The Change at Bethany

•At Selah tonight at 7p we’ll pray for the salvation of those close to us who don’t yet know God. We’ll also continue to pray for prayer. Most of us are bad at prayer, but we would all like to do better. Jesus says we don’t have because we don’t ask. Tonight we’ll ask.

• Under pressure from local government, Bethany Christian Services, the largest evangelical adoption and foster-care agency in the U.S., is now placing children with openly gay and transgender couples. (In the past, Bethany referred gay and transgender couples to other agencies, which remains an option for them.) That change comes as a result of gradually-emerging shifts in the culture, of which Bethany’s policy-change is a symptom not a cause. This note is way too brief to speak in detail to causes, but here are a couple thoughts, beginning with a little background.

• In Christian orthodoxy, from the ancient Church to the present, the people of God worshiped him as wise, holy, and just. “He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he” (Deut 32:4). From this view of the character of God came a moral clarity that distinguished sharply between the Creator and his creatures. “They have dealt corruptly with him; they are no longer his children because they are blemished; they are a crooked and twisted generation. Do you thus repay the Lord, you foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you?” (vv.5-6). You could say that worship happens — not to mention honor, respect, submission, and obedience — in the space created by this understanding of God relative to his creatures here in Deuteronomy and elsewhere.

• This has all changed (as at other times in history). Throughout my lifetime, even in the Church, the stature of God has been gradually diminished and the stature of his creatures gradually elevated. One result of this is people, especially in the generation after mine, would rather be in conflict with God than with other people. Because of what David Wells called the “weightlessness of God,” open conflict with people is regarded as unchristian, while open conflict with the word of God is accepted (often explained through reinterpretation or questions of legitimacy deriving from authorship, canonicity, enculturation and so on). Whatever the case, when God says to bear his image is to be created either male or female (Gen 1:27); or that “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Lev 18:22), his words are regarded as non-essential, enculturated, misinterpreted, of questionable authorship, or derived from questionable manuscripts.

• It’s the perfect moment for Bethany to avoid government sanctions in the name of Christian compassion, while dismissing whatever passages might conflict with their decision as unnecessarily combative and unkind.

• The consequences of all this are many and ongoing, but here’s one crucial loss that I now see everywhere: Christians are losing the determination to simply close their eyes, grit their teeth, and do the right thing. We are a generation of equivocators. We love the supposed freedom of vague ambiguity. We shilly-shally. We prevaricate. We quibble. We no longer see that moment where we say to ourselves: “this is going to be ugly and painful, but I know it’s the right thing to do.” The English Puritans used to say, “Duties belong to us; consequences belong to the Lord.” We tend to be managers of consequences. All of us, not just the people at Bethany, spend way too much time trying to curate outcomes. Better to do the right thing and leave the outcome to God. He never promised life would be easy anyway.

• Here’s an example. Interestingly, at just the time Bethany was facing government pressure to drop their biblically-based policy regarding gay and transgender couples, the same pressure was brought to bear on Roman Catholic organizations engaged in the same ministry. The difference is, the Catholics didn’t blink. Some of those organizations brought lawsuits and have since been granted protection by the courts. And though their cases are still in the courts, the point is that it wasn’t necessary to just give up the fight. Bethany could have pushed back. They didn’t have to be belligerent, they didn’t have to abandon love and humility, but they needed to stand their ground. There is never a necessary conflict between doing what’s right and doing what’s compassionate.