The pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Los Angeles, California announced last month that he is now “gay affirming” and has accepted his son’s homosexuality, a declaration that is causing a rift in his local congregation and sparking controversy within the Southern Baptist Convention.
In an hour-long sermon released on YouTube and a letter submitted to John Shore’s Patheos blog, Danny Cortez, pastor of New Heart Community Church, told his congregants that after a “15-year journey,” he has shifted away from his negative stance on homosexuality and is now accepting of LGBT people.
“In August of 2013, on a sunny day at the beach, I realized I no longer believed in the traditional [church] teachings regarding homosexuality,” Cortez said in his letter. “And it was especially the testimony of my gay friends that helped me to see how they have been marginalized that my eyes became open to the injustice that the church has wrought.”
Pro-LGBT Christians are becoming more common in the United States, but Cortez’s affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) makes his new gay-affirming theological position highly unusual. The SBC, the largest protestant denomination in the country with nearly 16 million members, decries homosexuality and defines marriage as “the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime,” a view shared by many churchgoers. But in a rare move for a SBC church, Cortez’s congregation did not vote to expel him from the pulpit after he declared his gay-affirming stance, but chose instead to keep him as their pastor and become a “Third Way” church — that is, a worship community where members “agree to disagree and not cast judgment on one another” on the topic of homosexuality. Although some members plan to split off from the church on June 8th, Cortez will remain head of New Harmony Community Church as it embraces a live-and-let-live approach “in the same way that our church holds different positions on the issue of divorce and remarriage.”
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