The following comes from a June 20 story in World Magazine.
Exodus International—a Christian ministry that aimed to help people struggling with homosexuality—announced Wednesday it would close after nearly 40 years of operation.
A statement on the group’s website said board members believed the organization had grown too judgmental. The leaders plan to launch a new organization under a new name.
“Exodus is an institution in the conservative Christian world, but we’ve ceased to be a living, breathing organism,” said Exodus President Alan Chambers. “For quite some time we’ve been imprisoned in a worldview that’s neither honoring toward our fellow human beings, nor biblical.”
The announcement came less than a day after Chambers issued an apology to the homosexual community. In his statement Chambers apologized for promoting counseling methods that included reparative therapy that “stigmatized parents.” (Reparative therapists focus on relationships between homosexual patients and their parents when examining causes for homosexuality. Not all Christian therapists use this method.)
Chambers also apologized for concealing his own ongoing struggles with same-sex attraction in the past. Chambers sought help from Exodus more than 20 years ago and left an active homosexual lifestyle. Several years later he married a woman and adopted two children. (The family lives in Florida.) He has since emphasized that marriage doesn’t “cure” homosexuality and that many homosexuals continue to struggle with the temptation their whole lives, much like other sins.
In the statement, Chambers seemed to re-assert his belief that homosexuality is unbiblical: “I cannot apologize for my deeply held biblical beliefs about the boundaries I see in Scripture surrounding sex, but I will exercise my beliefs with great care and respect for those who do not share them.”
But Chambers also seemed to affirm parts of a homosexual lifestyle that many conservative Christians would find distressing, including his belief that gay couples could be “every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know.” He also added, “I cannot apologize for my beliefs about marriage. But I do not have any desire to fight you on your beliefs or the rights that you seek.”
….WORLD named Chambers its Daniel of the Year in 2011 for his nearly two decades of work at Exodus that drew fierce criticism from the homosexual community. Chambers told WORLD that homosexuality was sinful, but repenting from the sin was possible through the grace of Christ. He emphasized involvement in a local church as a key component of Christian living.
Less than a year later, Exodus announced it would no longer endorse reparative therapy. The move drew some criticism, but many critics were more alarmed with statements Chambers had made in the previous months, including when he told a gathering of the Gay Christian Network, “We’re Christians, all of us.” (See “Alan astray?” from the Aug. 11, 2012, issue of WORLD Magazine.)
When asked if a person living a gay lifestyle would escape hell as long as he has accepted Christ as his Savior, Chambers replied in part, “…while behavior matters, those things don’t interrupt someone’s relationship with Christ.”
Those comments led Robert Gagnon, an associate professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, to call for Chambers’ resignation. Gagnon, who has written about homosexuality and spoken at Exodus events, said it’s unbiblical to assure people living in lifelong, unrepentant sin that they will go to heaven.
“Alan’s approach of providing assurances of salvation to those actively engaged in sexually immoral intercourse is a very different approach than Jesus’ and Paul’s warnings that immoral sexual behavior, among other offenses, can get one excluded from the kingdom of God and thrown into hell,” Gagnon wrote in a 35-page paper last July….
To read the entire story, click here.
Now tell me CCD why the need to have this article? Why are we reporting on this garbage? This is just this man’s opinion and I don’t want to read up more on him and this dead organization! This is truly a set back for our moral values…I something have to think why is a Catholic website wanting to include this type of reporting on their website..I have to question the integrity and or their reasoning, which I find faulty…Those are my own two cents here….yikes!
The recent USSC decisions are justabumb in the road..
The battle of homosexuality(the practice of sodomy)has just begun.
Sodomy marriage is just a tactic used by the homosods to promote and
propagate sodomy.Their reasoning is illogical and irrational.
A good example of the reasoning is the parent’s ploy:
My son or daughter is a homosexual,therefore homosexuality is good.
therefore Iwill support and promote the practice of sodomy.
The 95% of americans are like a sleeping giant and all the propaganda by
the SSmedia will not convince them that evil is good.Sodomy is unnatural
and is against nature and the Creator of nature.
Wow, Abeca, why’s your back up? It’s a story about people who have an imperfect understanding of how Christianity really works in a fallen world which sees everything “through a glass darkly.” I wouldn’t expect part of the problem, Protestant Christianity, to have a real clear take about the whole homosodomite problem afflicting the contemporary culture. Only the truest form of Christianity has that, called the Roman Catholic Church. We’ve got an unbroken succession of Popes beginning with St. Peter, which we can document, which Protestant Christianity can’t, because they have nothing like that claim we make, unbroken succession. So what’s the beef? You know your JP II Catechism, Protestant Christianity can’t make that claim. They’re fractured in their disunity, we’ve got very clear teaching going back to St Athanasius and St. jerome; Protestant Christianity doesn’t, they teach whatever their very flawed leaders claim is true, from the ravings of King Henry VIII to the Augustinian numbskull, Martin Luther. If you investigate most of the vaunted Protestant leaders and starters of heresy, they’re all pretty much basket cases of Neurosis and Psychosis, especially that raving maniac, Martin Luther. What would one expect from people who were so sure they were right, but showed how wrong they were. John Calvin? Another gloomy nutball reeking of wrong-headed opinions, and willing to persecute all of the members of the “Whore of Babylon,” the Holy Roman Catholic Church. So lighten up, Abeca C., institutions and people like this are ALWAYS gonna trip themselves up; they’re stumbling around in the dark of Protestant Christianity. GOD BLESS ALL, MARKRITE
Markrite, you might consider differentiating between protestants and their religion … two different things. I was brought up Lutheran and never heard of such things as the whore of babylon. I never heard anything about Catholics or popes. I was also a cub scout and a boy scout and never heard anything about Catholics, even though they were Jews and Masons and Protestants.
Markrite the devil likes this…..it gives people idea’s…tempts them to say “ya maybe this group is right”…..Like the norm that is spreading today…..the more stories like this garbage…it does not do what you say but it actually gives them more ammunition and more power for their agenda…For the few here who know better but for the thousands it does the opposite. People are hungry looking for answers and for someone who has a siblings who may have that disorder…this may be their answer….the article shares this groups point of view…it is more encouraging for being a pro for the gay agenda not the truth.
It’s cheap and trash reporting especially since this is a Catholic website, that is my opinion sir, no one will change my mind on this I see the pattern and it sets us back on the mission of the church…giving this group free acknowledgment….I think temptation plays big here….like the serpent tempted Eve with the information…Eve took the bite….there are good logical reasons for other articles but this one is clearly one that can work both ways especially on a Catholic website…..
Think what you want, but I speak from what I see today….take away reparation therapy as the gays want it…give more articles of groups sharing their pro-feelings on gay issues…their false compassion, we have landed in the gay mafia’s trap and it’s exactly what they want.
Most of today’s Protestant Faiths would even be unrecognizable by their founders – Martin Luther, King Henry 8th, and John Calvin, etc.
They did not promote homosexual activity or fornication or abortion. (Although Henry did support adultery.)
Most Fundamentalist faiths today at least try to adhere to the Bible, as they interpret it.
Dave,
What do you know of Martin Luther’s sexual proclivities? Gathering from your above statements, I would venture you know little about him.
Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen said “to know History is to be Catholic”!
Learn the true History of the Catholic Church so you can defend Her!
God bless, yours in Their Hearts,
Kenneth M. Fisher
Pray away the gay does not work. Get over it.
Arguing with tribal loyalty does not work either. Get over it.
Those with SSA (same-sex attraction) should NEVER be encouraged to marry.
They are called to chastity and celibacy – just like all other single/unmarried persons.
Fornication, homosexual acts, masturbation, pornography, contraception, voluntary sterilization are all MORTAL SINS.
(Everyone has different temptations, all equally a struggle to overcome. Ask God to help us do His will, not our own will.)
I am not asserting any studies or research with this comment. Only relaying my personal, anecdotal experience. Friends of mine who struggle with SSA and who have in the past or now consider themselves gay – who are also trying to live chaste and celibate lives – state that it is much easier to deal with the struggles of SSA in a single life rather than in a married one. They have stated that it is easier to focus on their strong desires and to avoid acting on them without the added pressures of being in a family that carries with it other triggers that cause obsession (their word, not mine) with sin. I embrace my fellow Catholics who struggle with this issue. It is a difficult road to travel. But at no point can we indulge as acceptable any sin that separates us from God.
Accurate teaching of the Catholic Church regarding homosexual acts, can be found in the “Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition”.
CCC: # 2357, 2358, 2359 & 2396.
Bible: Gen 19:1-29; Rom 1:24-27; 1 Cor 6:9-10; 1 Tim 1:10.
DAVE here are more:
1. Saint Basil of Caesarea, the fourth century Church Father who wrote the principal rule of the monks of the East, establishes this: “The cleric or monk who molests youths or boys or is caught kissing or committing some turpitude, let him be whipped in public, deprived of his crown [tonsure] and, after having his head shaved, let his face be covered with spittle; and [let him be] bound in iron chains, condemned to six months in prison, reduced to eating rye bread once a day in the evening three times per week. After these six months living in a separate cell under the custody of a wise elder with great spiritual experience, let him be subjected to prayers, vigils and manual work, always under the guard of two spiritual brothers, without being allowed to have any relationship . . . with young people.”
2. In the Constitution Cum Primum of April 1, 1566, Saint Pius V solemnly established: “Having set our minds to remove everything that may in some way offend the Divine Majesty, We resolve to punish, above all and without indulgence, those things which, by the authority of the Sacred Scriptures or by most grievous examples, are most repugnant to God and elicit His wrath; that is, negligence in divine worship, ruinous simony, the crime of blasphemy, and the execrable libidinous vice against nature. For which faults peoples and nations are scourged by God, according to His just condemnation, with catastrophes, wars, famine and plagues. . . . Let the judges know that, if even after this, Our Constitution, they are negligent in punishing these crimes, they will be guilty of them at Divine Judgment and will also incur Our indignation. . . . If someone commits that nefarious crime against nature that caused divine wrath to be unleashed against the children of iniquity, he will be given over to the secular arm for punishment; and if he is a cleric, he will be subject to analogous punishment after having been stripped of all his degrees [of ecclesiastical dignity]
The Third Lateran Council (1179) establishes: “Anyone caught in the practice of the sin against nature, on account of which the wrath of God was unleashed upon the children of disobedience (Eph. 5:6), if he is a cleric, let him be demoted from his state and kept in reclusion in a monastery to do penance; if he is a layman, let him be excommunicated and kept rigorously distant from the communion of the faithful.”
Abeca,
Excellent posts on Church teaching!
Abeca, I ditto Catherine! Thank you for sharing this! It goes to show that the ancient view of compassion and the modern view of compassion are completely disconnected from one another.