Stumbling blocks and millstones

This blog will have several subject to deal with in coming months, but I'm going to camp out for a while in these inaugural posts on the issue of gay marriage in the United States.

Proposition affecting the legitimization of gay unions passed in California, Arizona, Florida and Arkansas on Tuesday, largely, but not entirely due to support from religious groups in the conservative evangelical, Mormon and Catholic communities. Significant support also came from African American, Asian and Hispanic voting blocks. What was at stake was a societal approval of gay and lesbian unions against a moral standard of what turned out to be a majority of people in those states.

So we (an I'm including myself in this because I am a conservative evangelical) won the battle. Gay marriage is not approved in our state and still seems to be looked down upon throughout most of the nation. We won...but at what cost?

Ostensibly, Christians are supposed to be about "winning souls for Christ" by our example. What is the example we have set in this battle? And in winning the battle, have we lost the war for a group of people we know need the love of Christ so desperately?

Right now, regardless of what you think about the sexual orientation, we have prohibited a group of people from solemnizing their hope for a committed relationship. We believe we have halted any attempt to teach our children that these type of unions are acceptable (although I really doubt this will stop teachers from teaching that in Bay Area schools). We have held firm to our principals.

But in the process, not only is the gay community taking to the streets in protest, but hundreds of thousands on heterosexual supporters are joining them, all with a common perception: that the religious community isn't serious when they say that the death of Jesus on the cross paid for all sin for all time; that grace only goes so far; and the God only loves them when they live a certain way.

I'm in the business of communication and we have an adage: perception is reality. It doesn't matter what the truth is when the general perception is opposite from what you might know to be true. So It doesn't matter if we all really believe that Jesus loves everyone and doesn't want anyone to go to Hell. The public perception is that the church is primarily a place of condemnation. As a result there are many people who will now reject the gospel because it has no place in t heir reality.

In Luke 17, Jesus said to his disciples, “It is inevitable that temptations to sin will come, but how terrible it will be for the person through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin."

So we won the battle, as I have said, and we have built a wall to protect us from the sinners' lifestyles. My question to all of you is, how do we overcome that wall now?