UnClobber: Expanded Edition with Study Guide

Rethinking Our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality

Colby Martin

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781646982431
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Sessualità e genere nella religione

Armed with only six passages in the Bible—often known as the "Clobber Passages"—the conservative Christian position has been one that stands against the full inclusion of our LGBTQ siblings. UnClobber reexamines each of those frequently quoted passages of Scripture, alternating with author Colby Martin's own story of being fired from an evangelical megachurch when they discovered his stance on sexuality.

UnClobber reexamines what the Bible says (and does not say) about homosexuality in such a way that sheds divine light on outdated and inaccurate assumptions and interpretations. This new edition equips study groups and congregations with questions for discussion and a sermon series guide for preachers.

CHAPTER 1

WHEN THE HEAD AND THE HEART CAN’T GET ALONG

Carol and Iced Tea

As all good stories do, mine begins in a lesbian’s hot tub.

Carol was short, fit, and sported a high and tight haircut. No matter when I saw her, she was dressed in shorts, a polo shirt, and white sneakers. Carol lived across the street from me growing up, and I knew two facts about her: she was a lesbian, and she owned the block’s only hot tub.

I was probably eight or nine years old when my mom told me and my two brothers that our neighbor was gay. My mom knew this because Carol had been her PE teacher back in high school, and though I couldn’t have appreciated how unusual it was at the time, Carol lived out of the closet in our small town of Albany, Oregon, since as long as my mom could remember.

And I knew she had a hot tub because I could see it through the fence on my route when I delivered newspapers around the neighborhood. Carol subscribed to the Democrat Herald, so I interacted with her from time to time as I tossed a paper on her porch or collected her monthly payment.

Even though I was raised in a conservative Baptist home, with a dad who descended from a long line of Baptists, I think it was because my mom was a first-generation Christian that I never got the sense that Carol was anything other than, well, a retired gym teacher who read the paper. You see, while I remember my mom informing the three of us about her former kickball instructor, I don’t recall her layering it with negative associations. Sure, Mom taught us that homosexuality was a “sin in the eyes of the Lord,” but I think she missed the Sunday school series on homosexuality at First Baptist Church, because she never spoke a word of judgment or condemnation against Carol beyond that. Plus, to the excitement of this particular pre-teen paper boy, she said yes when Carol asked if my brothers and I wanted to swim in her hot tub. I’d never been in a hot tub before, and I wasn’t about to let the sinful lifestyle of one of my longtime customers keep me out of the water.

Three things stand out to me about my first time in a hot tub, which also coincided with my first time in the home of someone who wasn’t straight. First, the iced tea wasn’t very good. I’m pretty sure it was unsweetened Lipton. (No offense, Carol, but this is not the drink of choice for young boys.) Second, her hot tub didn’t have any fancy lights, and the jets didn’t work. So it amounted to an oversized bath for me and my brothers, a bit of a letdown for my first time. It took me years to buy into the allure of a Jacuzzi. Finally, thinking back on that afternoon, what stands out the most about Carol-the-lesbian and her backyard hot tub was how, well, normal she was. She might have been a sinner, but she sure was a nice sinner.

Seeds were planted in my heart that afternoon in the piping hot (if sadly motionless) waters of Carol’s tub. I wouldn’t come to appreciate that moment until years later, nor would I be aware of the seeds’ presence in my heart. But in the pages that follow I want to tell you the story of how I discovered that both following the beliefs of my head and trusting the convictions of my heart do not have to be mutually exclusive endeavors.

In fact, I believe that the spiritual journey might very well involve the process of aligning these two realities.

Meeting Jesus on Huntington Beach

The summer of ’99, before I started my final year of high school, the trajectory of my life changed forever.

I grew up going to church religiously. My mom dragged us every Sunday, both before and after my parents divorced when I was ten years old. Like many kids, I was indifferent on my best days and indignant on my worst. So I surprised even myself when, at seventeen years old, I said yes to Jeremy, who asked if I wanted to go with him to Southern California for a week-long Christian conference called SEMP. I’m sure I agreed to go only because I thought Jeremy, one of my youth pastors, was cool. And I felt special for being invited. Plus, for this Oregon born-and-raised kid, SoCal (Southern California for the uninitiated) was a place of magic and mystique.

SEMP—Students Equipped to Minister to Peers—was an annual conference aimed at training high schoolers in the ways of evangelism. The mornings were spent in classrooms, learning tools such as the Jesus Juke¹ and the Romans Road². In the afternoons, they paired us up two-by-two and sent us out to places like Huntington Beach for random street witnessing.

That first day on the beach, harassing vacationers about the eternal destination of their souls left me feeling like a fraud. It revealed my allegiance to Christianity as being in name only. I felt exposed, like the unsuspecting kid who wore all white to the laser tag birthday party. When I returned to the room I was staying in, I collapsed on the bed and sobbed for a solid twenty minutes.

Sometimes life gives you the gift of standing outside yourself, if only for a moment, to grasp the entirety of the fork splitting your road; a moment when you realize that whichever path you take, whatever you decide in this precise moment, will have consequences for years and years to come. As a teenager, obsessed with being popular and neurotic about standing out, the options before me were this: either proceed as usual and continue to live life for the sole purpose of acquiring attention and affection for myself, or make a dramatic about face (what the biblical writers call “repenting”) and devote my energies to bringing attention and affection toward Jesus.

As I lay there in a pool of snot, my pillow soaked with tears, I was confronted with the reality that I had spent the afternoon trying to convince others to follow someone whom I, myself, had never bothered to walk behind. I was introducing strangers to someone I didn’t even know. And the separation between who I was on the inside and what I was doing on the outside was suffocating my soul.

I tracked down Jeremy later that night and asked him to pray with me, to help me take that first step down the path, the path where my life would first and foremost be about Jesus. In that moment, I knew the vision I wanted for my life. Like when you plan a long road trip and you may not know every single place you’ll stop, but you know the destination and can chart out the general course, I sensed a call on my life then as strong as I still do today: I wanted to be a pastor.

I wanted to give my life to telling people about Jesus. I wanted to study the Bible, teach it, and inspire people to trust God with their lives. I wanted to invite people to consider that the Way of Jesus is the best way for a life of peace, hope, justice, and love. I wanted to shepherd people through the ongoing transformation of love in their lives.

Being a pastor has been a harder journey than I could have imagined that night, when I prayed with Jeremy. I’m not sure I would have taken that path had I known some of the heartbreak awaiting me in full-time ministry. But after being in the game for seventeen years now, I can honestly say I am still chasing after the same vision for my life. And while I may no longer tell random strangers that they are destined for eternal damnation if they don’t repeat a magic prayer, my resolve to study the Scriptures, follow Jesus, and invite others to do the same has remained unmoved.

Oversaved

When we got back from SEMP, I was a different person. Whether it was because of my encounter with Jesus for the first time or because of my encounter with Krispy Kreme for the first time, the jury is still out. But there’s no question everything changed. I was (as we called it back then) “on fire for the Lord.” I began organizing prayer groups, teaching Bible studies, and putting on massive evangelistic events to save all my friends. I was unashamedly passionate about Jesus.

Allow me to pause for a moment and apologize to anyone who knew me between 1999 and 2004. Those years, while my intentions were positive and my heart was in the right place, I was a classic case of being oversaved.³ It was annoying. I know. Every conversation had to be about my faith. Every interaction led to a discussion in theology. No one was safe, not the person next to me on an airplane or the couple at the adjacent table in Starbucks. Most of my childhood friends began to tire of my relentless pursuit to proselytize them. I was a Jesus Freak through and through, and any ridicule I received I wore as a badge of honor, assuming it was the persecution Paul spoke of in the New Testament.

After high school, I abandoned my plans to study graphic design in New York and instead enrolled in a small Christian college in Salem, Oregon, where, to my delight, being a Jesus Freak was a virtue. Rather than being ignored and ostracized, I was sought after and elevated. Being oversaved had become an asset.

Now, I mention all this so that you get a sense for how entrenched I was in conservative evangelical Christianity. I could recite Scripture, defend the creeds, and wax eloquent on the advantages of premillennial dispensationalism with the best of them. And yet, when it came to theology around sexuality, I don’t recall spending any time or energy on it. At that time I didn’t have any gay friends or family members that I knew of. Carol, a distant memory and merely an acquaintance, remained my sole interaction with someone who was gay. If the topic of homosexuality did come up, whether at school or at church, the conversation served only to reinforce the party line: homosexuality is a sin. It was as much in question as it was to be a liar, a murderer, or an adulterer. And the Bible was seen as unambiguous in its views. Whether or not homosexuality is wrong in the eyes of God was a nonstarter. As a result, I never started.

Which is why it was so surprising to me, as I sat in that high-ceilinged room being interviewed by Ruth and the other three ministers, that I almost didn’t get licensed to be a pastor because I had conflicted feelings about LGBTQ people and the church.

No Membership Allowed

“You wrote here,” Ruth went on, pointing to my written answers, “that while you agree with the denomination on the issue of homosexuality, you struggle with our church’s policies. Can you elaborate on that for us?”

I thought back to the moment that led me to write down that answer. I was walking through our church lobby while reading the policies and procedures manual, squeezing in some study time during my lunch break. I was reading the sections that covered how the church elected their elders, how they allotted vacation time for staff, and what the process was for becoming a church member. And then I read a sentence that unlocked feelings I didn’t even know I had. Essentially it said, “Practicing homosexuals shall not be permitted to become members of the church.”

I froze, in the middle of the lobby, unsure of how to decipher my emotions. There was something so jarring about the phrase, “shall not be permitted to become members.” It felt like the first time I learned that Augusta National Golf Club, one of our country’s most prized golf clubs and host of the annual Masters Tournament, didn’t allow African Americans to be members until 1990 and didn’t allow women to be members until 2012.

Here was a Christian church, through which I was seeking to become a pastor, that would deny membership to someone because . . . because what, exactly? Because they were attracted to people of the same sex? Or because they had sex with people of the same gender? I wondered what all it took for a person to be considered a “practicing homosexual.” Then I saw there was more. It went on to explain that not only could practicing homosexuals not become members but also could not serve in a number of volunteer positions either.

“So let me get this straight,” I said to myself, oblivious to the fantastic pun, “the denomination will allow gay people to attend their churches, worship on Sundays, volunteer in a limited capacity—such as where people can’t see them or they don’t have any leadership—and accept their tithes and offerings without hesitation, but if a gay person seeks membership or wants to use leadership gifts to serve the body, then nothing but rejection awaits?”

At the time, I didn’t have proper language to name what was going on for me. But ten years later, with a solid decade of hindsight in my toolbox, I discovered the cause of my unsettled spirit walking through the lobby that day.

Pursuing Integrity

I met with Derek once a week for nine months during 2014. He was my spiritual director, helping me discern the calling and mission of my life. At that point I had gone through multiple painful experiences with churches, and I wondered if perhaps my seventeen-year-old self had been wrong. Distraught and a little freaked out, I turned to Derek to find clarity on who I was and what I should be doing.

During our time together, he had me go through an exercise of mapping out a timeline of my life. Using a large poster board, I wrote on dozens of colored sticky notes to chronicle the significant events and people that had impacted me. It was a brutiful⁴ tapestry of my first thirty-two years....