The gay club

Christian leaders seek to help pastors battle desires
Gay-sex controversies have led not to new theology but to a call for the church to help pastors fight their urges.
By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
December 21, 2006

DENVER — Recent gay-sex scandals involving evangelical pastors have prompted much soul-searching among conservative Christian leaders.

No one has proposed rethinking the theology that homosexuality is a sin. Instead, there's a growing consensus that the church must do a better job of helping pastors resist all immoral desires, such as a lust for pornography, an addiction to drugs or a lifelong same-sex attraction.

Seminary professors, Christian counselors and veteran clergy say the best way to help pastors fight temptation is to get them talking — even about their most shameful secrets. They don't want a sordid tell-all from the pulpit each Sunday. But they would like pastors to bare their weaknesses and admit their lapses before a small group of "accountability partners" — friends committed to listen with empathy, then rebuke or advise as needed.

"Our current environment demands perfection of pastors," said Craig Williford, president of the Denver Seminary. "It doesn't allow leaders to struggle, to be human, to deal with their issues without fear of losing their ministry. We need to help them find safe harbors."

Williford recently attended a conference with 50 seminary presidents; most, he said, had pushed this issue to the top of their agenda after the scandals.

The most recent involved the Rev. Paul Barnes, 54, who resigned Dec. 10 as pastor of a large church in suburban Denver after confessing to repeated trysts with men. In a tearful goodbye video, Barnes told his congregation he had struggled with homosexuality since he was a boy. "I can't tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away," Barnes said, according to the Denver Post. One of its reporters viewed the video before the church sealed it last week.

The confession in many ways echoed a farewell letter the Rev. Ted Haggard, 50, wrote his Colorado Springs mega-church last month after admitting to contact with a male prostitute.

Both men described their lives as a decades-long battle against their desires. They said they had tried numerous strategies to overcome their feelings but did not succeed.

Some gay-rights activists had hoped these accounts would prompt a reevaluation of the widespread view among evangelicals that homosexuality is a choice — and that it can be overcome with prayer and discipline. "If one of these guys in power would say 'I've been wrong,' that would change the world," said the Rev. Mel White, who runs a faith-based gay-rights group called Soulforce.

But many evangelicals have drawn a very different lesson from the scandals.

They note that Barnes and Haggard said they felt alone in their struggles, unable to confide in anyone. And they blame that isolation — at least in part — for the pastors' falls.

"We don't know how to deal with what's going on inside us, so we stuff it, or deny it, or adamantly preach against it," said the Rev. Kurt Fredrickson, who directs the doctorate program at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

The Rev. H.B. London, who runs a clergy counseling program for the Focus on the Family ministry in Colorado Springs, said: "There's a loneliness, even though you're surrounded by lots of people, and that often drives you to try to fill your life in another way."

"Oh, faith partner, is it wrong to imagine Heath Ledger pounding my ass in a tent?"

"Why yes it is, just as it is wrong to imagine blowing Lance Bass backstage"

"Let's pray as we listen to Donnie McClurkin"