PDF version is available here The 72nd summer connECtion of Evangelicals Concerned will be held May 30 – June 1, 2014 at Kirkridge in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. Our keynoters will be Amy Plantinga Pauw, Professor of Doctrinal Theology at Louisville Theological Seminary, Jim Rayburn III, author, speaker, jewelry designer and son of Young…
PDF version is available here An “ex-gay” rally that promised to bring thousands of “ex-gays” to the Supreme Court Building turned out fewer than ten people. Among them was Richard Cohen, famous for his “cuddling on the couch” counseling with young male clients. “Grandpa” McIntyre drove his pick-up truck from Texas and claims he’s “the…
Exodus shuts down after nearly forty years of failure at trying to change sexual orientation. Nearly four decades of claimed success were wishful thinking and deceit. Exodus president Alan Chambers says: “For quite some time we’ve been imprisoned in a worldview that’s neither honoring toward our fellow human beings, nor biblical.” He apologizes for the…
(PDF version available here) John Paulk admits: “I do not believe that reparative therapy changes sexual orientation; in fact, it does great harm to many people.” This former head of Focus on the Family’s “ex-gay” program, former Exodus board president and 1998 Newsweek cover story (with his “ex-lesbian” wife) has, in April, issued an official…
(PDF version available here) The 100th person to keynote an EC summer retreat will be Shari Johnson. She’s the author of Above All Things: The Journey of an Evangelical Christian Mother & Her Gay Daughter. Johnson is president of P-FLAG in Odessa, Texas. The 101st person to be an EC keynoter will be Jared Porter…
(PDF version available here) On November 6, voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington legalized same-sex marriage and Minnesotans voted down a constitutional amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage. Six states (New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Iowa and New York as well as D.C.) had already legalized same-sex marriage. Thirty-two states have voted to restrict…
(PDF version available here) Longtime “ex-gay” leader John Smid says he’s never seen sexual orientation change through all his 22 years in the “ex-gay” movement. He’s written a book, Ex’d Out, about coming to this public acknowledgement. EC’s founder, psychotherapist Ralph Blair, endorses it: “However well-intended, the ‘ex-gay’ efforts of the past four decades were…
(PDF version available here) “So great to learn that God is saving people in gay Christian circles. I guess I have felt, along with many evangelicals, that once someone drops the traditional view of homosexuality, eventually all the other dominos will fall and the result will be some kind of vacuous liberalism or secular humanism. …
Conservative Protestantism’s continuing antigay agenda “is likely to mean saving fewer souls.” This is a conclusion of American Grace authors Robert D. Putnam of Harvard and David E. Campbell of Notre Dame. Writing in the Los Angeles Times (Oct 17), they confirm a continuing cultural finding: that “intolerance of homosexuality” is proving to be “the…
After an average of 16 years in mixed-orientation marriage, the same-sex oriented spouse is still same-sex oriented. On the basis of self-reports, there’s no shift toward heterosexual attraction on the part of the same-sex oriented spouse, even though there’s some participation in sex acts within the marriage. When asked about frequency of sexual relations within…