RIP Tony Campolo, Dec 19, 2024.
Several folks in our community got to hear him speak at a Mosaic / World Vision gathering 7 or 8 years ago.
I’m attaching this interview from a time when Campolo was still in process on LGBTQ identity and Christianity. He would resolve this process 3 years later. In 2015 he wrote a letter explaining his move to become fully affirming:
“One reason I am changing my position on this issue is that, through Peggy, I have come to know so many gay Christian couples whose relationships work in much the same way as our own. Our friendships with these couples have helped me understand how important it is for the exclusion and disapproval of their unions by the Christian community to end. We in the Church should actively support such families. Furthermore, we should be doing all we can to reach, comfort and include all those precious children of God who have been wrongly led to believe that they are mistakes or just not good enough for God, simply because they are not straight.”
Link to full essay:
This is a good video clip, and letter to share with people you might know who are compassionate followers of Jesus, but whose worldviews are still influenced by the exclusionary, hard-right wing of the church. They might identify with the place Campolo was when this was filmed. And they might be on a journey toward where he resolved the issue, especially as they process the disconnect between compassion, the teachings of Jesus, and the insanely hate-filled era we seem to be descending into.
The places where dialog can still happen have been rapidly shut down in the past few years. KB and other Mosaic churches were once able to have the kind of dialog depicted in this clip within Vineyard Canada, but that was cut off when they decided to kick us, and all other inclusive churches out in 2020. The same thing happened to CRC inclusive churches in the past couple of years. Campolo held an open dialog with evangelicalism that seems to be almost completely closed now with the assendancy of Trump “Christians”. But individual conversations with folks we have relationship with can still happen, especially if we just keep centring them on the actual teachings of Jesus in the gospels, centring them on relationships with real people, and centring them on Love.
Commenti