Former outspoken social conservative Michael
Coren found ‘no condemnation, no cynicism, no grudges’ when he recently
spoke at a church focused on outreach to LGBT people.
Toronto Star / Paulo Marques
Journalist Michael Coren recently delivered a guest sermon at the Metropolitan Community Church.
By:
Michael Coren
Published on Mon Jun 29 2015
There she goes: plump, porky and with wings.
Yes, pigs can and do fly. Or to put it another way, we now have
undeniable proof of climate change because hell has frozen over. Michael
Coren, long a public opponent of same-sex marriage and certainly not
considered a friend to the gay community, is asked to preach at
Toronto’s Metropolitan Community Church.
MCC is not exclusively gay but its central
theme, its charisma if you like, is outreach to LGBT people and in all
of its many international branches it is at the heart of the struggle
for full equality. Indeed in Toronto its leader, Brent Hawkes, is one of
the most high-profile, visible and eloquent leaders of the gay
community.
It was Brent who invited me. I have written
before about how in the past two years I have undergone something of a
conversion on the road to Toronto, left the Roman Catholic Church,
abandoned social conservatism and become one of those liberal Christians
I used to mock. It’s been a pilgrimage and one that — while coming with
a heavy professional and personal cost — has made me a better person
and a better Christian.
I came to realize that anywhere there is love
there is God, that judgmentalism is vehemently anti-Christian and that I
had, well, got it wrong. In one of those glorious paradoxes my feelings
were confirmed by the sweeping, organized and vicious campaign against
me by social and Christian conservatives. By their lack of love you will
know them. Which is when Brent approached me and asked me to speak. We
have known each other for years because we often appeared on opposing
sides on television and radio; neither of us ever thought we’d be
embracing, close to tears, in front of the altar of his church.
I’ve spoken to hundreds of groups and haven’t
felt nervous for decades. Yet suddenly this 56-year-old man who hosted a
nightly television show for 16 years was most definitely nervous. How
many of these people had I hurt, how many had lives made more difficult
by my writing and broadcasting? I’d never hated but I had given an
intellectual veneer to the anti-gay movement, had enabled — even
unintentionally — some muddy bigotry.
There were two services, with a combined
congregation of around 700. And as I walked in on that hot, rainy
morning I was drenched in love and acceptance. No condemnation, no
cynicism, no grudges. As a constipated Englishman I was several times
close to weeping as I witnessed a sense of authentic Christian community
that I have, with all due respect, seldom found in mainstream church
settings. I saw collectives of warmth and support, groups of people from
various ethnicities, backgrounds, sexualities and experiences united in
acceptance. After three months of abuse, accusations and firings from
men and women who claim to be Christian my sense of liberation was
exquisite. A dawn of the miraculous after the dark night of the cruel.
I told them
that as a straight man who had reversed his position on gay rights and
marriage I had recently experienced a glimpse of a shadow of a whiff of
what it must be like to be a gay Christian. I said that some of the
finest Christians I had ever met had been gay Christians. I said that
remaining Christian in the face of hostility and even vitriol was an
indication of enormous depth of faith and a living, fleshy example of a
glorious mystery. I spoke of unconditional love, of what Scripture
actually said about sexuality rather than the popular and misguided
caricature of Biblical truth, I said that the only absolutes were grace
and love.
The point is that in the 200,000 words of the
New Testament perhaps a mere 50 in any way concern same-sex attraction,
yet tens of thousands speak of charity, care for the poor, forgiveness,
love, empathy, gentleness and kindness. At its best the church has led
the way for the state but on this issue the contrary is true, as we
witnessed with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision. There is still
time to do the right thing however. As I said, pigs can fly and Michael
Coren can speak at the Metropolitan Community Church.
