“Lord of all” really means all

After college, I had a brief stint as an online community manager for a large international missions agency. There were a lot of great conversations about missions, worship, and general theology. Someone eventually joined not just to converse with us, but to convert us to his beliefs. He wrote essays about his personal stance on theological issues, including why you couldn’t truly be a Christian unless you made the choice as an adult to be baptized. His posts were divisive and not really productive, serving mostly to pull people out of the conversations we were having relating to the missions agency. We tried to handle the situation diplomatically by talking to him about keeping the discussions more focused on missions and worship, but he insisted that we couldn’t talk about those things unless our theology was correct. In the end, there was no agreement that could be made and we had to ask him to leave.

At the time, I was shocked by that guy’s hardline stance on theological issues while arguably being wrong about many of the things he talked about. I’m not a trained theologian by any means, but I was pretty sure that having such fierce arguments over who was really a Christian was wrong. What shocked me most, though, was his inability to engage in community while disagreements existed. But I would never do something like that, right? I was much more enlightened than him, I would never engage in such tomfoolery.

I grew up in the deep South in the ’90s, and there were a few things I grew up believing that absolutely ended up being wrong. I grew up learning that people from the opposing political party were anti-Christian, and that numerous other groups were acting in direct opposition to “us.” Most notably, I grew up with a lot of false and harmful notions about gay and trans people. I never considered what I believed to be hate—I thought I was giving these people the tough love that they needed. But even without actively hating people, I passively hated and allowed hate and injustice to exist.

In my writing for the GPS, I tell a lot of stories about other people doing the wrong things and me convincing them to do the right things. I want to be clear in my stance here: I was wrong about many things in my youth, and not loving gay and trans people, who had already been rejected by many Christians, was very wrong. I was so wrapped up in thinking of myself as a loving person that I mislabeled my apathy and inaction as love. When I write these posts, I talk about doing the right thing not because I’m some enlightened saint who has always believed everything that I preach, but because I learned many of the things I know through failure.

Being loving can often mean admitting that you were wrong in the past, not just about personal mistakes, but also about positions on major issues—and people. The point is not to wallow in guilt and make these issues about us; the point is to do better and keep the focus of the love on the people who need it. We all want the church to be a place where everyone is truly welcome, but we’re never going to get there if we spend all our time thinking about how everyone else is missing that mark. We also, each of us, have to change to be more accepting. That can be hard, but for the people who have been excluded from our community, it’s vital.