BREAKING UPDATE: Apparently World Vision has reversed their decision to adjust their policy toward same-sex married employees/employment. Read the full letter from Richard Stern, here. An incredible turn of events that is well-appreciated, and well-received.

While I still maintain what I’ve written below, at this point it more applies broadly to the conversation about the Church and same-sex marriage than to World Vision and their initial policy shift. So please read it in that light.

Editorial Note: You may want to download the World Vision letter from Richard Stern (President) for complete context and language for these remarks and observations.

You may also want to read:

Why gay marriage is not a justice issue
Why Rachel Held Evans is wrong about winning the next generation

I mean it was almost inevitable, wasn’t it?

A major evangelical organization waving the rainbow flag of cultural surrender, having capitulated to the demands of Empire America with apparent disregard for Scripture and orthodoxy.

That World Vision was the first to capitulate is as surprising as it is disappointing.

That their supporters would dismiss criticism of their pro-gay pivot by sandwiching it between starving, thirsty children in Africa is as remarkable as it is dastardly. (As they say the easiest way to obscure a lie is to sandwich it between two truths.)

What World Vision has chosen to do by modifying their Employee Standards of Conduct “to allow a Christian in a legal same-sex marriage” to become an employee makes this an incredibly important issue for the Church to publicly address.

Because accepting same-sex marriage by granting employment to same-sex married employees—and by extension permitting gay sexual activity within such a social construct—has crucial gospel, moral, and theological implications.

1) This is a gospel issue because it’s a moral one.

The gospel is by definition a Story. A Story about God becoming flesh and blood and moving into the neighborhood, as one person has put it (John 1). The God who assumed such flesh and blood was Jesus.

Jesus came to provide the rescue and re-creation we so desperately need. Everyone of us. Whether gay or straight.

So before you jump on me for wielding a 10-blade to wrench the speck of sin out from the eyeball of World Vision’s new same-sex married employee, I’ll openly acknowledge the two-by-four protruding from my own peepers!

But here’s the thing: Gay people need to be rescued from their rebellion and put back together again as much as I do!

And that’s what the gospel solves; that’s what the story of Jesus provides. And that’s what’s at stake. One person puts it like this:

If sexual activity outside of a biblical definition of marriage is morally neutral, then, yes, we should avoid making an issue of it. If, though, what the Bible clearly teaches and what the church has held for 2000 years is true, then refusing to call for repentance is unspeakably cruel and, in fact, devilish.

Yet by refusing to call for repentance of married gay people World Vision seems to deny the power of the gospel to root out that speck and put that employee’s life to right, because they deny there’s a problem to begin with.

Except homosexual activity, whether inside or outside so-called “same-sex marriage,” is sin for which the gospel—the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus—provides the antidote. By eschewing their responsibility to engage this issue as members of the Church by hiding behind the parachurch label, they abdicate the proclamation of the gospel in its fullness for all of life.

Yet it’s absolutely impossible for the Church—including a paraChurch organization—to do anything other than proclaim, because She is by nature a proclaiming entity. The Bride of Jesus Christ can neither be silent nor ashamed to confront acts of the vandalism of God’s shalom, when people intentionally ruin the way creation is supposed to be.

Whether through the injustice of poverty or gay marriage/activity.

She must unashamedly proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, bearing the same kingdom message of life and social transformation for issues of poverty as much as for issues of sexuality in order to rescue and re-create those who vandalize.

2) This policy pivot is a moral issue because it permits gay sex as much as gay marriage.

Let’s face it: Same-sex marriage, while not merely about gay sex, is a social construct that ratifies gay sexual relations and activity.

Yes gay people love each other within such a relational construct. They are also nice people who do nice things for society. And same-sex marriage isn’t merely about fulfilling some primal desire.

But let’s not forget about the main event of any marriage: sexual intercourse and intimacy. And God judges such activity as open rebellion against His creative intent and righteousness when enjoyed outside creational marriage as much as between men and women of the same gender.

Homosexual activity is sin, which World Vision, by extension of celebrating an employee who is “a Christian in a legal same-sex marriage,” now seemingly embraces without repercussion.

Ironically, this right isn’t extended to employees who fornicate and commit adultery—their own letter says they “continue to expect abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage for all staff.” (At this point one must ask the obvious: How are you defining marriage World Vision? Have you adopted Empire America’s re-defined social construct as a definition for this God-created institution?)

Look at this language again in regards to their newly adopted employee policy allowing a gay-oriented Christian to legally marry: it seems apparent that World Vision now permits gay sex, as long as it occurs after a legal same-sex marriage and remains between said gay relationships. They would have to by the logic of openly employing married gay people.

Perhaps that’s not what World Vision intended, but I’m not sure there is any other way to read it. I find this remarkable, not only because this pro-gay pivot is a crucial gospel and moral issue, but because it is an epic theological one, too.

3) It’s a theological issue because it’s a Trinitarian and Creedal issue.

Some would suggest the traditional view on same-sex relationships isn’t quite the slam-dunk case I and others think it is. Nor would they suggest it’s a valid litmus test for Christian orthodoxy.

Let’s take the first one: What’s the alternative to the “traditional” view? a “progressive” one?

So for 2,000 years the Church has been ill-informed and/or misinformed about how God actually has conceived of marriage? And then another 4,000 years before that those poor ignorant children of YHWH…

And now we’ve finally discovered what we’d been missing out on all these years? So glad to know…and yet:

How have we come to that understanding? Who has informed us of this ill-informed, misinformed definition of marriage? Empire America or God Himself?

If it’s God, well, then we’ve got a problem, for two reasons:

1. He would be contradicting His own self-revelation and authority through Scripture (Gen 2; Lev 18; Matt 15; Rom 1; 1 Cor 6)—of which World Vision maintains it is not “diminishing…in our work.”
2. Because the Church has understood marriage as a God-created union mirroring the “mutual interpenetration of divine self-giving lovers”—that’s fancy theology talk for the perichoresis. In other words, marriage is about the relationship between God the Father/Son/Spirit (the Trinity) as much as it is about creation.

Which makes sense, because humanity itself is about the Trinity. The Holy Scriptures declare God created and crafted both male and female in the image and likeness of God.

Swiss theologian Karl Barth emphasized that human existence as male and female is not something secondary to the Image, but is at the very heart of the Image of God.

The image has a masculine side and a feminine side, which is why maintaining a biblical view of marriage is so important —one man, one woman in an unbroken dance in mutual-interpenetrating ways (including but not limited to sex!), like the Trinity itself does.

Marriage reflects God Himself. Of which so-called gay marriage does not. It can’t; it never will.

And while World Vision maintains they “have not endorsed same-sex marriage,” that they now “allow a Christian in a legal same-sex marriage” and “have chosen not to exclude someone from employment at World Vision U.S.” who enters into such a social construct seems like the very definition of endorsement. How isn’t it?

(BTW I am not suggesting World Vision or its leaders aren’t Trinitarian or deny the Trinity. I am suggesting this policy pivot has Trinitarian implications.)

I would also suggest that such an endorsement is a crucial theological issue because gay marriage denies the very Creed they require their employees to accept. Adjusting your definition of marriage not only mess with the definition of humanity and marriage, denying that the Creator created both on purpose and with purpose. It also implicitly messes with the Trinity, of which the Apostles’ Creed testifies.

(Again, I’m not suggesting World Vision and it’s leaders are anti-Creedal or deny the Creed, but that their policy pivot has Creedal implications.)

Openly affirming and employing married gay people, then, has Creedal implications as much as theological ones, which is why I do indeed consider ones view on gay sex and gay marriage a litmus test of orthodoxy.

This screed isn’t directed at people but at a new policy of a Christian organization within the catholic Church called to stand side-by-side with local churches to proclaim, advance, and advocate Christ’s kingdom reign.

You can certainly dismiss my issue with World Vision as anti-gay—linguistic rhetoric that never ceases to amaze me…But you certainly can’t dismiss it as anti-Christian. This “issue” as World Vision calls it is a sad policy pivot that has crucial gospel, moral, and theological implications—and the apostle Paul urges (1 Cor 5:12) fellow brothers and sisters in Christ to call each other on such pivots.

PS—While World Vision is certainly the largest Christian anti-poverty organization on the block, it’s not the only one. To show I’m not sacrificing hungry starving African children at the altar of the culture wars consider helping fight poverty through Compassion International

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