Letter from Misty Irons to the Overseeing Session

October 19, 2002

To the Session of Redeemer OPC:

Thank you again for giving me the opportunity to respond to your questions and concerns about my Musings On website at our July 23 meeting. I am grateful that you took the time out to meet with me during what was a busy and stressful month for some of you. As you have expressed to me, I was also pleased that by the end of our discussion we were able to affirm our friendship and mutual love for one another in Christ.

Shortly after your most recent session meeting of September 24, 2002, Lee delivered to me a copy of your letter bearing the same date, in which you direct me again to shut down my Musings On website. As I have considered your letter over these past three weeks, I have had some difficulty in understanding the session’s perspective on what took place at the July 23 meeting, since my recollection is apparently different. It may very well be that I have misunderstood your letter or failed to remember some vital information about that meeting and need to be corrected, so perhaps I ought to explain to you where my difficulties lie so that you can help to clear them up for me.

The session’s perspective seems to be that the July 23 meeting brought to light “serious disagreements” between myself and the session regarding “what the Scripture teaches regarding the issues before us.” You say that you hope that our meeting “clarified in [my] mind the reasons” why I am being asked to shut down my Musings On website, namely, my “unbiblical views regarding homosexuality” and “language that is demeaning to brothers and sisters in Christ.” And now that some time has passed since that meeting, the session is “directing [me] once again to shut down [my] website and expect[s] that to happen as soon as possible.” So it sounds to me as if the expectation of the session these past two months was that I should have been spending that period of time thinking about the Scriptures that were brought to my attention during that meeting, and having been so instructed I am now being reminded by the session once again to submit to biblical teaching and shut down my website.

However, I do not recall any of the session members instructing me from the Scriptures during our meeting on why they believed my views on homosexuality were unbiblical. Here is what I do recall. I remember that I began the first 20 minutes of our discussion talking about the exegetical, theological and confessional bases for why I believed both homosexual orientation and homosexual activity were sinful. I cited the Genesis 1-2 account of the marriage union between Adam and Eve as proof that God’s will for marriage is clearly a heterosexual and not a homosexual union. I also volunteered some further thoughts I had been contemplating lately, centered around Genesis 1:27 which seems to teach that the image of God consists of both male and female. I speculated that perhaps the reason why God approves only of heterosexual marriage is because only a male-female union can reflect the image of God in its fullness, meaning that the Bible’s teaching that the marriage union should be between a male and female, far from being a mere social or cultural norm, is actually grounded in the everlasting character of God himself. I then handed out copies and read aloud to the session an article I had written in the April 2002 issue of Nicotine Theological Journal, in which I used the doctrine of original sin as taught in Westminster Shorter Catechism #18 to defend my view that the homosexual orientation can be both an unchosen condition and also a sinful condition in God’s sight. In the article I argue that even the homosexual who does not act upon his orientation is still guilty of sin and deserving of God’s judgment and condemnation, apart from Christ. Except for one elder who asked a question of clarification about my NTJ article, I do not recall anyone raising issue with my presentation or seeking to correct me from the Scriptures, and so I assumed that I must have satisfied the session that my views on homosexuality were orthodox.

So when I received your letter which states “while it remains obvious to all of us that we have serious disagreements about what Scripture teaches regarding the issues before us...” and which characterized me as holding to “unbiblical views regarding homosexuality,” I have had trouble understanding what the session believes those serious scriptural disagreements to be, and what exactly is unbiblical about my view of homosexuality. I don’t recall the session having instructed me on these points.

The only Scripture verse that I recall being brought to my attention during our two-hour meeting was Ephesians 5:11, which says, “And do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even reprove them.” [Mr. K--] used this verse to exhort me to be more confrontational of the sin of homosexuality in my writings on the Musings On site. In response I said that I agreed with him that homosexuals ought to be confronted with their sin and that I hoped to write more on the issue of sin in the near future. I explained, however, that in my research I have found that there are very few homosexuals who haven’t already been strongly confronted by Christians about how the Bible condemns their homosexuality. What homosexuals rarely experience is Christians taking the time to listen to their side of the story about how most of them have already spent years trying to change their orientation without success, and that is the reason why they seem unresponsive when we try to share the gospel with them. Given this tension between our two groups, I have come to believe that the best approach to reaching homosexuals is first to demonstrate a willingness to listen to them and understand where they are coming from before expecting them to listen to what I have to say about their sin.

I had an opportunity to explain more about the evangelistic approach I am taking on my Musings On site when one session member raised the concern that I criticize Christians in my writings, a concern that is echoed in your letter which characterizes my website as “contain[ing] language that is demeaning to brothers and sisters in Christ.” At our July 23 meeting I responded to this concern by explaining that being openly self-critical as a Christian before my homosexual readers is a deliberate strategy on my part to build bridges with the gay community by acknowledging the ways they have been unjustly treated by Christians. I said that I viewed evangelizing homosexuals as a cross-cultural ministry in which one is required to study the culture at hand, identify those differences that may be a stumbling block to the gospel message, and seek out ways to remove those stumbling blocks. In the case of the gay community, I have concluded that the main stumbling block to preaching the gospel to them is that many homosexuals feel they have been mistreated by Christians. My way of trying to remove that stumbling block is to side with them on those criticisms that I believe to be legitimate. I also told the session that I was not aware that being critical of other Christians in writing was somehow inappropriate, particularly in Reformed circles where we routinely criticize other evangelical Christians in print all the time. I mentioned Credenda Agenda as an example of one publication widely read among Reformed Christians that does this. In view of these reasons which I presented at our meeting, I am not sure why the session still considers my criticisms of Christians, which appear on a personal website that represents only myself, to be more of a disturbance to the peace and purity of the church than those criticisms that have appeared for years in numerous well-known Reformed publications.

These are my recollections of the portions of our July 23 discussion where I thought I had already addressed the concerns that the session raises with me once again in this most recent letter. In your letter you say, “Our sincere hope is that our meeting clarified in your mind the reasons why we have asked you to shut down your website.” Once again, my impression from this statement is that the session’s expectation was that these past two months I should have been contemplating the clear reasons why the session asked me to shut down my website. But in truth I don’t know what those reasons are, since my recollection is that session members interacted very little with the scriptural, theological and evangelistic explanations I presented at the July 23 meeting. Except for Ephesians 5:11, I don’t know what Scripture verses I ought to be considering in order to try to bring my own thinking in line with the session’s.

But there is another reason why I have not been spending the past two months contemplating the reasons why I should shut down my website. On July 23 after our discussion ended, you may recall that I was excused from the meeting so that the session could discuss in private what action should be taken. I was waiting out in the living room when the meeting concluded, and the moderator [Mr. P--] came out and sat down with me in private to explain the session’s decision. What I remember being told by [Mr. P--] is that the session had decided not to take action against me for now (which I understood to mean disciplinary action), but had instead decided to monitor my website over the next couple of months to see what direction it took. The rationale, he explained, was that in the course of our discussion I had pointed out that some of the writings with which session members took issue were written a year-and-a-half ago, but that in recent months I have had the benefit of being challenged by some of the criticisms I have received during this current controversy, to which I planned to respond positively in my future writings. Since the session understood that there is a lag time between my current thinking and getting those thoughts written up and posted on my website, I was told they decided to monitor my site for now to see what direction it took in response to the criticisms and concerns that have been brought to my attention.

What I understood from my conversation with [Mr. P--] made sense to me in view of the progress I thought we had just made in our discussion together. Going into the meeting I assumed the session’s main concern would be my view of homosexuality, which is why from the outset I tried to affirm in the clearest terms that I could come up with that I believed both homosexual orientation and homosexual activity were sinful. When I saw the absence of objection and general lack of comment in response to my presentation, I took it to mean that the session must have been satisfied that my views were orthodox. The rest of the meeting was spent discussing more peripheral, non-doctrinal issues such as my political views, the rhetorical style of my writings, my openness to the possibility of change in a homosexual person, and certain phrases/sentences in my writings that were said to be misleading or unclear. So when I heard from [Mr. P--] at the conclusion of the meeting that the session decided to focus on monitoring my website, I took it to mean that the session wanted me to come up with changes/additions I could make on my site that would appropriately respond to the concerns they had raised regarding these more minor areas of disagreement.

I immediately thought of a number of changes that I wanted to make right away, but it happened that my web designer closed down his business on July 31 so I had to spend most of August searching for a replacement. By the end of August I found a new web designer and had him make the following changes on my site, which were finalized on September 5:

1. I posted a disclaimer on the front page of my site, according to the wording that was crafted by the session at their July 11 meeting: “The views expressed on this website are solely my own opinions and do not represent the official position of my local church or denomination.”

2. I completely removed the article called “Sex, Swear Words and Satan” which one of the session members told me he found offensive, because in it I write about a conversation I once had with my husband in which we criticized Christians. Even though in my own opinion I thought the piece was pretty harmless, I thought perhaps this elder was right in saying that my criticisms of Christians in that article were overkill, and since it didn’t contribute significantly to my site anyhow, I figured it would be best just to remove it.

3. In response to the concerns of one session member, I incorporated some clarifying remarks in a sentence I wrote in “A Log of My Progress” in which I said that I would not “disfellowship” from a homosexual person who left the conservative church because he/she was unable to live celibate and wanted to seek out a relationship. I added some parenthetical qualifications to make it clear that by “disfellowship” I was referring to my personal friendship with that person (as opposed to ecclesiastical disfellowship).

4. I rewrote the opening sentence of “A Conservative Christian Case for Civil Same-Sex Marriage” in response to general criticism I have received for saying that “the church” should support civil same-sex marriage, which I agree was a careless oversight on my part. I replaced “the church” with “conservative Christians.”

5. In “A Conservative Christian Case...” I changed the sentence that read, “In fact it is absolutely essential for the church’s survival in a pluralistic society” to read, “ In fact it is absolutely essential for the survival of our religious freedom,” in response to general criticism I have received about that statement.

I am also planning to post a new article in which I talk about a gay Christian man who believed that his homosexuality was a sin and committed himself to a celibate life. My thought is that this article would be a good way of transitioning my website into dealing more in depth with the issue of the sin of homosexuality, in response to [Mr. K--’s] exhortation to me from Ephesians 5:11. I am presently in the last stages of preparing the final draft of that piece.

Yet having received your recent letter, I now wonder if there has been a misunderstanding regarding what I thought the session expected of me as a result of our July 23 meeting. If I have been mistaken about what I thought those expectations to be, I would greatly appreciate the session’s assistance in clarifying them for me.

Thank you for your patience in hearing my concerns in this rather lengthy response. I wish I could have written you a much shorter letter, but for clarity’s sake I felt I needed to take the time to explain myself fully. As always I look forward to hearing your response.

Yours in Christ,

Misty Irons