Sean Johnson - Intentionally - The Education of Sean Johnson

For a number of months something has been weighing pretty heavily on my mind. I’ve been thinking a ton about the Haggard scandal and its repercussions. To be honest, I’m no further ahead in the way of answers to my questions than I was when I first heard about it. All I know is that something is desperately wrong. All I know is that for all the love that Christianity preaches, it is very much lacking in practice.

One Degree Of Separation
The first thing that amazed me about the whole scandal was my proximity to it. I knew the guy. When I was in high school, I went to church there. I met my prom date there. I shook his hand. Seemed like a very nice guy, and a guy who had an immense amount of love in his heart.

We’ve all grown up watching television and reading the newspapers, and are used to seeing people become infamous. We’re used to reading and watching, mostly in a detached way, as these people become the butt of jokes on late night talk shows and blog posts. I’m no different.

But I’ve never actually known one of these people. I’ve never looked them in the eye. This was different.

To watch a guy’s life - his family, his profession, his entire being - be absolutely torn apart in a matter of hours…was heartbreaking. I couldn’t believe how much venom came spewing out from people all over the world towards a guy they’d never met. I watched as he was interviewed in front of his wife and children, humiliated. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Actually, I’m sure I have. I just had my eyes closed. Probably spit some venom myself.

The Church Gets It Wrong

As I read the letter he wrote to his congregation, I cried. He had been dealing with homosexuality his entire life, and he obviously despised himself because of it. He was raised in a church that told him that he was evil, a leper, someone to stay away from. He knew that if he confided in his fellow Christians, they’d likely respond with some venom of their own. It wasn’t something he was allowed to even be struggling with, so he bottled it up. And as anyone who’s been a teenager can attest to, bottling something that strong up is an extremely difficult thing to do.

Christians are sometimes afraid to challenge the prevailing wisdom of the day. Just as it’s highly unlikely that Christ would have had slaves or treated women like second class citizens, I really don’t think he’d approve of how the church is handling the homosexuality issue. I understand that it’s a messy, controversial issue, one that is driving a wedge even deeper into the country, and even into church congregations. I don’t have an answer. But what I don’t believe is that the way to love and support the gay community is to tell them that God hates gays.

What the church has done is to label homosexuality as the last taboo. Lie and steal at work - fine. Cheat on your spouse - it’s okay, we can help you. Even the murder can be brought into a community of acceptance and love. But homosexuality? Good riddance to bad filth.
Here’s the thing - man has always, ALWAYS tried to create “in crowds.” It has tried to look for ways to make certain people special and make certain people…outsiders. We don’t have to learn how to do this - it’s hardwired into our brains (go to a kindergarten playground and watch a while.) We do it in school, we do it with fraternities, we do it with “patriotism”, we do it with sports teams, we do it with celebrities, we do it with clubs that require keys to get into.

And the church is not immune - not by a long shot. God’s grace is an amazing gift, but it doesn’t mean we walk the world with halos. Instead of thinking of the body of Christ as something that is all-inclusive, open and available to anyone and everyone, we think of it as a special club. We wall ourselves up inside our churches and our bible studies with people from similar economic, social and lifestyle orientations, and as we get comfortable, we lift the drawbridge.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but until Christians learn to stop it with the in-crowd mentality, we won’t be living our beliefs. Christians are all fallen people - nobody lives a life consistent with the will of God. That’s why we needed a savior in the first place.

So please, until you can go through the week without stealing a glance at the pretty guy or girl down the hall, until you can take your paycheck, pay your rent and put a little aside for food and then promptly give the rest away, until you can realize that maybe you don’t need the enormous house and the sports car, until you can honestly pursue a goal not because of your ambition or greed but only because God wants you to, until you can invite the poor and the hungry and the sick and the socially spit upon to your house for dinner….until you don’t have any skeletons in your closet, be enormously thankful that your brokenness is accepted, and give that same gift to everyone.

Haggard was one of your most giving, most loving pastors. He was a gift to the church body, to his family, to his friends. But because of the way the church approaches his struggle, he was forced to keep it inside, and it destroyed him.

The church is full of Ted Haggards - people who are forced to keep something as powerful as their sexuality locked up. And until the church changes its approach, until it creates a place where anyone is welcome, where any issue can be talked about openly, their lives are going to be miserable.