Families and Friends

Helping Our Faith to Understand and Love 

As we watch our top faith leaders react and respond to genuine modern human situations, we see exposed many weaknesses, misunderstandings, and argumentative behaviors. Strong words; but we feel many of the top leaders understand and desire supporting modern loving decisions but are too “weak” to oppose narrow old-fashioned beliefs, which clearly reflect “misunderstandings” in the education and interpretations of biblical translations. “Argumentative” behaviors occur when one or more high-level leaders independently create one-sided committees with targeted purposes without listening and considering valuable and accurate modern information.

Over the past decades, these activities have occurred with many subjects and situations. For us, SDA Kinship, many decisions have been issued and committees have been formed to reject our family “rainbow” members and their families, too. Fortunately, our local church and our friends accepted our gay son, and we never encountered some of the mean and hurtful behaviors that are occurring today.

As Carolyn and I continue to meet new family and ally members, we hear more and more stories of hurtful, insulting, totally unfair comments and rejections from pastors, elders, and, sadly, their personal friends (friends until their “rainbow situation” became visible). Also, we continue to meet and support pastors and faith employees quietly and privately because they can’t be honest and visible because of unfair and improper “rules and regulations” issued by un-Christian like leadership.

Recently a well-liked and genuine German “rainbow” pastor publicly “came out.” His local church and conference reviewed his pastorship and voted to keep him ordained and pastoring. Jesus was smiling at their love and understanding. Our GC did not agree, and strong rejections were issued to their division leadership. In addition, Elder Ted Wilson created “his” Human Sexuality Task Force “to help our church members and especially our younger church members, to understand what the Bible has to say about human sexuality. We are facing a huge onslaught of aggressive conditioning of people’s minds from social media, from culture, regarding LGBT and other aspects.” Elder Wilson continued sharing. “The Human Sexuality Task Force will be producing materials... In small 60-second, 90-second sound bites, two-minute expositions, two-hour presentations, two-day summits, whatever it takes.”

So Kinship families, allies, friends, let’s connect and gather together to respond to those 60- and 90-second sound barks, those two-minute arguments, those two-hour one-sided debates, and two-day Revelation summits. Together we can help our faith mature and become a Jesus-centered faith filled with love and acceptance of all family variations and challenges. We also need to do “whatever it takes” to help our faith become Christlike and loving rather than judgmental and rejecting.

Two weeks ago we attended an Adventist church several hours away. One pastor made a very intuitive comment. He stated, “Our Bible is not a textbook or a medical document; it is a message for mankind [humankind] to learn from!” We loved it; simple but meaningful.

Please support our motto: Jesus Never Looked the Other Way—Neither Should We!

— John and Carolyn Wilt, Families and Friends Directors