"Before There Was Science, There Was Religion..."

Rev. Ken Wilson - Vineyard Church, Ann Arbor, Michigan

With 'A Nudge' From Jesus, Evangelical Minister Supports Gay Marriage

By Niraj Warikoo
April 7, 2014

When the Rev. Ken Wilson was younger, he didn’t know anyone who was openly gay. Like many of his peers, he saw people in the LGBT community as criminals, perverts or homos, a bigoted insult he heard in school.

And when he started his church in the 1970s in Ann Arbor, the evangelical pastor maintained a policy of not allowing gays who were actively sexual.

But about a dozen years ago, the founder and leader of Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor started to have some misgivings about his views. Members of his Christian congregation were coming forward to talk about siblings and children who were openly identified as gay.

In 2011, “I got a strong nudge from Jesus,” telling him to write a letter to his congregation about his changing views on gay issues, the 62-year-old minister said.

It was a slow process, one that involved prayer, introspection and scholarship as he pored over the Bible and interpretations of it from various writers. Last month, the long letter he wrote to his congregation was published as a book that embraces LGBT people.

Experts say it might be the first time the pastor of a large evangelical Christian congregation in Michigan, and maybe the U.S., has come out so openly in favor of gay people and same-sex marriage.

The move comes at a time of intense debate in Michigan over gay marriage after a ruling two weeks ago by a federal judge in Detroit that legalized gay marriage, a ruling currently being appealed.

At least one out of every four Michiganders identify themselves as evangelical or born-again, the biggest religious group in the state, according to studies. For evangelicals — many of whom are conservative and take the Bible’s words seriously if not literally — it’s a wrenching debate that goes to the core of their beliefs.

“It’s about welcoming previously excluded groups,” Wilson said of his decision. “That’s what it means to be evangelical — to make the good news accessible to those who haven’t had access to it. That’s my task. That’s what a church is supposed to do.”

But for many evangelicals, Wilson’s views in his book — “A Letter to my Congregation: An evangelical pastor’s path to embracing people who are gay, lesbian, and transgender into the company of Jesus” — are controversial.

The national leadership of the Vineyard denomination, which has about 1,500 churches, “is not at all supportive of what I’m doing,” he said.

And the leadership at many evangelical churches in metro Detroit — including the two biggest evangelical mega churches in metro Detroit, Kensington and Northridge — are still very much opposed to same-sex marriage.

While support for gay marriage may be increasing overall, it’s still low for white evangelicals, the group least likely among those surveyed to support it, according to the Pew Research Center. A survey released last month by Pew said 23% of white evangelicals back same-sex marriage, the same amount as last year. In contrast, support for gay marriage has increased among other groups, such as Catholics and mainline Protestants, Pew said.

Wilson’s move sparked a backlash within his own congregation, with some people leaving and ending their financial support in the past two years as he became more public about embracing gays. The church’s income has dropped 12%, in part because of him coming out in favor of LGBT people.

He faced a similar challenge when he decided in 2004 he would welcome people who accepted scientific theories of human evolution and in 2006, when “I made it clear Christians had an obligation to care for the environment and that climate change was something we had to take seriously.”

But his congregation survived both of those moves, and he said it will weather this controversy, too. Decades ago, evangelical churches like Vineyard “had a strict policy against remarriage after divorce,” Wilson said, given that Jesus said people should not remarry.

But that changed, and Wilson could not see any reason to also exclude gay people.

Most congregants are supportive of Wilson.

“God is unhappy when we turn anyone away from the church or him,” said Penny Johnson, 55, of Livonia. “Being evangelical means you bring people to Jesus. You don’t turn them away.”

Johnson said she was raised by a single mom at a time when many evangelical Christians frowned upon people like her and those who were divorced.

“We’ve overcome that for the most part,” and need to do that now with LGBT people, she said.

“I have family, friends who are LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) and the fact that I am a Christian and go to church is, quite frankly, off-putting to people in that community,” she said. Gays “are feeling like they’re being turned away from the church.”

That happened to Lisa Ruby, 49, and her wife, Lisa Carico, 42, a lesbian couple who were looking for a church.

They could have joined a liberal house of worship that welcomed gays, but “we didn’t want a crunchy granola church like Unitarians, where they don’t talk about God or the Bible,” Ruby said. My partner wanted “something very Bible thumping, a lot of Jesus. She liked a lot of church in her church.”

Raised Jewish, Ruby felt the same way: “I like a lot of Bible in my religion.”

But many evangelical churches were homophobic and didn’t accept gays, they said, including Wilson’s church at first. Five years ago, when they tried to join, Wilson suggested to the couple that they find a different church. Carico came back later the following year and Ruby then got involved with the church’s single women’s ministry.

“No one really talked about” the issue of their sexual orientation, Ruby said. “It was like ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ”

As Wilson started becoming more open to LGBT people, they grew increasingly at home in the church.

“We’ve lost church members” because of Wilson’s changed views, Ruby said. “We’ve lost money. But he couldn’t go forward. It wasn’t what he believed anymore.”

Wilson’s wife, Nancy, also was a pastor. She died suddenly in 2012. She was known for always emphasizing “love, love, love,” said Ruby, who worked with Nancy in the women’s ministry.

Ken Wilson also stressed love, but he’s “very smart, very intellectual,” Ruby said.

“He would have to find it in the Bible. He is a scholar. He couldn’t just say, ‘gay people are great, love them, let them in the church.’ He needed to figure it for himself, not just in his heart, but in his head.”

Ken Wilson did that, embarking on a spiritual and academic journey that had him trying to understand Bible verses that conservatives say clearly prohibit sexual activity between people of the same gender.

“I take the Bible very seriously,” Wilson said. “It’s inspired, it’s God’s word in written form, and I do not dismiss the text and scriptures that speaks this question.

“When the Bible prohibits same-sex sex, what was the historical context for that? There’s no real indication monogamous, gay partnerships were the aim of the Biblical texts, but there were some very clearly examples of exploitative same-sex sexuality, like temple prostitution or slave sex, masters requiring slaves to perform sexual services as part of their ownership of them.

“In the New Testament, there was pederasty, where older men providing mentoring to underage prepubescent males in exchange for sexual services ... The Sodom and Gomorrah story is about gang rape. It’s not about anything like loving monogamous relationships. To apply that to the issue of homosexuality is a gross misuse of scripture.”

Some evangelical theologians agree, including James Brownson, a professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, whose 2013 book “Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships” made the evangelical case for same-sex relationships.

For both straight and gay couples, Wilson preaches that sex should be between two people who are in committed relationships for life.

But the issue for Wilson was not just an abstract theological debate. It involved real people in his congregation, which has about 500-600 in attendance on Sundays.

“I think about this pastorally, not politically,” he said. “Pastors have to protect families and couples who are vulnerable from the spotlight and the vitriol of this intense controversy.”

Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford, said that Wilson’s views will become more common in years to come given increasing acceptance of gays among young people.

“I think this debate is over,” Luhrmann said. “There’s been such a rapid tipping point towards the tolerance of homosexuality. It’s just so clear.”

White evangelical Protestant millennials (ages 18-33) are twice as likely as the oldest generation (68 and older) to support same-sex marriage, 43% to 19%, according to a survey released in February by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Wilson’s views seem to have changed hearts inside his congregation. The Monday after same-sex marriage was legalized, he asked the congregation if anyone wanted to help give Communion.

Carico is usually introverted, but volunteered. A woman in the church who was raised conservative went up to Carico to get Communion specifically from her.

She told Carico she had been struggling with Wilson’s new views, but now accepted them. The woman then started crying hard.

“It was so incredible,” Ruby said, recalling the moment. “It was beautiful.”


The Rev. Ken Wilson’s new book “A Letter to My Congregation: An evangelical pastor’s path to embracing people who are gay, lesbian and transgender in the company of Jesus” was published by ReadTheSpirit Books. It’s available on Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com

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Yesterday, millions of people went to church in America, a few hundred in Ann Arbor, Michigan heard this message of acceptance and inclusion, but what about the rest..

This weekend the Mormon Church held it semi-annual conference attended by more than 100,000 in Salt Lake City and broadcast live by satellite to millions of the church's members gathered in thousands of their meeting houses throughout the world.  

This is the message they received:

"While many governments and well-meaning individuals have redefined marriage, the Lord has not," said Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve. "He designated the purpose of marriage to go far beyond the personal satisfaction and fulfillment of adults, to more importantly, advancing the ideal setting for children to be born, reared and nurtured." […]

Andersen encouraged church members not to buckle under the pressure of a growing movement on social media and elsewhere by advocates who want to make gay marriage legal. He offered the example of a woman who articulated her support for "traditional marriage" on Facebook and refused to take it down despite backlash.

Anderson also praised those who “struggle with same-sex attraction,” but stay true to the commandments of God and not succumb to the sin of homosexuality.  

As I have grown older, I have become increasingly convinced that organized religion is an evil corruption of the relationship that men and women can and should have with their God.  It has been the source of countless wars and it is still so today.  Here in America, religion sponsors hatred and violence at home and abroad.  The more I think about it, the more I regret that I was ever involved in it.

"Fear Eats the Soul"