Can Evangelical churches afford to be LGBT-affirming?

Short answer: No.

Is it possible for Evangelical churches to throw in the towel on the “gay wars” and be ‘affirming’? Maybe not. Consider EastLake Church in Seattle.

It was founded in 2005 by Ryan T. Meeks and his wife, and became a megachurch with multiple locations. In 2014, a staffer confided in Meeks that she was afraid of being fired if seen dating a woman.

“I realized I had been a coward for too long,” Meeks recalled.

He announced the church would be LGBT-affirming.

That was news. Meeks’ church was the first large Evangelical church to make such a move. A January 15, 2015 cover story for Time magazine profiled the church:

“For the past six months, the church has played a short welcome video at the start of every service that includes the line ‘Gay or straight here, there’s no hate here.’ One of the pastors now sends a wedding gift on behalf of the church every time she hears that gay congregants are getting married. The church’s first gay wedding took place last month.”

Meeks was quoted:

“I refuse to go to a church where my friends who are gay are excluded from Communion or a marriage covenant or the beauty of Christian community,” he says. “It is a move of integrity for me—the message of Jesus was a message of wide inclusivity.”

His congregation began to leave.

Within a few weeks after the initial announcement, offerings had tanked, and the church was laying off staff—including the lesbian staffer.

A 2019 interview with Glenn T. Stanton, the Evangelical author of The Myth of the Dying Church, comments: “I mean it’s like Ryan Meeks handed out an invitation to his parishioners to please go someplace else. And that’s exactly what they did.”

Or was it more in the way it was done? In the comments here, Jack Huber has an eyewitness account:

“While their decision to becoming affirming was exactly the right thing, was long overdue, and should be a model for other Evangelical churches, it had the effect of becoming all they were about, almost to the detriment of their other ministries. Meeks was an outstanding pastor with a good heart but all this was hard on him and he managed it as best he could as long as he could. I felt for him. His pain was on full display.”

By 2017, Meeks was a star in liberal media.

He was critiquing now not just the gay issue, but the Bible itself, and not always in delicate language. The Evangelical world watched in shock. There was a broad feeling that Meeks had ended his career as pastor.

An Upworthy video preserves his discourse of the time.

“‘I don’t care if the Bible says, “Gay people suck,” he declared. ‘The Bible is pro-slavery, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. It doesn’t have a very great view of women leading and teaching. I have lots of things I disagree with about the Bible.’”

Meeks was becoming more ‘New Age’ all the time.

In that sense, the story isn’t even really about the LGBT issue, or women, or anything in particular. It was Evangelicalism itself.

Meeks recalls trying to get the church to change with him. As he tells the church’s history:

“Over time, EastLake evolved into more of a quirky interfaith (and non-faith) spiritual community with a deep appreciation for all great teachers of Love and Self-Actualization.”

Within months, “beat up and exhausted,” he was in therapy.

Or as he puts it, he was pursuing other “healing modalities to cope with all the turbulence, betrayals, and angry people we dealt with as a result.”

As his church imploded, he ended up, as he says, a “washed-up ex-mega church pastor-turned-mystic humanist psychonaut.”

He gave a final sermon, saying that church is “an incendiary idea” that should be “a laboratory for unorthodox and heretical ideas,” a process that leads to “reimagining the boundaries of what God means…”

A case could be made that Meeks didn’t do anyone any favors.

He went too big too fast, the argument might go, and created an example of failure. When Evangelical pastors think about the LGBT issue, they will have EastLake Church in mind.

Many Evangelicals, including pastors, very likely have private ideas in stark contrast to their public commentary. But Evangelical pastors know they face ruin if they budge from the positions they’re “supposed” to hold. They and their staffs will be out of work, and all the work they do will be over.

It just doesn’t “feel” Christian to not hate people.

To be a ‘Christian’, in the Evangelical way, seems easy.

You go to church. You absorb some Bible trivia. You smile and you give money. You talk politics. You talk religion. You think of your family as the center of your life’s meaning, and you go to church to affirm that idea.

If you’re straight, Evangelicalism has an incredible idea. It tells you that being straight is the divine state. You don’t have to do anything except control that sex life. You’re godly just in the nature of the desire you hold in your sexual existence. And that’s Christian enough.

If the alternative is “mystic humanist psychonaut”—then Evangelicals are just going to leave.

At Evangelical church, ‘normal’ is divine.

The idea of investigating “modalities,” doing inner work, interrogating the Bible, deconstructing, shrugging off old teaching and old boundaries—doesn’t even feel like religion. 🔶