a community where one is “open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”

The last thing the American church needs are more messages telling us to focus on ourselves. Guilt trips and shoulds don’t help much either for our “it’s all about me” mentality knows how to resist anything that makes demands on our self. It will take a drastic change in mindset to move us past our “I think therefore I don’t give a crap about anyone but myself” operating system. But I think for the church to not only get over this plague of acedia, but to survive, we must start thinking communally. As Ubuntu thought states, “I am because we are.” We belong to God which means we belong to each other – embracing that relational identity may perhaps be our only hope.

As these sorts of conversations go, we had to cover the topics of children and vocation. I told her a bit about my kids including my daughter’s struggle with being by far the smartest kid in her class. I was then informed by the stylist (who used to be a teacher) that I needed to avoid getting her into the Gifted and Talented programs at all costs because the kids in those programs aren’t actually smart they just ask a bunch of really annoying questions and make it difficult for anyone to learn anything. Then after admitting to her (not without reservation) that I was in seminary studying theology, I got to hear her go off on what she hates about church. Basically, she informed me that she can’t stand that churches focus so much on the Bible and studying theology and learning history. In her view all of that was pointless and if a church wasn’t there to help her figure out how God can solve her problems, then she didn’t see the point.

It was a sobering experience sitting in the chair listening to her talk. She’s great at what she does (I love my hair), but it was a still a needed reminder of the perspective of the average American church attendee these days. Just as education is about passing a test and not real learning, church is about getting that magic God-fix and not being wholly transformed. I know that there are all sorts of churches (especially here in Texas) that cater to that sort of mentality, some even perhaps hoping that with bait and switch tactics they can get people to actually follow Christ once they get them in the door. But, listening to her just had me wondering how the church can faithfully minister to people like her.

Is it possible to call people to be living sacrifices when they can’t even be bothered to know who it is they follow? It’s hard enough to talk about turning the other cheek when there are celebratory flash mobs in the streets because we finally killed our enemy. Or to call the church to love their neighbor when people see giving to others as an infringement on their entitlements. But this goes even deeper. It’s a mentality utterly at odds with the entire way of Christ and yet its adherents still claim to be Christian. I struggle with knowing how to respond. I know this issue is nothing new; it’s just difficult to be reminded of its extreme in such a blatant way. But I keep wondering how can the body of Christ ever be healthy when so many of its members are non-functioning?

And in all truth, it’s been a strange season for me. Holy Week as well. I am immersed in the Christian world and yet I think Lady Gaga’s new controversial single “Judas” has prompted more spiritual reflection in me than anything else this week. It’s been amusing to follow the controversy and to read the outrage of those who are incensed that anyone would dare admit to being tempted to love Judas over Jesus. Because, of course, none of the rest of us ever betray Jesus in any way. None of the rest of us lives in the real world full of its tensions and murky conflicts. We all must preserve the façade of who we declare Jesus to be without admitting to the reality of the world we inhabit. Or something like that.

So while Lady Gaga’s song was a well-timed publicity stunt, it is brilliantly proving its own social commentary in how it is being received. A world that hypocritically denies its own hypocrisy is throwing a fit at having that hypocrisy pointed out in such an outrageous manner. The Jesus they claim to follow doesn’t match the lives they live and it is a divided life that they are fine with until someone like Lady Gaga forcefully pulls down the dividing curtain. But as I thought about it, I realized that it is that crazy divided life and disconnect from reality in the church that has defined my experience this Lent.

During this season of spiritual reflection and sacrifice as Christians theoretically prepare ourselves to respond to the sacrifice of Christ by becoming living sacrifices ourselves, the church as I’ve experienced it this year has been hell-bent on defending tooth and claw its own personal construction of Jesus apart from the reality of the world. On one hand there have been the vicious attacks on any who would dare suggest that maybe, just maybe, God’s love is stronger than death and will win in the end. For some, theirconception of a limited God must be defended above relationships or the even the communion of saints. Then on the other hand this season has been defined by large sections of the church campaigning to ensure that our government doesn’t waste our hard-earned tax dollars on programs for the poor and disadvantaged in our nation. ‘Jesus’ must be defended at all costs, but never to the point that he actually crosses that dividing line into our real lives (and budgets). This is how we have been preparing to celebrate the Resurrection this year.

Instead of letting the sacrifice of Christ prompt us to live eucharistically as the body of Christ that shares the abundant blessing and gifts of God with each other, this Lent has been defined by selfish hoardings of God’s love. We limit God’s love to only those who intellectually assent to the same cognitive propositions as we do, and we then hoard God’s freely given blessings as if we’ve done something to deserve them or something. We love Judas and the pieces of silver too much to actually follow the Christ we proclaim – but unlike Lady Gaga, we refuse to admit it.

So this is Easter and what have we done? It hurts my soul to see how the church has spent Lent this year. We are the Body of Christ, why can’t we live like it?

And then I came home and saw the social networks ablaze with the inquisitional fires of the evangelical church jumping at the chance to denounce Rob Bell for his audacity at (supposedly) proclaiming in his upcoming book that in the end love truly does win. From the blog posts dismissing him for his universalism to John Piper’s juvenile tweet of “farewell Rob Bell,” it was hard not to laugh at the absurdity. Here I had spent a weekend having my faith in the church’s ability to actually follow Jesus somewhat restored to only be immediately reminded of the vitriol many in the evangelical world possess for any who don’t buy into their very historically recent and rather scripturally unfounded definition of what it means to be a “biblical Christian.” But what truly got to me was how in how this debate was framed those opposing Bell’s ideas were being forced to claim that in the end God’s love actually doesn’t win. Like Jonah pouting after God didn’t utterly annihilate the people of Nineveh, they are actually defending a system that puts limits on God’s love simply because they want to be the ones with a corner on the truth who get all the goodies in the end. Call it doctrine or dogma or self-centeredness, it simply confounds me that people still continue to argue against the love of God.

What appears to be at the source of the controversy is Bell’s supposed claim that a loving God would never judge anyone to eternity in hell (although since most people –including myself – have not read the book yet, no one really knows if that is what he is actually saying. But check out the YouTube promo video here). So Bell is being called a universalist which in evangelicalese is code for "I'm a heretic who hates the Bible" (or something to that effect). But if Bell is saying what I think he’s saying (and of course I have no idea, but I’m throwing my 2 cents in anyway), he is actually far more in line with traditional orthodox Christian theology than this new-fangled thing called evangelical theology. I’m betting that the position he is asserting is that of a universalist who believes in hell (which is where I’ve found myself landing these days as well).

In this view nothing – not human doctrine nor prejudice – can stand in the way of a God seeking to reconcile all things to godself. God created humans to be in constant relationship with godself – growing ever closer to mirroring the image of God we were created in. We instead chose to attempt to be godlike without God, walking away from God in the process. But God did not reject us. God could have withdrawn from us, casting us away from divine perfection – annihilating us in the process since by nature we could not exist apart from that which we were meant to be in eternal relationship with. Instead God was merciful and simple let us walk away. But like Dante so beautifully portrayed in his Divine Comedy, even as the furthest reaches of hell are frozen over as Satan flaps his wings in a furious attempt to fly further and further away from God, he is still not out of the reach of God’s love. Hell exists, but it is a place of our own creation as we try to flee from God asserting “our will be done” instead of “thy will be done.” God does not condemn us to hell, or cast us out of his presence (which would destroy us); instead God pursues us out of Eden and even into hell, offering the gift of blessing and redemption. We are meant by nature to be in relation with God, created in God’s image our purpose is to bear that image and continually reflect it back to God through our acts of worship in this world. Despite our attempts to flee to the furthest reaches of hell, God still reaches out to us because if we still exist, we are still image-bearers, and God seeks after us to restore the racked icons of our person to godself.

When the historical church couldn’t understand how a person could be forgiven and reconciled to God they declared them an anathema which means that their fate be cast up to a higher court for although it was beyond them how they that person is in Christ he or she could never be beyond God. And if in the consummation of creation all things will be reconciled to God, then unless we want to assert that God rejects and therefore annihilates those who flee from him, we have to believe that in the end God’s relentless pursuit of his beloved results in the actual redemption and reconciliation of all things. In the end all that belongs to God, all that was created in the image of God, will turn away from its rebellion and be reconciled unto God. In short, in the end love wins. Love is not fettered by temporal constraints, or extended only to the workers that arrived early in the day. We were created to be in relationship with God, and it is the return to that state of theosis where we can participate in the covenant where we are blessed to extend God’s blessing to the world that God desires for us.

I saw a glimmer of a church that got that with the Salvation Army this past weekend – a group of passionate followers of Jesus taking seriously the call to end the injustices that stand in the way of the blessing and reconciling of the world. They know, in their own peculiar way, that love wins. So instead of trying to put limits on God’s ability to redeem creation and pouting about wanting to be the only ones the divine lover chooses to pursue, maybe we can start acting as if God really does rule the universe. Maybe we can accept the gift of God's love and instead of selfishly keeping it all to ourselves we live into our identity as blessed icons and give that love away.

I want to post this list to see what other options the readers here might have to contribute. The point of this is not to argue which view is right, but merely to list what views are held by church. Also, I’m writing as someone who has not personally experienced the pain and struggle that typify many LGBT peoples experience with the church. I don’t want to ignore that pain or that in discussing churches’ views I am discussing things that have affected the lives of real people, but I’m only trying here to give a snapshot of what I’ve seen. I’ve also left out the views on the extremes – i.e. the Fred Phelps hatred and the anything goes tolerance – to focus on views that I’ve had experience with in churches. So here’s my 2 cents…

Group 1. This group thinks all forms being gay are a willful choice to sin against God and the Bible. While they might not use hate speech like Fred Phelps, they generally won’t allow gay people to attend their churches. If they do, they insist that they repent and seek a cure for their sinful choices. Often this group tries to hide the existence of gay people in culture as well. They fight libraries that have children’s books about two mommies, they see a gay agenda in the media if a gay person shows up on a TV show, and oppose gay marriage as an endorsement of sin. If they know anyone who is actually gay, it is generally only someone who has been treated of their problem and now asks for continual prayer that they won’t fall back into sin. To them the Bible is clear and easy to understand in its condemnation of same-sex relationships since (in their view) people don’t interpret the Bible, it simple speak the truth for itself.

Group 2. The second group would still say that being gay is unbiblical/sinful, but they would be more nuanced and loving in that assertion. They may or may not see being gay as a choice, but they will generally admit that it is something that goes so deep in a person that they cannot willfully choose not to be gay. So while they might say that being gay may not be a choice (and therefore not wrong in and of itself), for them acting on gay desires is always wrong. So while they love and accept people who have the condition, they condemn gay sex, gay relationships, and gay marriage. So there are churches where people who openly identify as gay can attend (although they are always known by that label) and they might even be allowed to serve in some non-leadership positions in the church (but generally never with children). Like hetero singles, they are constantly encouraged to keep pure but have the harder struggle since they know that they will never be allowed to find love without slipping into sin and being rejected by their church community. There is generally much outreach in these communities to get practicing gays to join this “accepting” community where they have support to stop practicing.

Group 3. The third group generally believes that being gay is a condition and not a choice. They may or may not believe that practicing being gay is biblical or not, but what they believe about that matters less than the fact that they know they need to be loving and accepting of all people. Gay people are God’s beloved just as hetero people are, so the church should love them just as God loves them. The discussions here are generally about rights and justice. The language is that all people should be granted the same benefits of civil society no matter who they love. So gay marriage is supported and any discrimination whatsoever is fought against and condemned. Some in this group would still speak against gay promiscuity, just as they would hetero promiscuity (which is part of why they support gay marriage). They understand that the Bible has been used in hurtful and hateful ways against gay people in the past and they want to move past that. They might have read some alternative interpretations of the few Bible passages that seem to condemn same-sex relationships, but they may or may not be convinced by either interpretation. Since they generally know and are friends with gay people, they are okay with the ambiguity of biblical interpretation because they see being in loving relationship as being far more important than dogma.

Group 4. In the fourth group I would place those that have devoted the time to digging through scripture and history and have decided that there is nothing unbiblical about same-sex relationships. Their decision generally isn’t based on cultural-pressure or a sense of tolerance, but the conclusion of a serious wrestling with scripture. They are often told that they are unbiblical and just want to support sin, but often they have very strong doctrine based on the Bible and Christian tradition (although it often is more of an ancient or postmodern interpretation than modern evangelical). They will be advocates for the gay community when needed, but since their theology doesn’t see gay people as other, they often don’t see people first by that label. They often have a hard time finding churches where they fit in as many churches either still see gay people as somehow inferior or make the entire church’s identity about including gay people. While many people in this group devote themselves to wrestling honestly with the whole of scripture, there is a portion who knew they had to try to figure out the gay issue in scripture and so that is the extent of their wrestling. So while they have intellectually resolved that scripture does not condemn gay people, they still might hold to “biblical” ideas of sexism and racism because they were taught such things when they were younger. So it is hard to classify this group as liberal or tolerant, they are simply those who are willing to wrestle with scripture and conclude that there is no need to condemn.

Do these groups seem accurate? What other perspectives would you add?