Listen to this chapter:
“Abba Father” (Dave Bilbrough, 1977)
Ashley had not set foot inside an Adventist church since she was 14—that was nearly 12 years ago back in Fort Worth, Texas, shortly after her father and I had separated. She was a high school freshman, in her first classroom school experience after nine years of homeschooling. Her brother Adam was away at boarding school, also his first year of traditional classroom schooling. After eleven years of homeschooling, he was attending a self-supporting Adventist academy in another state. Fortunately, for both of them, I had taught them “to be thinkers and not mere reflectors of other men’s thought.”
We had been going to Fort Worth First Church only a few months when the inevitable time came that her youth class discussion focus turned to the topic of homosexuals in society. The kids were brutal, stating their opinions that gays “shouldn’t be given any ‘special rights’” and that “all faggots should be taken out and shot!”
The youth teacher allowed each student to express his or her homophobic and hateful views, with some even trying to quote Scripture to support their statements. Then it was Ashley’s turn to speak those room-silencing words: “Are you telling me that God wants you to kill my mother because she’s gay?” It was the last day that Ashley attended the youth class at Fort Worth First Church. Or anywhere, for that matter. I continued to attend church there but found no rationale in continuing to make Ashley go with me, or to keep her from participating in her high school track meets on Saturday mornings.
But the years have passed, and the children have grown up. Both have college degrees and are young professional adults, excelling in their respective careers. Ashley, who still lives in California about a mile from me, does not go to church. Anywhere. Ever. Adam is married, still lives in Texas, and he and his best friend Chuckie (going by the name of Chuck) now teach a youth Sabbath school class in a different Fort Worth area Adventist church. He and Chuck, as co-teachers, are deliberately exploring controversial issues. Like his mother, Juliana Harvard, Adam is teaching a new generation “to be thinkers and not mere reflectors of other men’s thought.”
In mid-April, Adam’s employer sent him and his technology team to work for a week in Silicon Valley—Stanford, to be exact. They finished their job in four days, and Adam was able to arrange his return flight for Saturday afternoon so he could spend some time with his family in Alameda. He was perfectly agreeable to going with Lina and me to San Francisco Central church on Sabbath morning, even though we would have to leave church early in order to get him to the airport on time.
Ashley and Adam are very close, but I never expected her to accept our standing invitation to ride with us into the City and actually visit a Sabbath school class again, especially with the knowledge of how her two moms had been treated there only six months ago. (But that’s for another story.) Now, all she said was, “What should I wear?”
While Lina set up her laptop for PowerPoint slides before Sabbath school, Adam and Ashley and I walked down the block to Crepe ‘n’ Coffee for an omelet and orange juice. Then we came back to the church for the young adults “Anchor Points” class that Dr. Greg Nelson had started before he left Central church in January. I was pleased with the mix of people I saw, which included young lay pastor Mark Ferrell. Andrea, a young professional woman who taught the class, wore an elegant cream-colored pantsuit with stacked heel sandals, and presented an excellent lesson on the nature of Christ. There was a lot of class participation, including comments from Adam. Even Ashley appeared to be interested.
When we went upstairs for church, we went through the Personal Ministries room to get to the sanctuary. Actually, we went there specifically to look for a copy of Jon Marksen’s book, National Sunday Law, which Adam wanted as a resource for his youth Sabbath school class in Fort Worth. The literature racks had been freshly filled with a wide assortment of Amazing Facts booklets—including the infamous Homosexuality—Return to Sodom by Gary Gibbs that had been a recent topic of conversation on the SDA-FFLAG email group I am privy to as a guest member.
You can be sure that neither of my alert grown offspring missed said pamphlet. They each grabbed a copy then they scampered upstairs to the balcony (which I figured they would do, rather than follow Mom to the second row in front where I needed to be with my digital camera to capture images for the Central church website).
Adam and Ashley heard absolutely nothing of the church service; they were too busy scrutinizing the pamphlet. On our way to the airport, we listened to their facade of raucous laughter as they expounded on their findings.
“Mom, guess what we found out about you and Lina,” Ashley began with open sarcasm. “We found out you use inflatable dolls and have 500 to a thousand sex partners who are total strangers. Oh, yes, you molest children, too!”
“I looked up the Bible texts this guy used,” Adam chimed in, “and he didn’t even quote them correctly. What this guy wrote is not what the Bible says!”
As both went on, I began thumbing through the pages of the copy I had picked up and found that all they were saying was true. Mr. Gibbs had begun his paper with a grossly over-sensationalized report of a demonstration by gay activists in protest to a fundamentalist church that was holding a publicized anti-gay meeting. He then compared this event to the Biblical story of Sodom. He did, indeed, misquote and misinterpret Scripture. He stated repeatedly that “the Bible clearly states that homosexuality is sin,” making no distinction between homosexual orientation and behavior. The paper bore a publication date of 1996, and so many, if not most, of his “facts” were very outdated.
Even the title, equating the Sodom experience to homosexuality, showed a lack of understanding of what not only Scripture but Ellen White says about the “sins of Sodom” as described in Ezekiel 16:49-50, “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.”
This Bible passage is further interpreted in “The Destruction of Sodom,” Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 156-170: “The profusion reigning everywhere gave birth to luxury and pride… The love of pleasure was fostered by wealth and leisure, and the people gave themselves up to sensual indulgence… Their useless, idle life made them a prey to Satan’s temptations, and they defaced the image of God, and became satanic rather than divine… In Sodom there was mirth and revelry, feasting and drunkenness. The vilest and most brutal passions were unrestrained. The people openly defied God and His law and delighted in deeds of violence…”
This leads us to understand that the sin of Sodom was pride, riches, and idleness, which resulted in inhospitality, immorality, violence, and abuse, but certainly not homosexuality as an orientation or as a loving, committed, monogamous relationship between two people of the same gender. Given Lot’s desperate attempt to appease the violent aggression of the men of Sodom that night by offering them his virgin daughters, it would seem that they, like the “sons of Belial” in Judges 19:16-28, were most likely heterosexual men who engaged in homosexual rape as humiliation, as well as sexual abuse of females for sport.
Mr. Gibbs seemed to delight in using the word “sodomite” in sarcastic ways, making the word synonymous with homosexual. In actuality, in the five texts in the King James Version of the Bible which use the word “sodomite” it is translated from the Hebrew word “qadesh” which means a male prostitute in a pagan temple. According to Biblical historians, there is very little evidence about the practices of the qadeshim, and no particular reason to assume they serviced men.
However, as obvious as the absurdity of this pamphlet was to my children, I knew it would not be obvious to most of the uninformed and misinformed persons who might walk into Central church and pick it up. Furthermore, we realized how much damage could be done by this erroneous, inflammatory little piece to any gay person, Adventist or not, or their parents and families, who might walk into Central church and find it there. I knew we had to do whatever it would take to get these horrid little books removed from the Personal Ministries literature racks at San Francisco Central Church!
After we got Adam safely boarded for his return flight to Dallas-Fort Worth, Lina, Ashley, and I went back to Central church to pick up the laptop. People were still milling around and were getting ready for an afternoon meeting in the seminar room.
Ashley approached Pastor Mark, who was in the back of the seminar room, and handed him her copy of the pamphlet. He obviously had had no idea the pamphlets were being distributed in the church. With a thinly veiled look of chagrin, he thanked her politely and said he’d “look into it.”
I gave copies to the head elder, with a fervent request that this issue be brought to the Elders’ Meeting, which was to take place the following Sabbath. The elders met, but the topic of this pamphlet was not brought up, we were told later, “due to a lack of time.” Nearly a month later, the head elder came up to me quietly after church and told me the pastor had asked the Personal Ministries leaders to remove the pamphlets. I could only wonder how many other people had picked up copies of it—and how much more damage had already been done—before they were removed.
The pamphlets may be gone—for now—but the homophobic attitudes and mean-spirited persons who put them there are not. Adam will continue to “push the envelope” in the youth Sabbath school class he and his friend Chuck are teaching. Ashley is not likely to attend another Adventist church, and certainly not Central. I can only hope she might visit a “coffeehouse” Adventist congregation (like Hillside Community Church in South San Francisco), but she would go only if it were conveniently located to her. And probably only on the arm of her avowed-atheist boyfriend. (Guess how likely that is to happen?!) Or perhaps at some future time she will secretly listen to Dr. Greg Nelson’s wonderful sermons that are still archived on my YouTube channel.
But, for now, Ashley finds it difficult to understand how her “two mommies” can stay—and even continue to serve, albeit without holding church office—in a church that “makes no accommodation” for its GLBT members and claims Biblical support for doing so. My only answer is that Lina and I do what we do for God, not for the church, but in spite of the church. And nothing—not even the church—can separate us from the love of Christ.
As Adventist author Dr. Ben Kemena says so profoundly in Homosexuality: Another Adventist Point of View: “The enemy to Christian love and loving is not hate. Rather, the enemy is ignorance.” And the one fact that people are most reluctant to accept is that homosexuality is not a choice. I appealed to Pastor Mark and the board of elders with my paraphrase of Dr. Kemena’s powerful words: “If [Central church is] unable to support homosexuals more, I hope that the church will endeavor to hurt homosexuals less…. [We] yearn to be part of an Adventist church which would rather err on the side of helping hurting people than hurting helpless people.”