How Southern Baptists are working together on gender and sexuality issues

Today on the ERLC Podcast, we’re talking about how the ERLC’s work on gender and sexuality issues helps fellow Southern Baptists.

Part of the mission of the ERLC is to assist churches by helping fellow Baptists understand the moral demands of the gospel. We also apply Christian principles to moral and social problems and questions of public policy. One of the ways we fulfill this mission is by partnering with like-minded individuals, churches, and institutions across the Southern Baptist Convention to produce work that is accessible and applicable to both the layperson and the scholar. 

Today, we’ll highlight two instances of cooperation in the area of gender and sexuality issues. The first involves our resource, “God’s Good Design: A Practical Guide for Answering Gender Confusion.” The second involves our public policy advocacy with the Baptist Convention of Iowa. Together, we signed onto an amicus brief in defense of parental rights.

We’ll talk to Dane Hays, family pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Decatur, AL, about the “Gender Guide.” Dane has served in counseling and discipleship for over 20 years. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Psychology from UAB and a Masters of Divinity from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary where he studied biblical counseling and theology.

You’ll also hear from Tim Lubinus, the executive director of the Baptist Convention of Iowa, about the amicus brief. Prior to his current role, Tim was a missions pastor and served overseas on the mission field with the International Mission Board. He received a Masters of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and has a Doctor of Ministry from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.  

Episode Notes

• God’s Good Design: A Practical Guide for Answering Gender Confusion
• ERLC joins amicus briefs in supporting parental rights and opposing radical gender ideology in schools

Episode Transcript: How Southern Baptists are working together on gender and sexuality issues

Narration

Welcome to the ERLC podcast, where our goal is to help you think biblically about today’s cultural issues. I’m Lindsay Nicolet, and today we’re talking about how the ERLC’s work on gender and sexuality issues helps fellow Baptists.

Part of the mission of the ERLC is to assist churches by helping fellow Baptists understand the moral demands of the gospel. We also apply Christian principles to moral and social problems and questions of public policy. One of the ways we fulfill this mission is by partnering with like-minded individuals, churches and institutions across the Southern Baptist Convention in order to produce work that is accessible and applicable to both the layperson and the scholar. 

Today we’ll highlight two instances of cooperation in the area of gender and sexuality issues. The first involves our resource, God’s Good Design, A Practical Guide for Answering Gender Confusion. The second involves our public policy advocacy with the Baptist Convention of Iowa. Together we signed onto an amicus brief in defense of parental rights. 

We’ll talk to Dane Hays, family pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Decatur, Alabama about the Gender Guide. Dane has served in counseling and discipleship for over 20 years. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Psychology from UAB and a Master’s of Divinity from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he studied biblical counseling and theology. 

You’ll also hear from Tim Lubinus, the Executive Director of the Baptist Convention of Iowa, about the amicus brief. Prior to his current role, Tim was a missions pastor and served overseas on the mission field with the International Mission Board. He received a Master’s of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and has a doctor of ministry from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

As we’ve discussed in past episodes, our younger generations are marred by gender and sexuality confusion. The ERLC convened a group of experts in theology, ethics, public policy, and law to think through how to respond to this cultural moment with biblical wisdom. Together, they created a resource that we refer to as a Gender Guide. It’s grounded in scripture and shaped by theological categories, faithful to, The Baptist Faith and Message 2000. This free guide provides churches with a theological framework and practical scenarios that will help us reach those broken by the sexual revolution with the hope of the gospel. Here’s Dane Hay,s to share how this guide has helped serve him on a practical level in his local church.

Dane Hays

I was prompted to use the Gender Guide when I was teaching on Wednesday nights through the book of Titus. So Paul wrote the letter to Titus because Titus was in Crete, and Paul left Titus there to do the work of putting the church in order and working to correct some false teaching that was going on in the church in Crete and in Titus too. Paul addresses older men and younger men and older women and younger women, and in that there were different struggles that were going on in those different genders living out the gospel faithfully. They had some confusion about what it meant to be a young man or a young woman or an older man, older woman. Paul told Titus to teach what Accords with sound doctrine. And so there’s a lot of similarities in what was going on in Crete and what’s going on in our culture today. Just confusion about, what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? And so I turned to the Gender Guide because I knew that it was addressing those issues in our culture and helping provide clarity about, in today’s society, what does it mean to be faithful as a man and a woman. And how do we learn about how to apply the gospel and adoring the gospel through living faithfully in those roles.

So the framework that the guide used where it addresses God’s good design for gender, that’s actually a framework that I try to approach all of my ministry, especially to teenagers, because framing their understanding of the world that they live in and framing their understanding of scripture is this big story of God creating the world and creating a beautiful and wonderful thing, but how sin distorted that good design and how we can see what he is doing to redeem that good design and to restore it to what it was originally intended to be. And so even just the framework of the Gender Guide was helpful because it goes right along with how we’re trying to frame the scriptures, how we’re trying to help them to understand the scope of God’s big story. The framework was really helpful because it gave me specific categories to lay out in my own teaching, in the way that I had led those conversations with them.

And it gave us the opportunity to think through if Paul were writing a letter to our church or if he were writing a letter to address the modern day church in our culture, how would he challenge older men and younger men and older women and younger women to faithfully live out the gospel. But I also gave it to all of my adult leaders because our context of ministry, we do teaching, but we also do a lot of discussion and we break up into smaller groups so that they can talk through and apply what they’re learning. And so it was a helpful framework to give to my teachers as they were thinking about how they were going to engage the students about these questions. And it gave them language, it gave them categories, and it gave them helpful things to think through to prepare them for those conversations.

The thing that I took from the guide, the overall tone was this balance that I am seeking to implement in my own ministry of truth and love. And I think it’s really easy for us to get out of balance in those two things. Sometimes people find it really easy to say the true things that might need to be said, but they don’t do it in a loving way. On the other side of that, some people want to love others, but they don’t wanna say the hard things that need to be said. And the guide helped set a tone that I think pastors and parents can be so helped by because the language that’s used in the guide about young men and young women, particularly being refugees of the sexual revolution, I think that is so true because there’s a pervasive culture and there is a system, a worldview out there that is harmful and that is preying on the vulnerabilities of the brokenness in our world.

And the sexual revolution in particular really has a grip on the young people in our culture, and we need to be ready to speak the truth and love to those people who are fleeing from that world because it’s not fulfilling what they were created for. And so what I love about the Gender Guide is it doesn’t offer unqualified acceptance. It doesn’t offer harsh rejection, but it offers truth and love, and that is what we need if we’re gonna be prepared to reach this generation. When it comes to these issues of gender identity and sexual sin.

Narration

Some of us might think that issues of gender confusion couldn’t possibly directly affect us or those close to us, but this isn’t true. We will all face ripple effects of the gender and sexuality confusion in our culture at some point. Here’s Dane explaining how the Gender Guide helped prepare those he ministers to, for this reality.

Dane Hays

So one of the things that I noticed is that for my teachers specifically, so as I’m thinking about my adult leaders, I think it was really eye-opening for them to see that even in a Bible belt community like I’m at in Alabama, there are real scenarios that could touch our church, our community, our town. And I think that it helped them to see that this issue is not some abstract issue that’s going on in the culture war, but it’s things that are affecting our day-to-day life in our church and our community. And then it also prepared us as a student leadership team, even as pastors to think ahead and plan for how would we address these scenarios if they come up in our day-to-day ministry. 

There is one story that emerged from this season in our church. There’s a young man in our church, he’s an adult, he’s married, has kids, but he is a leader in our church and has been close to these conversations that we’ve been having in our student ministry and in his workplace. He was recently told that he had to accommodate and use pronouns for someone that he believed that, you know, didn’t line up with that person’s biological gender assigned at birth. And he felt like his workplace was asking him to violate his conscience. And so the Gender Guide and the ideas and the Gender Guide were really helpful as we pastored him through that, shepherded him through that to help him learn how to talk about these things with his supervisors and learn how to interact with that employee who was under his supervision. And I think one of the things that really helped him in that process is his own personal character and integrity. He was seen in his workplace as someone that was a hard worker, someone that was fair, and someone that was favored by his leadership and his character and his integrity and his tone of love and not compromising what he believes. But his commitment to godly integrity and godly character helped him have an ear with his supervisors that he might not have had if he had not tried to strike that tone of speaking the truth in love.

Narration

The Southern Baptist Convention was built on the backbone of cooperation, and we all need reminders of that work in order to fuel healthy partnerships for the gospel. Listen, as Dane elaborates on the centrality of collaboration in creating resources like the Gender Guide and how they serve him personally in his ministry.

Dane Hays

As a pastor, as a counselor, I’m very busy. I have a lot of things on my plate that I have to deal with, and I have to go from meeting to meeting, dealing with a variety of different things. And so it’s important for me to be prepared to talk about these kinds of things. It’s important for me to have the tools that I need to be able to answer these questions and disciple our teenagers. And so I don’t have time to do all of the research that needs to be done to understand these really complicated things. My student ministry leaders, the adult leaders, they don’t have time to go read long books about gender identity and how to deal with those things in the culture. And the ERLC has assembled thought leaders to do really great things in the area of research, and that’s true of gender, but it’s true of other things as well.

And we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and we don’t have to do that because the ERLC is doing this work to equip us to do that so that we don’t have to expend resources and time that we don’t have to think about these things. We can be equipped by them. So I would encourage any pastor, any parent, any church leaders to dig into the work that the ERLC is doing because especially the research area has been tremendously helpful to me in my ministry. And I think it’s very important to cooperation efforts that we have as Baptists.

Narration

In 2022, the ERLC joined the Baptist Convention of Iowa in signing onto a friend of the court brief urging a federal appeals court to block a transgender policy in a public school district that threatened parental rights. Here’s Tim Lubinus discussing more about this case and the benefits of the collaborative effort between the ERLC and state conventions.

Tim Lubinus

I had heard about the case, but it was actually the ERLC that brought it front burner for me to give me attention. What happened, one of our school districts changed their policy in their school on how they handle privacy and the spaces that especially transgender students could be part of in the school and pronouns and that kind of thing. And there was a reaction that parents had against that where they were concerned about the safety and privacy of their children or even the forced speech that’s required in some of the pronoun requirements. And so there were law cases. In fact, the Iowa State legislature acted in this case as well, and it percolated through the courts even to the Supreme Court. And the ERLC contacted me and said, Hey, do you want to work together to sign a brief where we would disagree with this policy and speak in favor of parental rights, in favor of freedom of speech, in favor of privacy, and security for our own students, and we gladly joined in.

And if it wasn’t for the ERLC doing the heavy lifting on that, I don’t think I would’ve done much more. But I was grateful for the expertise and the initiative that the ERLC took in this situation. The update really was, it stopped other schools from going down this road, but really the trigger was the state legislature acted very quickly to stop that particular policy and made it a moot point because they were acting outside of their jurisdiction then because of what the state had required. So the result was it really stopped all of that kind of policy change across our state in other schools as well.

The Southern Baptist Convention is broad and diverse in its scope and expertise and we at the state convention or the pastors we work with in local churches have a long list of job responsibilities that they do but can’t be specialists in everything. They’re generalists but not specialists in issues like public policy and elections and some of these issues that affect us. And so we rely on others like the ERLC, both in a general sense on ethical issues, but even specifically on public policy at the federal level. And then to help us navigate at the state level as well so that we know how to impact elections, how to impact policy, and to help our congregations navigate some of these ethical issues that come our direction. And so we’re grateful for the resources and the encouragement and for the advocacy that the ERLC has that helps us to do our job better because we can’t be specialists in the kinds of things that the ERLC is really good at.

Narration

Though the increase in L-G-B-T-Q identification and the adoption of radical gender ideology, particularly among young people, can be intimidating and discouraging. It should be viewed as an opportunity for the church. Here’s Tim with how Christians and pastors can step up in the midst of this confusion to bring biblical clarity.

Tim Lubinus

One of the responses is that those who are searching and wanna know more are getting the clarity they need from their pastors and parents to understand for themselves how to navigate that even in their own feelings and their own identity. And there’s a lot of gospel progress that’s happening as a result of intensified conversations. Others who are unable, unwilling to fit in with biblical teaching, well, they leave the church now. It’s a sad thing for the person, at least temporarily as they lose access to hearing the gospel and being part of a Christian community. I think a win in all of this is pastors are able to do a little bit more homework and get clarity in their minds and so that they can equip their saints for how to parents and how to be good colleagues at work and how to be good neighbors in this environment, how to speak what is true in love, giving people dignity and help human flourishing that comes from being part of a Christian community and having faith in Jesus Christ.

This is actually an opportunity for the church to have clarity on their teaching. We might ask just culture wide, what happened? How did these percentages change so dramatically? We know it’s not a biological phenomenon, it’s something else. And how did these changes get interest in LGBT issues grow so fast, what’s within our culture that maybe we haven’t addressed? And I think there’s some soul searching of pastors and other theologians on how we address the dignity of man and anthropology, human flourishing and creation order that maybe we haven’t addressed as thoroughly as we have needed to. I think it’s also helps us in the area of political ethics and civic responsibility as well, that these issues don’t just affect what happens in Washington, but they are in our own school and our own neighborhoods and workplaces. And we can’t just, you know, render to Caesar and sort of ignore everything in these areas because they’re close to home and have impact on our own churches and families.

I think the message I would have for pastors is not shrink from addressing these issues because people really want biblical answers to everyday problems that they can address at school and in their neighbors and in the workplace. And they rely on you pastor for help. And you may not have all the answers, but you can point people to helpful resources and encourage them to stay in the game. If we can’t talk about relevant issues that the Bible addresses, there’s something wrong with our worldview. There’s something wrong with our gospel message. There’s something wrong with our apologetic skills. And so let’s not shrink or say that we only deal with spiritual things or our citizenship’s in heaven, or whatever the excuse might be, to not address these very relevant issues. Because if our people don’t come to our pastors, they’re gonna go somewhere else to get the help that they really want and need, and it may not be a healthy place.

Narration

As we navigate the ever-changing issues of our culture, it’s imperative for us to apply one Peter 3:15, “but in your hearts, honor Christ, the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason, for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect.” At the ERLC, we value partnerships within the SBC because through them we are able to help one another with this mission. Together we can cut through the confusion and chaos of these conversations in order to point current and future generations to the one who can satisfy our broken hearts and ultimately make all things new. 

Thanks for listening to the ERLC podcast. Join us next time for the last episode in our series on marriage and family, as we hear from the research team.