If you have read some of the last few articles that we posted (“Progressive Christianity and Polyamory” and “My De-conversion Story”), you can probably surmise that we are concerned about the rising tide of Progressive Christianity.

 

Now to be clear, I am not concerned that Progressive Christianity will thwart the plans of God or His church. As Jesus stated, “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not stand against it.”

 

And neither am I solely attempting to convince those who have adopted progressive theology that they are in error. As a pastor, it is not my primary job to persuade others to believe as I believe. As Jesus also said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, […] Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from Him comes to Me” (John 6:44-45).

 

As such, my primary job as a pastor is to encourage and equip other disciples of Jesus who have already been (or are being) convinced and drawn by the Father to believe about the Son the same things that I have been convinced and drawn by the Father to believe.

 

However, part of being able to do so is to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” And to be able to do so, “with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander” (1 Peter 3:15-16).

As I have studied and taught about being a disciple of Jesus over the better part of a decade now, there is something that keeps bothering me that I can’t let go. There is something that we are not teaching people that they need to know.

 

A.W. Tozer wrote in The Crucified Life:

 

“What a bunch of unworthy people we evangelicals have become, daring to stand up on our feet and preach to an intelligent audience that the essence, the final purpose and the cause of Christ is to save us from hell. How stupid can we get and still claim to be followers of Christ.

 

“The purpose of God is not to save us from hell; the purpose of God is to save us and make us like Christ and to make us like God. God will never be done with us until the day we see His face, when His name is on our foreheads; and we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is.

Over 15 years ago I made a prediction to my Evangelical friends that the legalization of same-sex marriage was inevitable in the United States.

 

My argument was that there simply wasn’t anything in the Constitution to stop it. The only way it could have been slowed down, is if we would had preemptively adopted a constitutional amendment stating that marriage was between one man and one woman alone, a long time ago.

 

At the time I argued that rather than waste our political capital trying to stop same-sex marriage; we should have been putting that political energy into ending abortion, where we could make a constitutional argument under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that unborn children are not receiving equal protection (but that is another article).

 

However, what I did not foresee at the time was the number of Evangelicals who would turn to progressive Christian theology in order to attempt to make same-sex relationships acceptable within the Evangelical church.