JD Greear penned a defense of himself against the exposure that he got in Megan Basham’s new book Shepherds For Sale: .
Megan Basham wite:
Though he reversed his position after two years of pushback, North Carolina megachurch pastor J. D. Greear, while president of the Southern Baptist Convention, encouraged his congregation to minimize speaking about sexual sins like homosexuality, saying they should not “shout about what the Bible whispers about”—as if the destruction of Sodom and Paul’s description in Romans 1 of the progression of societal depravity were mere murmurs.
J.D.: I suppose it’s fitting we start with this one, as it has become, by now, a very familiar critique.
First, I have not changed my position on homosexuality or changed how I encouraged our congregation to engage with it. Multiple streams of evidence show that. I used a poor choice of words that allowed my meaning to be misconstrued, especially when those words were lifted out of context of the rest of the message. When it became clear that people outside of our church thought I was minimizing or denying the sinfulness of homosexuality, I took responsibility for my failure in communication and clarified my position.
The problem is, although JD Greear flip-flopped on the Bible whispers about homosexuality line, he has not changed his plethora of compromises on homosexuality.
In using “whisper” I was making a comparison with how Jesus talked about pride and religious hypocrisy versus how he talked with those he encountered in sexual sin (i.e., compare his tone in Matthew 23 with the tone of his conversations in John 4 and John 8). I was attempting to show that whenever Jesus dealt with someone in sexual sin in the Gospels, he spoke to them up close, with tenderness, as individuals with stories, even as he made clear their sin to them. In the sermon itself, in the statements that immediately followed, that is exactly how I contextualized what I meant by “whispers.”
As I’ve acknowledged multiple times, my use of the word “whisper” to make that point was confusing and could be misleading. I apologized for the word use in this blog post and in this podcast. I acknowledged that faults in communication are almost always the fault of the communicator, and that I was guilty of using unwise and unhelpful words. [emphasis Greear’s]
JD Greear is caught up on this line, and Megan Basham to a lesser degree. But it is by far not the worst thing Greear has said about homosexuality. Consider these words Greear spoke at an Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission event, as highlighted by Jon Harris of Conversations That Matter.
I do want to apologize to the gay and lesbian community on behalf of my community and me for not standing up against abuse and discrimination directed towards you. That was wrong and we need your forgiveness stand up and be among the fiercest advocates for the preservation of the dignity and the rights of LGBT people.
– JD Greear
Indeed, if I wanted to make a passing jab at JD Greear for being compromised on sodomy, this would have been the quote to have referenced. JD Greear has not repented of this error.
