As a 26-year-old, I feel a lot like others within my generation. I have deep sympathy for my friends who are gay. They often suffer as societal pariahs at the hands of misinformed Christians who believe that gays have chosen their sexual orientation. Though I unashamedly believe that God desires a better path for their lives, I also understand that my obligation to love them is not dependent upon their capitulation to a particular belief system.
When I hear younger evangelicals address homosexuality, they speak with compassion, sympathy and love that have been uncommon among the Falwells and Robertsons. But this change in tone isn’t surprising because rising generations are twice as likely to be in close community with someone who is gay. It is a lot easier to fight a faceless “agenda” than it is to war against a friend.
Now is the time for those who bear the name of Jesus Christ to stop merely talking about love and start showing love to our gay and lesbian neighbors. It must be concrete and tangible. It must move beyond cheap rhetoric. We cannot pick and choose which neighbors we will love. We must love them all.
RE: “Now is the time for those who bear the name of Jesus Christ to stop merely talking about love and start showing love to our gay and lesbian neighbors. It must be concrete and tangible. It must move beyond cheap rhetoric. We cannot pick and choose which neighbors we will love. We must love them all.”
Right — because until folks like 26 year old Jonathan Merritt came along, there wasn’t anything but “cheap rhetoric” about loving gay people, and elderly Christians didn’t show love “to our gay and lesbian neighbors.”
What a smug, self-congratulatory article.
Years ago, back in the early 1990s a group of “elderly” [now doddering] parishioners at my parish bought, restored, and developed a house in primo real estate territory to volunteer to serve and house those dying with AIDS, the vast majority of which were gays. But hey — that was just the cheap rhetoric of the Baby Boomers who didn’t know any gays in a mid-sized Southern town.
Just a little message for Mr. Merritt.
No matter how much you talk about “loving the sinner” and no matter how much you “do” for the gays, the progressive gay activists will never ever ever be satisfied with your “progressive” attitude and the “modern inclusive nature of young evangelicals.” You can take that to the bank.
Until you repudiate any notion of same-gender sexual activity being damaging to 1) self, 2) other, and 3) society — not to mention Biblically prohibited — you’ll always be right up there with Phelps, sir, in the eyes of the gay activists.
Good luck to you.
Sarah,
If that’s all Merritt had to do to win favor with gay activists, he’d have it easy. Fact is, until he shouts from the rooftops how healthy and natural all things gay are, until he insists that it’s a holy thing deserving of the church’s blessing, and until he teaches his children – and advocates the teaching of OTHER people’s children – that it’s a perfectly desirable lifestyle for them to “explore” and preferably adopt, he’ll always be right up there with Phelps.
He’s going to need more than luck.
Sarah and Greg, so true! The title is Merritt’s first misnomer. Gay activist do not believe they are “sinners” for their homosexual activity. So Merritt is misinformed from the beginning..