Who says Reformed Pastors can’t engage in theatrics?
Last week PCA Pastor Greg Johnson, who recently published his gay coming out article with the help of Christianity Today, put on quite a performance for his applauding brothers at General Assembly. Pastor Johnson delivered a speech full of victimology, identity politics, and blame with the aim of moving the crowd to vote down the Nashville Statement.
The Nashville Statement delivers a fairly lukewarm argument in favor of gender distinctions. It is a sign of how low the Revoice crowd has sunk that parts of this document alarm them.
As Tom Littleton has reported, Pastor Greg Johnson did find himself freed from enough shame and sorrow to meet up with fellow Revoice enthusiasts for a #pcaga gathering.
A PCA gay pastor hotel party?
Making “Gay Christian” History
Several sites have posted videos of Johnson’s maudlin speech. We thought it important here to document his very words. Make no mistake, these words are history in the making.
The PCA broke off from the PCUSA because of this same homosexual agenda only 30 years ago. What a tragic loss to see a once Biblically faithful denomination taken in by the sort of spiel that follows:
“I was raised by an atheist father in an atheist home and I shared that atheism. I knew I was gay at age 11. I was in a Baptist fellowship hall at a cousin’s wedding when I realized, this was in the summer of 1984, that I could not take my eyes off one of the groomsmen.
“I remember feeling a massive weight of shame, and then when I noticed that everyone was staring at me, I felt fear. It was that same day at that same wedding that someone explained that the groomsman had a brother that the family had disowned because he was gay and they were Christians and they couldn’t tolerate somebody that disgusting. And that was the day I realized that Christians hate gay people.”
…No misrepresented straw-men in this history, to be sure…
“By God’s grace he pursued me and in college I became a Christian, I trusted Jesus, was baptized in a PCA church at age 20 and the next year I enrolled in Covenant Seminary, not because I had any interest in going into ministry, that took another decade, but because I had to catch up and make up for lost time.
“And I had read every single book that RC Sproul had ever written and purchased all of his VHS tapes and memorized them all. But I was still hungry.”
…That would be literally hundreds of hours of detailed audio theological discourse. That is a dubious claim for anyone, especially a man who thinks so little of Scripture and theology he includes none in his speech…
“Um, at this point I’m 46 years old, and, uh, still same sex attracted. My orientation has not changed and for those who are exclusively same sex attracted who are men, we don’t even know for certain, I’ve talked to every head of every ministry and I can’t find a single instance of Same Sex Attraction going away.”
…We know of several excellent ministries led by men thoroughly converted and gloriously freed from sodomy that Pastor Greg Johnson overlooked…
“And so where that leaves me at age 46 is I’m a 46 year old virgin who has never so much as held hands, I’ve never had a romantic embrace, I have never hugged romantically, uh, I have had a history of struggle with pornography of which I’ve been 15 years sober, uh, I’m mortifying my flesh every single day. And yet, that has a cost. Jesus has washed me. And yet I’m in the fight for my life every single day, and I don’t regret that one bit, but the cost is this: the cost is that there are no family photographs on my mantle, because I have no family.
The cost is I know what it’s like to sit at home alone in my apartment on Christmas Day because I have no family. The cost is that I may need to be buried someday, not cremated because there will be no one to receive my ashes because my line ends with me, and I don’t regret that, I accept that as a calling to suffer for the sake of Jesus who said that those who give up fathers and mothers, husbands, wives and children, brothers and sisters for my sake will receive 100 times more.”
Greg Johnson isn’t forgoing a family for the sake of Jesus’ kingdom.
Rather, he doesn’t like the way Jesus has ordained families to be in His kingdom since the garden.
God has said in Genesis 2:18 “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper FIT for him.”
God calls Pastor Johnson to repentance for complete transformation (See I Corinthians 6:9-11).
Johnson is shaking his fist against God’s word and creation….
“And I love Jesus. And I want to serve him, and I’m willing to suffer for him because it’s that beautiful. And yet, friends, when I read article 7 of the Nashville Statement, it hurt. Because article seven said that it is a sin to adopt a homosexual self-conception.
“And we don’t do that for any other people group.”
… “People group?”…
“We don’t tell alcoholics its a sin to conceive of yourself as an alcoholic because drunkenness is a sin, its the beginning of learning to manage your alcoholism and bring it under obedience to Christ so it doesn’t define you.
“We don’t tell paraplegics that they should conceive of themselves as able-bodied because that’s ideal.
“We wouldn’t tell an infertile woman she needs to conceive of herself as fertile and she’s unbelieving to conceive of herself as infertile because that’s not God’s design.”
…Notice how freely Pastor Greg Johnson groups his chosen sin with medical conditions…
“Friends, I’m fallen; I’m broken, and Jesus has washed me and saved me. My prayer is that you would consider the damage that will be done to people like me when article seven says that it’s a sin to acknowledge our brokenness and the shame and suffering and sorrow that goes with that.
“My prayer is that we will instead go through the hard work of coming up with something Biblically nuanced…”
…Although there is no Bible in this speech…
“Theologically sophisticated. Missionally sensitive and pastorally sensitive.
“That people like me don’t have to go through all of the suffering I have had because their pastors will become well equipped to love people who are broken and same sex attracted and waiting for glory.
“Thank you brothers.”
At this point, the assembly broke into a round of spontaneous applause. There will be no applause in heaven for a speech like that.
