Reaching Out and Resist: A Strategy from Heaven

By Michael L. Brown

Although I have been preaching repentance and holiness since I was 18 years old (1973), and although I have carried a strong burden for moral and cultural transformation for most of these last 40 years, the issue of homosexuality was never something that I focused on until 2004. Even then, it was quite unexpected.

To be sure, I was aware of some of the radical goals of gay activists, and I understood that the gay liberation movement was an offshoot of the sexual revolution of the 1960’s. Still, when I preached on sexual issues, my focus was on heterosexual sin – adultery, pornography, rampant no-fault divorce, sexual impurity – and when I preached on cultural reformation, I was more concerned with abortion than homosexuality.

Interestingly, when we lived in Pensacola, Florida from 1997-2003, even though there was a large gay pride event in the city every year, causing Pensacola to be dubbed “the gay Riviera,” I never once received a calling from the Lord to get involved. Some of our ministry school students would go down to the event and hand out bottles of water, reaching out to the gay crowds there with the compassion of Jesus, but that was about it.

Then, in 2004, less than a year after our ministry relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, some of my colleagues were asked by a local Christian ministry to join them in witnessing at a gay pride event taking place in a centrally-located park in the heart of the city. I was in England at that time and couldn’t join them personally, but my friends came back from the event shocked. There were lewd acts and lewd speech taking place in the presence of little children in the park, and the police did nothing to stop this. Instead, they escorted my Christian friends out of the park. How could this be?

About six months later, the Human Rights Campaign, the world’s largest gay activist organization, with an annual budget of $45 million, brought their Carolina’s fund-raising dinner to Charlotte. Again, to my shock, they were proudly backed by the biggest and most prestigious companies in the city, and they made clear that conservative Christians like me should be viewed as right-wing extremists.

During this time, the Spirit of God began to burden me deeply about the real dangers of gay activism, and the more I studied and listened and observed, the more I realized that this, indeed, was the principle threat to our freedoms of religion, conscience, and speech, not to mention an overt challenge to the definition of family, also shaping what our children would learn in school.

So I began to do what I always do when tackling an important issue: I sought to understand the perspective of those I differed with, meaning that, in this case, I began to read books and articles written by homosexual men and women, especially those raised in the Church, hearing their struggles and gaining insight into their worldview. And the more I read and the more I listened—taking advantage of every opportunity for a gay or lesbian person to tell me their personal story—the more my heart began to break for them.

It became very clear to me, in many ways, that the Church had failed to reach out with compassion to LGBT people, immediately branding them as the most vile of sinners, not understanding the struggles through which they had passed (especially those raised in strong faith environments), falling short in our longsuffering and compassion, and sounding quite hypocritical as we denounced the evil homosexuals while our own heterosexual families fell apart.

At the same time, I could not deny for a moment the very real threat posed by gay activism. Yet I also realized that most LGBT people are not activists and their only real “agenda” is to get on with their lives without harassment and rejection.

One of my strong Christian friends attended a Human Rights Campaign dinner in order to gain an insider’s perspective. Sitting at the table and talking with one of the gay attendees, he received a vision, something that was very rare for him. He saw a snake wrapped around the man’s neck, and he knew that the snake was going to kill the man. But he realized that if he tried to kill the snake, with one wrong move, he would kill the man instead. That was the predicament we faced regarding the challenge of homosexuality in our society.

As I sought the Lord about these things, He spoke to me during a day of prayer and fasting in January, 2005, as we mourned the momentous Roe v. Wade decision when the Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in America in 1973. Standing in front of that very court building in Washington, DC, together with hundreds of other believers, I was engaged in silent prayer and deep meditation when the Spirit spoke to me clearly: “Reach out and resist,” meaning, “Reach out to the gay and lesbian community with compassion; resist the gay activist agenda with courage.”

That has been the operative word for me these last 8 years, and believers from around the world, especially in America, have had that same word confirmed in their hearts. I commend it to you as a strategy from heaven. Reach out and resist.