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Posted on 10/23/2012 7:00:05 PM PDT by Gamecock
The son of author and speaker Brian McLaren, who is often identified as part of the controversial emergent church, married his same-sex partner this past weekend.
Trevor Douglas McLaren, 28, wed Owen Patrick Ryan on Saturday in Washington, according to The New York Times. The marriage ceremony was officiated by a Universal Life minister, and his father, Brian McLaren, led a commitment ceremony with "traditional Christian elements" afterward.
The elder McLaren recently recalled to NPR the time his son – one of four sons – came out to him.
It had just been a couple of years when McLaren shifted his thinking and abandoned the traditional view of homosexuality being a sin that he grew up with.
"I had gone through my change in this view before I ever guessed that any of my kids might be gay," he said on the radio program.
"I was a good kid, I believed what I'd been told. And as a pastor, I started having gay people come out to me and what became clearer and clearer to me is that their experience was not explained by the theology I inherited," he explained. "And that it would be unjust to continue to uphold what I'd been taught. Maybe I could say it like this: My call to love God and love my neighbor was in conflict with what I'd been taught the Bible required me to say and do."
Recalling the time his son came out to him, McLaren stated, "So I went through that shift in my own thinking. Couple of years after that, when I really in some ways come out myself as a person who no longer supported the traditional view and one of my sons came out to me, I just remember I cried and cried because my thought is 'Oh no, if my son has been going through the same kind of pain so many other people did and I didn't know it, I just couldn't live with that.'"
To his relief, he said, his son Trevor never worried about his parents accepting him.
McLaren is the author of A New Kind of Christianity and most recently Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross the Road?. Decades ago, he and a number of pastors had started what was called the emerging church movement to reach young people. But that later became divided as some pastors, including Mark Driscoll, left over theological concerns.
Matthew Schmitz, deputy editor of First Things, summed up McLaren's journey in an article Tuesday: "Brian McLaren started out wanting to reach the unchurched end up performing a commitment ceremony that stood outside the church not only physically (at the Woodend Sanctuary of the Audubon Naturalist Society in Chevy Chase, Md) but also doctrinally - in contravention of clearly delineated Christian teaching on the nature of sex and marriage. His desire for a more authentic and less abstracted faith took him away from the concrete body of Christ."
The problem that leaps out at me on this one is that Christ *very* strongly disapproves of such ceremonies.
No, he didn't. They committed a perverse mockery of a wedding; they pledged themselves to a life of buggery.
Brian McLaren, led a commitment ceremony with "traditional Christian elements" afterward.
Nonsense. Traditional Christian elements do not celebrate sodomy.
Daddy must be so proud....
They did not wed.
They had a ceremony where they pretended they were normal.
Makes me wanna PUKE!
Why do these Godless pervs want to have the trappings of Christianity without Christianity?
How can there be such concerns without any theology whatsoever??
I guess not having theology was the concern?
And the perversion continues. When do we sanctify sex with livestock and corpses? It will be the next step.
Same old, same old. Another compromising Christian preacher becomes a post-Christian preacher.
The law of God has not changed and will not. The law demands and condemns. Neither has His gospel changed, nor will it change. The gospel promises and forgives. Unless one keeps these two straight (no pun intended) and well distinguished the one from the other, there will be no end of confusion and every variation of misbelief and then unbelief will be the result.
Love is not helping your son by giving him a shove into everlasting damnation. It is giving your son your hand, helping to pull him away from hell’s fire, burning hotly at his feet.
Well ain’t that special?
protestantism is so much easier than true Christianity....you get to make up your own rules as you go along!!
No he didn’t. Calling it marriage does not make it marriage.
I was thinking about the reality you speak of today, while out riding my bike. It seems odd, but the God who rightly condemns is the same God who provides salvation from His own rightful condemnation!
Pretty amazing to me, one who needs such a God!
That is unfair. Faithful Protestant Christians believe in God’s plan for sexuality and for marriage. This issue is tearing denominations apart. The orthodox who are seeing their church’s embrace immorality are torn apart by this. It has caused great grief for many Protestant Christians who see their denominations betraying Scripture and their church’s own laws on this matter.
I pray that he will repent, turn from his wicked ways and come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ before it is eternally too late for him, his family and multitudes whom he is decieving.
P.S. I like your graphic. It is so sad, but true. Rick Warren and his unbiblical, "Seeker-Sensitive" so-called "philosophy of Ministry" model is also heretical.
God does not condemn. We choose damnation and God respects our choice.
Peace be with you.
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