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To: HKMk23

The notion of a homosexual "community" is problematical, because the purpose of community is a reenforcement of certain values, mist importantly of personal worthiness. Unlike AA, it reassures its members of the rightness of their action and that they should organize their lives around that conviction.


82 posted on 04/13/2005 5:27:47 PM PDT by RobbyS (JMJ)
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To: RobbyS

True, but I don't think it's problematic in a different way than has been overcome before. Paul had the Greek and Roman "communities" of ideas to contend with. Jesus had an established Jewish "community" that had very different ideas about what their Messiah would be like. All of these communities had shared ideas and beliefs in which they put stock and that they mutually reinforced. Remember Paul in Ephesus as the mob shouted "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" until the city clerk came out and told them to calm down (cf. Acts 19)? Talk about a hardcore "community" reinforcing a certain value. Then, of course, there are the communities of people around the world where missionaries have gone to share the message of the Kingdom. Every tribe and tongue is its own "community"; subscribing to and reinforcing their own ideas and customs. We even have "communities" on the high school campus. The terms "jock", "stoner", "hick" all come to mind from my H.S. days, and every one of those groups posessed and reinforced the "rightness" of a particular set of ideas and values.

The truth is that we are all involved in various "communities" at different levels of our lives, some official, some nebulous, but all influencing us in some way. In that sense, we do truly have a hmosexual "community", and I believe that the message of hope is for the members of that community no less than any other, and I also believe that The Word will successfully infiltrate that community just as it has so many others before. The community itself may not vanish, but individual members will be extracted from it, as if rescued from a burning house, and their lives transformed by the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ and, as that continues and those people keep going back to tell their friends, the whole community will be increasingly impacted by and drawn, one-by-one into the only community that will endure; the Kingdom of G-d.


85 posted on 04/13/2005 7:38:26 PM PDT by HKMk23 (Rex regum et Dominus dominantium)
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