You can’t do that!
CONSIDER SUPPORTING THE WORK OF LGBTQIA+ FAITH ACCESS. ALL OF MY WORK IS AVAILABLE FOR FREE, BUT YOUR GENEROSITY MAKES IT POSSIBLE TO CONTINUE. THANKS!In the early two thousands I worked at a fundamental christian mega-church. The church was one of those concert vibe churches with lights and smoke. I kid you not, the volume of the music on sunday morning would reach 110 decibels consistently. On the surface the church seemed like a progressive environment and seemed to be safe for people to bring honestly. The coffee was always hot in the church cafe, the preaching was communicated with excellence. The pastor was a great speaker and could make an audience respond to his messages. Honestly the music sounded better than most concerts you ever went to. The investment in music equipment was high.
Over time I began to notice there was a strange subcurrent that was going on within the church. It was not until later I discovered it was not isolated to our church alone. The evangelical christian world at the time had some unwritten rules that I was not aware would be the norm. Being new to church made these unwritten rules (which were not presented to me when I became a christian) a little bit odd for me to have to adapt to. We had to sign morality covenants to be part of the church staff or volunteer in the church. I will never forget the piece of paper we had to go over with the pastor stating that we would abstain from drinking alcohol. The pastors and the team viciously defended this idea saying that they had never seen alcohol consumption end well for anyone. So they forced the entire staff to follow this non-drinking moral code. Oddly enough this moral code was not isolated just to the church I worked at. I knew many pastors at the time who had to sign such agreements with their Ministries in order to continue working there.
Here is the deal. I started to notice over the next 10 years that i worked for this church that the moral culture began to change. I started hearing more and more pastors who would have Bible studies with beer. Pastors began meeting with congregants at bars and started swearing casually. When I first started as a pastor those two things would have absolutely made you fireable. This type of behavior in evangelical christianity was in the early two-thousands interpreted as sinful and deviant behavior. So what was going on? Was Humanity becoming more depraved? We're pastors not really Christians anymore? The intense stances that we took to look like good Christians seemed to be changing before our eyes.
We all are born with a god-given conscience. Our consciousness is given to us by God, and we need to ask ourselves is it okay for our conscience to be informed? I do not believe that pastors and Christians were becoming less Christian over time. I think that we began to wake up to the fact that the things we used to hold as moral we're more acceptable because of cultural shifts. The more we became educated and engaged with different things we learned how to navigate those cultural shifts wisely. Just like drinking to be a big deal when I was a young pastor, The church has a long history of things that it used to hold as moral and has shifted as Consciousness became informed.
For example, there was a period in the church where minorities were not welcome to worship with white people. The church woke up to the fact that this was wrong. Segregation was no longer the measure of your true Christianity. Over time the church began to allow women to speak from pulpits and to be pastors. This was a long time after women were allowed to start wearing pants in church. There was a culture in the church and was beginning to phase out when I was a young pastor that said if you listen to non-Christian music you were opening your heart to danger. Still today there are denominations that demonized dancing but that has become less and less of a moral problem as somebody dances and the cutting of hair for women is now acceptable.
So what is to say that some of the things we hold now as covenants with one another? Will we become more informed as time goes on? I believe that sexual orientation and gender identity are next on the list of the things that Christians will become conscious of. LGBTQIA+ Inclusion and rights must be next on the churches awakening.
50 years from now we need to be ready to understand that some of the things christianity calls wrong, will probably just be normal. being queer within a church in 50 years may not be a disqualifier. If you ask me as somebody who was fired from their job for coming out as trans, this is a good thing. We do not need to hold people to old consciousness any longer. We need to become more informed and become more inclusive of all people. Let's educate ourselves on what is and is not a big deal to God.
DO YOU NEED SUPPORT. MESSAGE ME AND LET’S CHAT
