In early January, Pastor Stan Mitchell of GracePointe Church in Franklin, Tennessee dropped a bombshell. He announced that his church would welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as full-fledged members. In the past, GracePointe took a line similar to other evangelical churches across the country, including the large number of such churches located in this tony Nashville suburb. That is, if you were openly gay, you were more than welcome to become a member, be baptized and take Communion. You just couldn’t hold any position of leadership, be married there, or have your kids dedicated.
However, GracePointe was forced into a major rethink when its most famous member, Carrie Underwood, declared that she supports marriage equality. That prompted Westboro Baptist Church to pay a visit to GracePointe–and also started a nearly three-year debate within the church. Eventually, Mitchell decided that the only thing the church could do in good conscience was to extend the full privileges of church membership–including the chance to serve in leadership–to openly gay members. He himself felt so strongly about the need to change church policy that “if I do not say what I say today, I cannot be here any longer.”
GracePointe isn’t alone. A number of evangelical churches and leaders are at least willing to rethink their traditional unyielding opposition to marriage equality. Those who have hopped the fence on the issue base their stance on the Bible. For instance, Ryan Meeks of EastLake Community Church near Seattle, who last fall decided to embrace marriage equality, says that as he sees it, “the message of Jesus was a message of wide inclusivity.” There’s even a nascent group of LGBT-affirming evangelical churches, the Association of Inclusive Evangelical Churches.
While most of them aren’t as willing to go as far as GracePointe and EastLake yet, some of them are taking the big step of acknowledging that there is a major shift underway. For some time, Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago area has been meeting in private with some of his gay members in hopes of better understanding them. This past October, Andy Stanley of North Point Community Church sat down with several prominent evangelical supporters of marriage equality and Southern Baptist leaders to discuss the theological underpinnings of both sides.
It should come as no surprise that much of this shift is generational. Support for marriage equality among young evangelicals has more than doubled in the last decade, from 20 percent in 2003 to 41 percent in 2014. As I mentioned last spring, younger evangelicals are significantly more progressive than their older counterparts on a lot of issues. It’s equally unsurprising that a number of evangelicals are unwilling to even consider changing their minds. Rob Schwarzwalder of the Family Research Council speaks for many of them when he says that those evangelicals who are willing to open their minds on marriage equality “can no longer claim to be persons of the Gospel–Evangelicals.” GracePointe has already taken a severe hit for its change of heart and mind. Its weekly attendance has more than halved in the last three years, and in January it only totaled $52,000 in giving–just over half its normal January total.
Speaking as someone who supported gay rights long before becoming a charismatic Christian, the reason for this generational gap is obvious. When you see LGBT people on a regular basis and you see that they’re just as normal as you are, suddenly all the talk about their lifestyle being an “abomination” rings hollow. It’s the same reason behind the larger leftward shift among young evangelicals–most of them didn’t spend their lives in a bubble, so naturally they’re willing to consider new ideas. That alone is refreshing. Indeed, the only surprise here is that this rethink started as soon as it did.
