Monday, July 20, 2020

SDA Issues: What has been going on at Andrews?

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
James 5:16

"Andrews seminary student and Mdiv recipient Paul-Anthony Turner, who also attended Southern Adventist University, recently shared on his Facebook page a letter from the Middletown SDA in Louisville, KY.


According to the letter, the Middletown Church elders and Pastor informed Paul that because of his theological views (Turner claims to be gay/homosexual), he would not be given church leadership roles.

Indignant, Turner made this letter public on Friday, posting it on his Facebook page.  He also invited readers to repost and/or share “anything  I‘ve discussed.”

What are some of the public views that Turner (who claims to be celibate) espouses regarding human sexuality?  Here is a sample:
  • Queer Eye is an indispensable theological resource for learning how & why to celebrate queerness in the Church.”
  • “Because of how we LGBT+  people have been subjected to
    immense abuse by incessant theologizing about sin regarding our lives, even though I hold certain traditional biblical beliefs about marriage that have led me to choose to be celibate to honor God, I choose to focus the Church’s attention on the breadth and beauty of the queer experience so that it may learn increasingly to celebrate those aspects of queer experience that go unnoticed and unappreciated and with which it should logically have no problem.  I pray Christians gain a new concern for LGBT+ people, one of celebration, instead of obsession with debates over sin, no matter how important those conversations may be.”
  • The church’s unwillingness to accept homosexuality is causing us to miss out on the “sacredness of queerness.”
  • “The longer we debate, the longer we miss out on the sacredness in queerness. We are missing out on all the wonderful, necessary color queer people cannot help but bring into the Church, and it is one of our weak links.  Maybe that’s just me, but what do I know?  I’m just a gay.”
  • “Bad theology #8: Adam & Eve were straight.”
  • “Bad theology #5: Homosexuality is a sin.”
  • “Bad theology #1: Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve.”
  • “Gayness is a corrective for straight toxicity
  • “The “BLM org vs. BLM fact” dichotomy is a DIStracting and DEtracting nonstarter—yet another (whether veiled or unrecognized) instance of distrust of Black people’s ability to protest correctly."  What is Marxism, how *specifically* does it manifest in the BLM org, and why is its influence bad?”
  • “Edenic sexuality is not straightness.”
  • “And leave my boy Karl [Marx] alone; he was (largely) right.”
In typical social media outrage fashion, there are calls on Turner’s page to complain to the NAD, the Kentucky-Tennessee Conference about Turner not being selected as a leader in the Middletown SDA Church."
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