ACBC And LBGTQ
How often have you found yourself in a deep discussion with someone only to find out later that you were talking about two different things? You’re talking socks on the floor and your husband is talking about who gets to be in charge of the household. “Wait, we were talking about socks, how did we end up talking about who gets to be in charge?”
This is the kind of thing that happened a couple of years ago when protesters did their thing at the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors’ (ACBC) conference on homosexuality in Louisville, Kentucky (held at Southern Seminary) in 2015.
The conference was about how to help people who are trapped in their sin of homosexuality to be freed from the sin and to become like Christ (who is a heterosexual man). The protesters started talking about how much they hated reparative therapy. And the counselor leaders, Heath Lambert and Al Mohler, responded by saying that they didn’t use reparative therapy and didn’t like reparative therapy, so there’s no trouble here, keep moving along, what’s the problem?
What the counselor people didn’t appear to notice was that the protesters were talking about change, not reparative therapy. They didn’t know the difference. They thought any change was due to reparative therapy. The counselor folks thought the topic they were discussing was a psychological method for change. The protesters were talking about whether a person could change. The ACBC folks were talking about how to help a person change See? Socks and headship.
If either side in the conversation had known about what the other side was thinking, the conversation might have gone a very different direction. For example, the protesters might have complained about the ACBC folks trying to help homosexuals change from identifying as homosexual to being heterosexual, they might have worded the complaint differently and the ACBC folks would have given a very different answer.
On the other hand, if the ACBC folks had realized that the discussion wasn’t about a psychological construct, but rather about change into Christ’s likeness, they would have given an answer more like this, “Homosexual desires, homosexual behaviors, and homosexuality in all of its expressions, is expressly condemned in the Bible. Along with this, anyone who participates, in homosexuality in any form is condemned as well. Homosexuality is an evil, demonic, and horrible state of existence. The Bible tells us that anyone held in the bondage of this, or any other sin, can be forgiven, cleansed, changed, set free, and transformed into the likeness of Jesus. So, come to Jesus and he will deliver you from the condemnation wrought by this horrible sinful state.”
Instead, the answer they did give, based on the discussion they thought they were having, opened the door to all sorts of other sinful thoughts and ideas. For example, many people, even Christians, thought/think that they were saying that it is okay for a Christian to have or harbor homosexual desires; that the Bible calls us to not behave in a sinful way, but thinking this way is okay; that it is okay to consider yourself a homosexual Christian. What Heath Lambert said was, “We don’t call people to embrace heterosexuality, we call people to embrace Christian faithfulness.” Because it does look like he was leaving these options open, I asked him about this later. He said something like, “Jesus was a heterosexual so to become like Christ is to become heterosexual.” You can see how his original statement might lead some to think he wasn’t taking a hard stand on the issue. But it makes perfect sense if the context of his discussion was about reparative therapy, not Christian transformation.
There’s another area of this discussion that needs to be mentioned. In Biblical counseling, we often hear someone’s presenting problem and immediately know that that isn’t really the problem or at least isn’t the source of the problem. If the person learned to walk with God, he would love his wife better, and she wouldn’t keep throwing his socks out the window. The issue is headship, but it isn’t solved by him getting big and demanding that his wife let him be the leader, it solved by him bowing his knee to King Jesus and imitating him. But this requires a change of heart. So, as counselors, we deal with the presenting problem, “smile at your wife, and go out and pick up your socks with a happy gait” and we deal with the heart problem (imitate Jesus and let him change you as you do).
With this in mind, the ACBC folks should have looked past the presenting problem (reparative therapy) to the heart problem (the protesters are trying to destroy humanity by promoting sin in every area of life). They should have jumped right to the real point and stood up for righteousness and holiness. They should have made a short statement about reparative therapy and then gone on to express the Freedom found in the shed blood of Christ. They had a perfect opportunity to preach the Gospel to the protesters and everyone else who was watching from the cheap seats. They missed a great opportunity.
They also created a couple of messy situations. Here are a couple that I know of, Tim Baily wrote a book called The Grace of Shame. You can find it here. The point of the book is really good but is marred by the continual attacks it makes on Heath Lambert and Al Mohler. Tim is convinced, because of these soft statements, that their understanding is that homosexuals cannot change. If Heath and Al would make it clear that they believe that people can confess their sin and repent of their sin and really be changed at the heart level into the image of Christ’s likeness which is totally heterosexual, things would be better on that front. Tim could rewrite his book and make it into a book I, at least, would be thrilled to pass along.
Second, Doug Wilson recently wrote a blog post where he says Heath and Al didn’t see the play coming, and by their answers made things worse for the whole church. For example, Al appeared to be capitulating on the assertion that homosexuality is an inborn orientation, which means that a homosexual person isn’t sinning, they simply are. This would leave the category of homosexuality completely outside of the Bible except for those pesky passages that “seem” to condemn it. The problem with this, besides that it can’t be what Al means because it is completely unbiblical, is that this can be said about any and every sin. Anyone who loves their sin can identify with that sin and say that it is their orientation and they are who they are. I’m a bank robber. I am a child beater. I am envious. I am a hater. And on and on.
Third and very related to the previous situation, their responses give the folks who created the Revoice conferences an open door to preach their vile sinfulness. If a person can’t change; if they are always going to be a homosexual; if they will be accepted by God when they are living in their sin of homosexuality, then why can’t everyone live in whatever sin they are in and go to Heaven when they die? If this is true, people can’t change, we’re stuck with what God has created us to be, we might as well leave the counseling business altogether. We may as well say, “eat, drink and be merry (Lk 12:20) and go happily off to Hell.
Now here’s the reason I wrote this post: if I am right in my understanding about the ACBC folks and Al Mohler, they can rethink how they handled things back in 2015 and make a couple of public statements similar to what I suggested above that they should have done. Or they could read Doug’s blog post and follow his counsel and go back and say something like this:
1. “For theological reasons, we do not support secular forms of reparative therapy, but we absolutely believe that secular reparative therapists ought to be free to conduct their business in all fifty states. When it comes to their right to operate, we support reparative therapists absolutely.” 2. “We really do not believe that secular reparative therapy goes far enough. They are right to treat homosexual desires as unnatural and undesirable, and so far we agree with them, but we also believe that it is essential that such desires be identified as sinful and offensive to a holy God, and not just inconvenient to the patient. Repentance is therefore an essential part of the restoration process.”
I could be all wrong in my understanding of what happened back then, there could be other reasons for their responses, but Heath and Al and (since Heath is no longer executive director of ACBC) ACBC can still make the public statements now that would affect lots of folks in great ways.
I hope this helps.