Russell Moore sounds like a very provocative seminary professor! I will quote the setup and question he posed to his Christian Ethics class at Southern Seminary. I will also link to his five part response. I am still considering his response and posting this to simply stir up thought.
Mr. Moore writes:
Every year at the conclusion of Christian ethics class here at Southern Seminary, I give my students a final ethical situation to answer for their final examination. They are graded not on their conclusion, but on how they arrived there. The question below is this year’s dilemma. They’ll answer, and then we’ll discuss it communally as a class on Thursday. Here it is:
This question takes place sometime in the future, in your ministry.
Joan is a fifty year-old woman who has been visiting your church for a little over a year. She sits on the third row from the back, and usually exits during the closing hymn, often with tears in her eyes. Joan approaches you after the service on Sunday to tell you that she wants to follow Jesus as her Lord.
You ask Joan a series of diagnostic questions about her faith, and it is clear she understands the gospel. She still seems distressed though. When you ask if she’s repented of her sin, she starts to cry and grit her teeth.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know how…I don’t know where to start…Can I meet with you privately?”
You, Joan, and a godly Titus 2-type women’s ministry leader in your church meet in your office right away, and Joan tells you her story.
She wasn’t born Joan. She was born John. From early on in John’s life, though, he felt as though he was “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Joan says, “I don’t mean to repeat that old shopworn cliché, but it really is what I felt like.”
Joan tells you that when she was twenty she began the process of “transitioning” from life as a man to life as a woman. She underwent extensive hormone therapy, followed by extensive plastic surgery—including so-called “gender reassignment surgery.” She has lived for the past thirty years—physically and socially—as a woman.
“I want to do whatever it takes to follow Jesus,” Joan tells you. “I want to repent…I just, I don’t know how to do it.”
“I am surgically now a woman. I’ve taken hormones that give me the appearance and physical makeup of a woman,” she says. “Even if I were to put on a suit and tie right now, I’d just look like a woman with a suit and tie. Not to mention the fact that, well, I am physically…a woman.”
“To complicate matters further,” Joan says through tears, “I adopted my daughter, Clarissa, when she was eight months old and she’s ten years old now. She doesn’t know about my past life as…as a man. She just knows me as her Mom.”
“I know the sex change surgery was wrong. I know that my life is twisted. I’m willing to do whatever Jesus would have me to do to make it right,” she says. “But what would Jesus have me to do?”
Joan asks you, “Am I too messed up to repent and be saved? If not, what does it mean for me to repent and live my life as a follower of Jesus? What is right for me to do?”
Show me, step-by-step, what you would say to Joan. Show me what you would tell her to do, short-term and long-term, and show me why in terms of a Christian ethic. Use Scripture, Christian theology, and wisdom to demonstrate not just your final decisions, but how you arrived at them.
Here is a link to the concluding post of Mr. Moore’s own answer to the above scenario.
He concludes with:
If Joan comes to your church this Sunday and hears the gospel, if “she” decides to throw away everything “she” knows and follow Christ, will your church be there to love him, and to show him how to stop pretending and to fight his way toward what he was created to be? Maybe it would take a Joan at the altar call to make us question whether we really believe what we say and what we sing. Is there really power, wonder-working power, in the blood of the Lamb? Is our gospel really good news for prodigal sons, even for sons so lost they once thought they were daughters?
I told you … provocative.
Bob Finch
Nora Seemann
YesGodLovesMe
Jennifer Thorne
Brady
LJ
Debbie Thurman
John Westcott
Julie Neils
Catherine H
I’ll miss you too! Thanks for posting this!
I’ve written a lot, but as someone with GID, I think maybe what I have to say needs to be heard? Or maybe I’ve got tickets on myself?!!!
I am born and living as a female, accepted Jesus as an 8 year old. As a 10 year old, I developed SSA and GID – gender identity disorder, mainly because I didn’t like the behaviour and traits I saw in the other girls at school, and in women in society. And as a Christian, why would I want to display these traits I see in women in society – bitchy, untrustworthy, can only do something by taking their clothes off (including charity events). Because I don’t bitch, I don’t flash skin, I don’t bitch about men, I am rejected by women in general. Men are fine with me.
In churches, I find it difficult to relate to the women because I am not in the middle of redecorating my marital home, having children, getting married etc. What is important to me (charity, improving my local community and world events), is radically different to other women aged 20-40 in church.
I try to hang out with men in churches, but they think I’m wanting a relationship with them, and so talk about their WIFE and CHILDREN in very obvious ways. Books for Christians are very gender stereotypical based on Western gender stereotypes and values. I cannot relate to any book published for women. I feel alienated. I do not fit in.
A lot of the modern churches in the UK (where I live) are teaching gender stereotypes and gender roles that are based on western cultural values, not Biblical values and teaching. This makes it even more difficult for someone with GID to ‘fit in’ in churches.
So even before we talk about whether or not a person should get the surgery reversed, there are so many issues to overcome.
How welcome do GID people feel in church?
Me? Let’s just say I’ve never mentioned GID in any church I’ve been to. Even in the church where there were a lot of SSA people and people knew I have SSA, I did not mention GID. I know one other GID female Christian, born female, and she doesn’t even talk with me about her GID. It’s completely taboo outside of Christian ministries that deal with relational issues like SSA.
I’ve just started going back to church in the past year. I love church, I love The Church and I love God! I now go to a Biblical Methodist church, which doesn’t teach gender roles etc, and women have always had a huge impact in the Methodist church, with no gender-based restrictions or stereotypes placed on them. I know people at church are going to realise I don’t talk about relationships etc, but being one of the 30 people under the age of 60 in the church, they are going to do their best to keep hold of me!!!
What would I say to someone who has had gender-reassignment surgery and comes to Christ? Pray, read the Bible, and ask God what He wants of you. I don’t have any answers.
But I think it will become very difficult for that person, especially if they reject the adopted body when they receive emotional healing. They may have to accept the adopted body as a consequence of sin. I don’t know, I don’t have the answers, and the answers may be different for each person who has had surgery.
To take this discussion wider, if someone has plastic surgery for non-gender related cosmestic reasons and then becomes a Christian, should that person have the surgery reversed? What about Christians who have plastic surgery?
Is the argument the same; chosing to change the body that God gave you?
This is a big issue with far more in it than anyone can grasp. It’s going to take a lot of hard work in research and prayer and reading the Scriptures, and talking with GID people and post-op transsexuals about their journey in faith to come up with any beginning of answers.
Best wishes to anyone trying to find answers -x-
You may change the body, but you cannot never change a man’s soul. Gay, transgendered, effeminate men are still men. Men with twisted minds. These minds need to be straightened up by Christ and all will fall into place. I suggest we look at how the bible views manhood and womanhood. e.g. man reflects the glory of God, woman reflects the glory of man. Man was created first, next the woman. Man must have authority over the woman. From what I observe, gay men are a result of a woman having control or authority over a man, especially the mmother…the gay man must learn how to break free from the bosom of his mother… We have a Father in heaven who can teach us all these things. joan must first cometo Jesus and repent with all his heart, i don’t necessarily suggest he go through another series of operations, just let God’s will be done in her life, and if God tells her to do surgery, then she must obey God’s will. I am absolutely certain that there is no sin too strong that the blood of Jesus cannot wash away.
Good post.
I had read the whole article before and had chewed on it.
All I can think of is a talk my youth pastor gave the church youth group awhile back (which feels like eons ago). He pointed out that Jesus didn’t use the same method of healing twice for those who came to him with their ills. This makes it hard for us to distinguish what healing looks and feels like for each one since it looks/feels so different from someone elses healing.
‘Fitting in’ can (and most times is) a lifelong process. God knows I’ve tried to fit in with the in crowd and the geek crowd only to end up back at the same spot again.
God did promise hardships, but he also promises peace for those who come to him and take his yoke upon their shoulders.
I’m not the poster boy for such things, especially this past week. A song by my one of my favorite bands “five iron frenzy” always rekindles hope inside me when times bear down on me.
“….Man vs the world
man vs machine
mankind vs himself
mankind vs me
the struggles go on
the wisdom I lack
the burdens keep piling up on my back
so hard to breath
to take the next step
the moutain is high
I wait in the depths
yearning for grace
and hoping for peace
Deat GOD increase.”
Every new day-Five Iron Frenzy.
i’m liking Russell Moore and his let’s get practical and talk real life application of this glorious gospel of grace..
i have no answers but it is a great discussion.. if i met joan i would assure her of Jesus’s vast love for her.. and walk and pray with her through the process of seeking God’s plan for her/his life.. not an easy journey but a journey that is possible with Jesus and a loving family.. actually i think God cares far more about things like pride than he does plastic surgery.. and he uses us while he fixes us.. using broken surrendered people to minister to other broken people and building us all together into his glorious bride.. oh i do LOVE God!
The fact that our world is filled with so many gay, lesbian & transgendered men & women is proof enough that people are looking for truth and identity and love and will go to any extreme to find it.
God has put in all of us an ingrained desire to find these things and in fact He is the only one who can fulfill us and restore us back to Him.
You ask us what would we say to a “transgendered” person who comes to Christ? I would say “Thank God for you” Take them in my arms and let them know how much they are loved and let them know that by their testimony, tens of thousands can be saved. Tens of thousands of our lost and broken-hearted can look up and see that God unconditionally loves them and has a plan for their lives.What a great and glorious day that will be when the Church stops trying to figure out what to do “IF” that day comes AND prays for that day to come.WE are ALL made in His image and likeness!
Thank you for posing such a provocative question!
The Church needs to step outside of “Church-ianity” and return to “Christ-ianity”