Episode 503 - Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosex

Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, songwriter, author, worship leader, an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene, and most recently, a hospital chaplain. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss things that are on my mind. The Voices in My Head. Music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more are all on the table as I discuss them here with friends and colleagues and sometimes just by myself, processing what I'm learning in the moment. Make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes, tweeting to me @RickLeeJames on Twitter, and by joining my mailing list at rickleejames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you are interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the loudest voices in my head, which is ironic because he was such a quiet person. Also, if you do want to be notified about all of my latest releases, not just this podcast, sign up for email notifications on my Substack page found at rickleejames.substack.com. Com. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so let's get to the latest episode of Voices in My Head, the Rick Lee James podcast.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I am so grateful that all of you are here listening this week. My guest this week is Greg Johnson. Greg is the lead pastor of Historic Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, where he has served on the pastoral staff since 2003. He holds a PhD in historical theology with a concentration in American religion from St. Louis University and an M.Div. from Covenant Theological Seminary. His newest book, which we will be discussing today, is Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church's Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality. Greg Johnson, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Oh, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Well, Greg, it's, it's a real honor to get to talk to you. I guess it was last— gosh, was it last spring or summer? Uh, we were at a conference together where I was leading music and, and you spoke at Nazarene Theological Seminary, and it was the Love Wins Conference. And I just, I found your presentation to be so stirring. It was so informative. And yet, as you discussed things that you discuss in your book, which we'll talk about in a few moments, you had such a way of not only just kind of recounting historical facts of things that had happened with the church and its relationship to the LGBT community and, and ways that they had tried to cure homosexuality, but you had a way of speaking about it which really was not casting judgment either on either side. It was from a perspective of people who really were trying to follow Christ, and they're trying their very best, uh, to navigate this thing that the church has not always been very good at navigating. So I'm so glad to have a chance to, to just talk a little bit more in depth with you today about this. I wonder if we could start today by you just sharing some of your backstory with us, some of your faith journey, and, and just kind of where you have, have come a bit to where you are today.

Yeah, I'm happy to. Um, you know, I was not raised in a church or synagogue. Um, you know, I was raised atheist. My dad was a senior executive in the federal government, grew up in suburban D.C., very secular, very happy home life, and, uh, realized in— I think it's 1984, uh, when I was 11 years old, I realized I was gay. I was actually at a at a wedding reception in an Independent Baptist Fellowship Hall and realized I couldn't, couldn't take my eyes off of one of the groomsmen. And then I realized that, you know, at that point, that previous summer, I'd realized things I'd been thinking about and lusting after. And, and then I remember all these people seemed to be noticing me staring at this guy. And so I was, you know, And the groom, I had heard just earlier that day that the groom had a brother who the family had kind of disowned because he was gay and they were Christians and they weren't going to have something like that in their house. And so the same day I'm realizing I'm gay, I'm also hearing that evidently Christians hate people like me. And so it was like, you know, as an atheist kid, being in a Baptist church was itself just terrifying. Then realizing that about myself, it was a pretty traumatic thing. And of course, this was the 1980s, this was the height of the AIDS crisis. This is when I could look at people a little older than me who were getting sick and dying. Kids would make jokes about AIDS victims. And, and, you know, I just left me feeling a huge amount of shame and fear. And, you know, I was very much decided even early on that I would probably never be sexually active. But that I would just kind of keep this part of my life private. And, you know, be an architect someday in Northwest Washington, DC with a house with a picket fence and a business. And, and then in, in high school, I started really questioning my atheism. I doubted my atheism the way Christians doubt their Christianity. And, and I just started asking questions about, is there such a thing as evil? Is it really wrong to kill people? You know, is the Nazi Holocaust really objectively evil? Because once you say that it is objectively evil, not just that it's bad for the human race or inconvenient or we don't like it, but once you say it's objectively evil, then you've got to have a ground of goodness, an objective ground of goodness against which everything else is evaluated. And I didn't realize it at the time, but I was kind of slipping down the slippery slope of the moral argument for the existence of God. And by the time I got to college, I was confident there had to be a God, but I just did not know anything about God or about Jesus. Um, I didn't know if Christianity was the answer, though I was leaning toward that because I had seen Christians loving people self-sacrificially, and, and that was something I wasn't used to seeing. Um, but, uh, through the ministry of Cru, what at the time was Campus Crusade for Christ, undergraduate architecture student, University of Virginia, 1990. I heard the gospel for the first time, and over about the next month or so, um, went from being the gay kid trying to bargain with God that I'll get better and then he can accept me to instead being comfortable being the big shameful sinner loved by Jesus. And for the first time in my life, I wasn't begging God to forgive me, I was, I was thanking him for forgiving me. I was thanking Jesus for atoning for all my sin and washing me and clothing me in his righteousness and bringing me into the family of God as an adopted son and little brother. And so, uh, um, it was, it was really amazing. And, you know, no one ever had to tell me that, that I was a sinner. You know, the Holy Spirit showed me that. And by the time I heard the gospel, it was really, really good news. And I just wanted— for me, I've never looked back. You know, I'm 50 years old now, and at this point I'm I'm still a virgin. I've never so much as held hands. I kissed a girl once in high school and then didn't like it, you know, because it was wet and humid and awkward and way too— but, you know, and, and, you know, I'm just here to say it's absolutely worth it, you know. Um, I, I have never looked back. I have never regretted, you know, all my eggs are in Jesus' basket and I'm just going to trust him and And he's actually blessed me tremendously. I have a degree of spiritual family and intimacy and closeness, both in depth and breadth, um, that, that's probably greater than a lot of people, even married people, have. And so I'm, I'm very thankful to God for his church as the family of God who have embraced me. And, you know, people know everything about me, and they— it's not an issue. They just, they know they're sinners too, and they know that Jesus is not a friend of the righteous. He's a friend of sinners. And, uh, and that humility and confidence in grace is what enables us to be open and honest about how the fall has affected us and, and, uh, nevertheless know that God delights in us and sings over us in song. So yeah, that's, that's my story. And then, uh, you know, I'd been a Christian a few years, and actually the first guy I ever came out to was my campus minister as a brand new Christian. Just— I knew I had to talk to somebody about my sexual orientation and, uh, struggle with that. And, um, and he was great. And actually, he was the guy who eventually encouraged me to go to seminary because he looked at me— even though I was young in Christ, I was getting my architecture work done and out of the way so I could do what I really wanted to do, which was reading books about the Bible and discipling the guys in my discipleship group and leading a prayer meeting in my home and going to other prayer meetings and doing, you know, evangelism and discipling people and devouring everything I could learn about God, every book I could find. Just because I had never had Sunday school or VBS or any youth group background in Christianity. And so I was, I was just so hungry. And ended up a decade later being ordained as a pastor. And I've been in the same church now as a pastoral leader for 20 years. Wow.

Well, thank you for sharing your story. I really appreciate that. And I think that gives our listeners a good background about who you are, where you come from, and, and really your unique place in, in the body of Christ. And, um, you know, I've heard you say a couple of times, just before we get into the book, you mentioned the word shame a few times, even as you were talking about yourself and the way that, um, so much of your, your life, uh, it felt like maybe shame had played a part. And I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about this, because I've heard you talk before about gay shaming. Both in the church and out of the church. And I wonder if you might be able to talk to us just a little bit about the difference between guilt and shame.

Yeah. You know, guilt is, is typically the guilt is, is, is over something we've done. You know, it says I did bad. Shame is far deeper and more personal because it attaches to our person. We're ashamed because of what we are. When we look in the mirror, when we look inside our souls, it's not just that we've done bad things, it's that we're defective. We're less than the best of humanity. We are not Adam in the garden. And so shame, for me, was something I felt very much growing up in the 1980s, even as an atheist. I could look at how the human reproductive system functions and realize that, you know, something was off with me. And, uh, and shame is universal, you know. You know, as soon as Adam and Eve sinned, they felt shame, and they knew they were naked and they needed to be covered. And God in his mercy covered them. Um, but, uh, You know, and I think because we don't understand how the gospel speaks to shame, or we miss it sometimes because we talk a lot about Jesus forgiving our sins, forgiving our guilt.

Sure.

We sometimes miss how much of the Bible story is God ministering to us in our shame. You know, because guilt says I did bad, shame says I am bad, I am defective, I'm wrong, I have something to be ashamed of. And And certainly Christians historically have, have tended to heap extra shame upon gay people because the fall has affected us differently. But, you know, it's not like straight people get a pass just for being straight because, you know, your sexual attraction to your neighbor's wife is not morally neutral either. Right, exactly. Jesus didn't put that in your heart, you know. And so, yeah, we've all got this battle in us because we're all defective. But the difference between guilt and shame is like if I go into Bank of America and I've defaulted on my mortgage, I've defaulted on my car payment, my bank account is overdrawn by thousands of dollars, and then I've got credit cards and they're all maxed out in the tens of thousands of dollars and all these fees on top of that. I go in and the teller says, oh, okay, Mr. Johnson. You know, they sit me down in a little cubicle and like, okay, you, um, yeah, you've made a mess of this, Reverend Johnson. Uh, and, uh, like, yeah, they say, you know what, here at Bank of America, we're gonna make this right. We're just gonna zero out all your accounts, just blank everything out. We'll cover the debt, uh, and, and, and just take care of all this for you. And, you know, as you're, as you're leaving Bank of America, they're You know, have you been forgiven? Absolutely. But two things are also true. One is that you're bankrupt, you know, you're zero. And the other is that Bank of America doesn't ever want to see your face again. And I think a lot of Christians, and particularly those of us who feel the shame of sexual, uh, sin, you know, um, I think a lot of us are kind of stuck there in our walk with God because we know we're forgiven But we think that's it. And that's only half of what justification is, you know, God doesn't just forgive us, he clothes us in the righteousness of Christ, you know, righteousness, being clothed in that is when the CEO of Bank of America comes running to you on your way to your car and says, no, no, I'm sorry, we made a mistake. This, this, he was new here. And, and, you know, she, she takes you to this like brass elevator in the back with mahogany paneling and takes you way up to the top of the building and takes you down all this hallway with all these portraits of her dead predecessors. And she takes you into her private corner executive suite and sits you down behind her corner desk with— and there are all these oil paintings and bookcases and antiques everywhere with a view over the city. And she has you sit down behind her desk and there's a stack of papers and a lawyer there. And she says, now, Mr. Johnson, we're just going to make this right. We're going to go ahead and sign over Bank of America and all its assets to you if you would just please initial on this form. And if you have time, we do have, you know, an artist with some oil paints and canvas down in the lobby. We would love for you to sit so that we can get your likeness for the executive suite. That's righteousness. Forgiveness says you can go, but righteousness says you can come. It's like being given the Congressional Medal of Honor and being ushered into the hallways of power. That's the gospel. You know, that's That's the gospel, not only for guilt but for shame. And particularly for, you know, and there's nobody who, who experiences shame like, like gay men. And even when we insist that there's nothing wrong with my sexuality, we throw out biblical sexual ethics, you know, we still feel the shame even if we don't realize we do, because we're still trying to make ourselves lovable. It, it's why so many gay men in particular, and, and, and there's a book called The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs. He's not a Christian, but he's a counselor who works mainly with gay men. And he points out how inside of us there is this velvet rage of shame and self-loathing that drives us to make ourselves lovable. And so we have to have the best wardrobe. We have to have the youngest appearance. We have to have the best haircut. We have to have the most over-the-top cocktail party, the most incredible condominium. You know, we have to— you know, gay men are at the top of so many fields because we're driven by this need to make ourselves lovable. And, and Jesus doesn't make us lovable, he makes us loved. And that's, and that's better than being lovable. I think there's probably no community in North America that longs more deeply for what only the gospel can give than the LGBT community, even if they don't know that that's what they're really longing for.

Yeah, that is so powerful. Wow, thank you for, for sharing that distinction with us today. Well, I, I want to move into, uh, talking some about your book today, Still Time to Care, which I just— I could hardly put it down once I started it. It was, it was such a good, um, it increased my understanding, but beyond that, it just is, is so well written. And so I want to applaud you on that, first of all. But I also want to share something that Ed Shaw wrote about your book. He said, uh, every so often a book comes along which helps you make sense of something confusing and damaging and does that in such an engaging way that you want everyone to read it so that the confusion and damage end for all. Greg Johnson's Still Time to Care is such a book, and I can't tell you how much I resonated with what he said there. It really did feel like a book I, I wish everyone would read, especially people in the church. So, um, just to make the most of, of our time together, because the book is about caring versus curing, and that relationship that the church has had in the past of thinking, uh, well, we're just going to cure you instead of really taking time maybe to focus on care and, and what that is there. I wonder if you could talk about the paradigm of care versus the paradigm of cure.

Yeah, the paradigm of cure, which we saw in the ex-gay movement starting in the late 1970s and really coming to a kind of fruition in the 1990s and then really crashing and burning. And then finally Exodus International, the biggest umbrella organization of ex-gay ministries, about 10 or 11 years ago finally shut down when its last president admitted that 99.9% of people involved in the ministries had not seen sexual orientation change in the sense of conversion from gay to straight. Some had experienced the ability to love one person of the opposite sex and to genuinely be attracted to that one person, though that was— even that was, was rare. And, and along the way, a lot of people were pushed into marriages that maybe God wasn't calling them to, and, and a lot of suffering ensued. And a lot of people were told to fake it until they make it. And the focus became less on holiness and more on heterosexuality, which is itself fallen. Like, why would we aim that low? Yeah, right. You know, I want to be offering every thought captive to the gospel of Jesus my King. You know, I don't want to be lusting after women instead of men. That's not a huge improvement. You know, like, still objectifying people and treating them like meat, you know, uh, using them to meet my own cravings. You know, I don't want that either. I don't want to do that to anybody. And, uh, So, um, but yeah, in, in place of that, what, what a lot of us are now really pushing for is a paradigm of care. And what that looks like is asking, okay, this gay person has come to my church. Yes, we need to help them break free of sexual sin and walk in holiness and discern God's call on their life and learn the Bible and, and have a devotional life and fall in love with God and all the things that we do for anyone else. But we also want to be sensitive to the fact that they may need ministered to in their shame. They may have huge regrets about what they are and have done. And instead of telling them to become straight, which, you know, every gay person on the planet has prayed for that, but it just doesn't happen. You know, actually helping them build real community, having an experience of family life within the household of God. And because their loneliness is one of their big dangers and their shame is another. And, and Christian community, gospel community where the gospel is central, where it's okay to be a sinner loved by Jesus, that's, that's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's okay to be in process. You know, that's something so huge. Um, the way I've seen that experienced is, is, you know, I've got one family that moved to St. Louis to be involved in my life and ministry 20 years ago, and I've been in their home hundreds and hundreds of times. You know, and, you know, I have refrigerator rights within their house. I can open up, I can open up the refrigerator and grab a drink and not have to ask permission because I'm one of the family. And, you know, that's, that's a huge thing. I have one brother who comes over every Thursday night for about the past 18 years, and we hang out for 2 or 3 hours. And, you know, I have people that I vacation with every January, every February. I have another elder in my church that I've been getting together with, with for coffee, a coffee shop Thursday morning since 2002. So that's 21 years. And, you know, I pray for his, his family, his wife, his marriage, his kids. And, and he gets my Covenant Eyes report and prays for me and helps me stay sober from porn, which At this point, it's about 17 years of freedom from that. But you know, that, that's experience of biblical community. And you know, I know married couples that don't have an uninterrupted 2 or 3-hour adult conversation every week, which is sad, but, but happens. And so I feel like in some ways God has just blessed me with this very rich community that has helped me walk in in faithfulness to God and has picked me up where I've been weak and has strengthened me and known me and loved me. And, you know, I wasn't always their pastor. Now I get to be their pastor, but I actually have been in the same church since 1994. So it's going on 30 years now, 9 years before I became a pastor. So it's been great. Uh, but that's part of what it takes to flourish, because we don't just want to get by. We want to— we want our souls to flourish. We want to know God's grace and walk in confidence and, and trust him and see him at work in our lives. We all need to be known, um, because, you know, the ancient world where structures were tribal, you lived in a village, and a person who never married was never alone. They were always in a village, and your village was your extended family. It was literally your brothers and sisters and their families and your aunts and your uncles and grandparents and children and grandchildren and grandnephews. And you were literally surrounded by family all the time, all through the day. And you were constantly given opportunities to both receive and give love, at least at its best. And with our notion of the Western nuclear family, where at least if you're a white American, family means your spouse and your kids. It doesn't mean your aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and great-nephews. And so we impoverished ourselves, and then we've become so transient where it's rare for somebody to say, I'm going to live in this city and have this job and be a part of this church for 50 years until I die, and they're going to carry me to my grave because they're my spiritual family. That's so rare today, and yet that really is what it takes to care for any single adult, uh, whether— whatever their sexual orientation. Um, the church needs to stop being just worship services and programs, and it needs to really become family.

Yeah, that's, that's so powerful. Thank you for sharing that part of, of, uh, of your story as well. I think it's so important important that we, um, tend to change our paradigm from cure to care. And that is really helpful. And that's what your book really helps us to do in so many ways. There's a lot of places I, I could talk about. I mean, we could talk about C.S. Lewis's best friend who was gay and, and the relationship that they had. There's stories about Billy Graham in your book, Francis Schaeffer, and all of the, the, the different people. And even just as a sort of historical reference, I think your book is wonderful in regard to that. But with the time that we have left today, and maybe I'll just kind of throw those out there as kind of like little teasers for people so they'll dive in more and understand more about your book that way. But there's a couple of places that to me just spoke in a big way that I felt like if I have a chance ever to just sit down and talk to Greg about this, this is one thing I just have to pick his brain about, you know, as I read this. Now, one thing for me was you have a powerful illustration on page 210 in your book about— it's really an illustration about emotional abuse, and you use it using something that is familiar to most of us, the temptation to overeat. And I really think it's a brilliant illustration, and it confronts what it's like for gay Christians to be in the church and how it feels so often for them. And I thought this did more to enlighten me to that perspective, and in really honestly kind of a humorous way, but at the same time, it like, it showed me like, yes, okay, Hey, that must be exactly what it feels like. You know, I've tried to understand and relate, but when I talk to other people about, you know, what it, what it may be like, I have fallen short of trying to help them, you know, try to understand other people's perspectives. So I wonder if you could, if, if you would, wouldn't mind, I'd love for you to maybe kind of share that illustration or even a bit of that illustration with us, um, today on the podcast because I really feel like our, our listeners, um, would benefit from that, if you don't mind.

Oh, not at all. You know, a lot of people have come up to me and said, Greg, your book didn't hit me until you talked about gluttony. And then they realized, like, oh, then all these things I've been saying or thinking or experienced is emotional abuse by my siblings in Christ. And I don't intend that, but I just never had paradigm shift for it. And, uh, and, you know, it's— I mean, I remember, you know, one kid who— the first— we, we hosted a conference called Revoice in 2018, and we're actually going to host it again, uh, this coming summer here in St. Louis. But, um, I remember one kid in a Captain America t-shirt who, during the first worship of Revoice '18, he walked out of the sanctuary and sat down in our narthex, which is sort of our lobby. It's old gothic cathedral building. And, and he was just weeping. And I just walked over and sat, you know, across from him and didn't say anything. And then finally, he, he told me that it was the first time he had ever felt safe in a church. And I thought, I mean, my heart just sank. But it's because of the amount of unintended abuse. Because, you know, like the Bible does talk a lot about gluttony. In fact, it talks more about gluttony than about homosexual sin, though that's not saying that one's worse than the other. It's simply saying that, let's face it, overeating is, is something that most of us in North America have been tempted by, you know. Yeah, it's that, it's that, you know, we— you— it's like you walk up and you smell the french fries, and then you know you want to supersize it. And yet, you know, gluttony, being well-fed, was one of the sins of Sodom, you know, in Ezekiel that's listed. And so, you know, but it's like if people want to say, okay, well, Greg, it's great that you're not overeating, you're watching your weight, you're getting the small fries or maybe a side salad. That's really great. But surely you understand that even the temptation to overeat is sin. Sin, because the temptation to sin is itself sin. And it's like, okay, well, yeah, that's, that's true, but in that, you know, we've always got indwelling sin. But, you know, uh, but, you know, are you saying that my smelling french fries and wanting them, that I'm somehow defying God? But, but that's what we do with, with same-sex attraction. And, uh, and, you know, suddenly the focus can be so much on— well, we'll use the gluttony illustration— on no longer being tempted. And then if you can imagine having, you know, speakers, you know, writing books and going on platforms and, you know, giving messages about how they used to be tempted by the smell of french fries but they're not tempted anymore. In fact, they could never be tempted to overeat ever again because God has so transformed them. And then you get you get, you know, denominational authorities, you know, demanding that you repent of liking the smell of french fries and that you, you, you know, uh, have to be perfectly delivered from it before you could possibly be used by God in ministry. And, you know, and, and, you know, you, you say, well, you're not a french fry lover, you just struggle with the temptation to french fries, you know. And, and after a while it just gets so messed up because we turn ourselves so inward on ourselves trying to figure out exactly at what point appreciating the smell of French fries turns into sinfully coveting French fries that God doesn't want you to eat. And, and, and, you know, you think, okay, we could really become pretty introspective here in a way that would lose sight of Jesus. Why not just be the big shameful sinner who is absolutely tempted every day to overeat and just not overeat? And, and when somebody does, you know, go to Old Country Buffet and just empty the place out, you know, you pick them up, you remind them of the forgiveness of God, and you help them to do better next time. What if we all just decided that we weren't actually going to overeat, and we just help each other with that? You know, that's a paradigm of care, as opposed to a paradigm of cure, where we're thinking that I have to get to a point where I'm no longer tempted to overeat, and that that's what sanctification means, because God tells us, Jesus tells us, we're gonna be tempted in this life, you know, you know. And Paul tells us that, that no temptation is, is, is, is unique. We're all tempted, uh, and God gives us ways of escape, uh. And so like, yeah, I think realizing that finding somebody sexually attractive that God has not given you as a spouse, that God would never give you as a spouse is not all that different from, you know, wanting to overeat and choosing to not do that, you know, because there's— it's— and, and both of them have all sorts of things to do with biological and physiological things. It's not just sin, it's also a hormone called ghrelin that does a lot to make you either want to eat or not want to eat, and you can't control that. All you can do is trust God and obey. And realize that you'll probably be— this is probably a lifetime battle. You're probably never going to get to a point where you have no appetite for food that isn't good for you.

You're right. As nice as that might be sometimes, I can testify to that for sure.

But that is the hope of the resurrection.

That's right. That's right. For sure.

No more sin, no more suffering, no more death. The old order will pass away and all things will be made new.

Amen. Wow. And that is, that is our hope, and I'm so grateful for that. Well, Greg, we have really only scratched the surface of, of what you have written in this remarkable book. And I want to let everybody who is listening, I just want to remind them that if the technology works the way it's supposed to, and it usually does, uh, as you're listening to the podcast, wherever you listen, you should be able to go to the show notes, and just with a click, it will take you to more information about Greg and how you can get his book. The book is, again, it's called Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church's Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality. Again, there is so much so helpful information in this book. I agree that I wish everyone could do it. I especially love the way that you talk about ways for the gospel, the, the ways that it creates safe space for people, especially gay people. I love how you talk about ways that the church can do a better job of ministering to people in the LGBT community. And, uh, for, for your amazing work, I just want to say thank you. And I hope that all of our listeners will go out and pick up a copy. Uh, if they need to, go to their local library, and if they don't have it, request it, because that's another way that we can get good resources like this. But I, I just hope that everybody, as much as possible, will read this, will share it, will have discussions about it in your church. I mean, I think it's a wonderful resource for even small group or Sunday school discussion among adults to be able to talk about these things together. Um, and so I just— yeah, all this going on and on is just to say thank you. I really appreciate your work, Greg.

Oh, you know, it's— I'm thankful for the opportunity to talk about it. You know, the, the, the— one of the biggest challenges that Christians face in Western culture right now is, is the argument that Christians hate gay people and that Christianity is inherently violent to gay people. And And, you know, we need to prove them wrong. And you don't have to compromise biblical principle to prove them wrong. You can prove them wrong by loving biblically, because that's what Jesus came to create, is a community of people who love sinners. Mm.

Amen.

Well, as I say to my guests every week, I get to say it to you today. Greg Johnson, thank you for being one of the Voices in My Head this week.

Glad I could be there.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head.

In my head. Music on the intro and outro of this show is from my single, "As I Walk These Halls," which can be streamed on any streaming platform, including Spotify. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, schedule me for a concert, a speaking engagement, a podcast, or even a book signing. In your neighborhood. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast will be. And now the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you You may abound in hope.