Michael Brown offers excellent insights into the Vicky Beeching bombshell.
Believers throughout the English-speaking world were shocked and saddened to hear that Vicky Beeching, a greatly loved songwriter and worship leader, has announced that she is gay. How should we respond?
1. This should not be about your own feelings. When you sing to God words of worship and praise that someone else has written, it’s easy to feel betrayed when that person lets you down. So it’s understandable that some believers are asking, “How could she do this to us?”
The fact is that she didn’t do this to you any more than she wrote worship songs for you.
According to her story, her sexuality is something she wrestled with for years, and as much as her “coming out” as gay was a public event, it was also an intensely personal decision before God, and that’s where our first focus should be: praying for her to align her life rightly with the Lord.
To lash out at her now in immature ways will only drive her further from the cross, and while it is fine to speak the truth to her in love – assuming she reads some of the comments addressed to her on blogs and social media – praying for the Holy Spirit to convict her of her error is even more important.
2. She will not be the last Christian leader to declare that she/he is gay. We are living today in a perfect spiritual storm in which biblical ignorance, moral compromise, and societal changes have combined to produce deep spiritual deception.
That’s what opened the door for Contemporary Christian Music artist Jennifer Knapp to “come out,” and that’s what opened the door for Jars of Clay front man Dan Haseltine to voice apparent support for same-sex “marriage” as well as for influential leaders like Rob Bell and Jim Wallis to advocate for redefining marriage.
That’s also what opened the door for an evangelical publishing conglomerate to publish and aggressively promote a book devoted to promote “gay Christianity.”
At any other time in Church history, ideas like this would not been countenanced for a split second among committed followers of Jesus who were grounded in the Word, but today, professing Christians are questioning some of the most basic scriptural truths about morality.
You can expect a lot more surprises in the coming days – both from pastors and music artists – but as painful as this is to witness, it is a necessary separation that will ultimately divide those who seek to change the Word from those who seek to submit to the Word.