Sojourn Community Church, the church that Crystal and I are members, was featured in an article in the LEO(Louisville Eccentric Observer). What an article! I could see many people getting upset about this but not me! I find it very interesting! The writer no doubt has a bias about religion but i will give him credit for the attempt to not be. He did a good job in presenting the facts about the church(the things he calls good and bad).
Now a little details from my perspective. It seems the author is quite unaware of about Christianity and what it means to be Christian. He seemed to get stuck on the fact that Sojourn says that the homosexual lifestyle is a "sin". I can see why he would hung up on that. If you aren't a Christian and you don't understand what sin is, which I would argue that outside of the faith you can't understand what sin is, you would have a problem with someone telling you that a particular lifestyle is wrong. Now with that said it needs to be pointed out that Sojourn doesn't take this stance on its own and it isn't the only thing that the church would label as "sin". Sin is not a complex thing and it is something we all do and we are all called to turn from. So the "sin" of homosexuality is no less or no greater in the eyes of God than the "sin" of drunkenness, adultery, idolatry, murder, and pride(which is a message he preached here).
So to isolate one sin, in the case of this article homosexuality, is misleading. The sermon that is referred too in the article was also about Adultery as well and is one sermon is a line of many sermons being delivered this year by Daniel in the Book of Romans from the New Testament. Daniel does one thing if nothing else well and that is that he sticks to the scriptures. This is where the entire problem between the Christians and non-Christians arises. The belief in the bible and its words. Either you believe that the bible is the inspired Word of God or you don't. If you don't then the words of the bible are nothing more than foolishness to you, or as one person put here nothing more than mere fables for good living. If you believe the bible is the Word of God then you have to believe that he can change your life and the lives of those around you.
So for me I don't take this article as an attack on Sojourn. This is merely a non-believers take on the Church. I don't expect him to have a correct analysis of Sojourn or the beliefs of the Christian faith. Just as I would hope he would not expect me to have an understanding of how journalism is suppose to be done as I have no clue about journalism in the slightest.
