The following essay is adapted from Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.
In September 2019, in Mesa, Arizona, pastor Ryan Visconti was thrilled to find himself at a private dinner with Andy Stanley, pastor of what was then the largest church in the United States.
On any given weekend, Stanley’s North Point church has roughly 31,000 attendees across eight campuses in Atlanta, Georgia. Stanley is also the author of dozens of books, and his sermons are distributed through a vast digital ministry that includes not only podcasts and YouTube videos, but also traditional broadcasts on NBC, CBS, and radio stations across the country. Little wonder, then, that Preaching Magazine ranked him number eight on its list of the twenty-five most influential preachers of the last twenty-five years.
But perhaps over no group does Stanley hold more sway than other pastors. Stanley was in Arizona for his “Irresistible” tour, a conference that promised to teach church leaders how to “expand [their] influence.” Visconti was excited for the opportunity to pick Stanley’s brain, though, at thirty-four, he would be the youngest at a table of about fifteen men and expected to spend the majority of the meal quietly soaking up wisdom from Stanley and the more seasoned leaders. That plan went off the rails when the discussion turned toward homosexuality and how the men’s ministries were confronting increasing cultural pressure to compromise on clear biblical teaching. Stanley shocked the room by arguing that they shouldn’t so much confront it as accommodate it. “He said he would encourage any gay couples in his congregation to commit to each other,” Visconti recalled.
For the next hour and a half, he listened as Stanley went on to contend that modern pastors must make allowances for gay and lesbian couples to be married in their churches because “that’s as close as they can get to a New Testament framework of marriage.” Visconti remembered Stanley likening same-sex attraction to a disability, something that can’t be helped. An expectation of celibacy, he argued, would be unfair.
Finally, Stanley revealed that while he had never officiated a same-sex wedding, he could see himself doing so eventually, especially for a family member. “I know I shouldn’t let experience dictate my theology, but I have. Maybe I’m wrong.”
Visconti was dumbstruck: “I remember thinking to myself, if his church knew what he was saying right now, half of them would probably leave over-night.” He joined several pastors in arguing with Stanley as others “squirmed in their chairs, muttering, ‘That’s not right.’” Host Joel Thomas, then pastor of Mission Community Church, had gotten his start in ministry under Stanley’s tutelage. When the dinner was over, he moved swiftly to protect his former boss’s reputation. Thomas asked the pastors to “honor” Stanley for being willing to “be vulnerable” in front of them. By this he meant they were not to speak of Stanley’s views to anyone else.
Visconti felt torn. It had been a private event, which meant there was an expectation of confidentiality. But another part of him felt plagued by the knowledge that a man with so much influence on his fellow teachers was encouraging them in error. He prayed and pressed several of his mentors about it, trying to decide how to address someone as famous as Stanley.
The mentors didn’t think confrontation was the right approach, even though two weren’t surprised by what Visconti had told them. Stanley had already preached messages about needing to “unhitch from the Old Testament,” seeming to suggest he was laying the groundwork for more liberal theology. And a sermon illustration in which he reproved a husband in his church for committing adultery with another man but not for the homosexual acts involved had raised eyebrows as far back as 2012.
In short, Visconti, who wasn’t very familiar with Stanley’s ministry, discovered that the fact that he might have heretical views had been whispered about for years. Yet this had not prompted the doctrinally sound pastors in Stanley’s circle to warn churches not to host his conferences or to caution Christians not to buy his books or entertain his teaching.
Visconti held out hope that those witnesses who were on more equal footing with Stanley might be the ones to call him to account. He also hoped the famous pastor might just have been processing his ideas out loud.
Yet, as the months went by, there was no evidence that any of the more senior pastors who knew Stanley better had addressed the issue with him. Then, in 2022, clips of Stanley from his biennial Drive Conference—another event specifically targeted at pastors and ministry leaders—made the rounds on social media. In one, he heaped praise on LGBTQ individuals, saying their desire to come to church despite receiving judgment from Christians showed they had more faith than heterosexual church members. He went on to call 1 Corinthians 6, Leviticus 18, and Romans 1 “clobber passages,” echoing a phrase common among gay activists when referencing Bible verses that address homosexuality. At no point did he indicate that homosexual acts or desires were sinful.
When Stanley’s remarks had given rise to similar questions in 2012, a North Point spokesperson claimed he was being taken out of context, though the representative did not clarify Stanley’s views. Now that Stanley was being asked again to explain whether he believed, as the Bible teaches, that homosexuality is a sin, his church declined to respond entirely.
Amid all the speculation about Stanley’s meaning, another clip from the Drive Conference especially pricked Visconti’s conscience. In it, Stanley seemed to encourage pastors to lead their congregations carefully and strategically toward acceptance of homosexuality.
Visconti feared that further silence would allow Stanley to use his platform to sow error and confusion in many churches across the country. Fifteen pastors knew in which direction Stanley was trying to nudge evangelical churches. And for more than three years, none of them had said anything. Visconti decided enough was enough. He posted an explosive thread on Twitter revealing what Stanley had said and naming his views “overtly heretical.”
Two other pastors who had been at the dinner that night confirmed that Visconti’s account was accurate. But that was as far as they were willing to go.
One told me he didn’t feel comfortable providing details because the dinner had been private. The other shared this concern about confidentiality but added, “[I’m] not sure I want to get into a political battle on this.” The most unsettling thing about my exchange with this man was the implication that because Stanley’s unbiblical stance centered on homosexuality, raising any alarm about it would have been “political.” A highly influential pastor was compromising the Word of God and encouraging other church leaders to do likewise. If any matter could be classified as ecclesiastical rather than civil in nature, this was it. Especially as it turned out there was a lot more going on at North Point to spread LGBTQ ideology through America’s churches than just Stanley’s pastors’ conferences.
In 2000, Jon Stryker, gay heir to a one-hundred-billion-dollar surgical supply conglomerate, launched the Arcus Foundation, a grant-making institution that soon became the largest funder of LGBTQ initiatives in the United States. But after legislative defeats like the passage of a 2008 California law banning gay marriage, Stryker’s foundation began devoting tens of millions of dollars to, in its words, “challenging the promotion of narrow or hateful interpretations of religious doctrine” within every major Christian denomination. Between 2013 and 2018, for instance, it gave over two million dollars to the Reconciling Ministries Network to “secure the full participation of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the United Methodist Church,” the last mainline denomination still resistant to full affirmation of the entire rainbow panoply. Given that the UMC went through a schism in 2022 over LGBTQ ordination and gay marriage, it seems Stryker’s money was well spent.
While evangelicalism’s decentralized and independent nature makes any wholesale attempt at reshaping doctrine unfeasible, it, too, came in for the Arcus treatment, albeit with more scattered outlays of cash. One particular expenditure proved strategic, as it managed to harness the influence of both North Point on the Eastern Seaboard and another internationally famous megachurch in the West, Rick Warren’s Saddleback.
Between 2014 and 2018, the Reformation Project, a brand-new organization led by twenty-three-year-old Harvard dropout Matthew Vines, received $550,000 in grants. The purpose of the funding, according to Arcus, was to “reform church teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity among conservative and evangelical communities.”On the surface, the Reformation Project would have seemed an unlikely vehicle for making inroads with the most resistant strain of American Christianity. Anyone watching the viral 2012 YouTube talk in which Vines argues that God does not condemn loving, gay relationships, only same-sex rape and orgies, might have guessed he was a nervous high-schooler. But youth and inexperience were lesser obstacles than his overt branding as a gay-affirming evangelical. Vines has even called affirmation of homosexual unions “a requirement of Christian faithfulness.” For Vines and the Reformation Project to have any hope of fulfilling their mission, they needed partners who looked and sounded like the conservative Christians they were trying to convince but whose teaching was equally committed to the project of undermining Scripture.
Enter Greg and Lynn McDonald. In 2015, they founded Embracing the Journey, an organization for Christian parents of LGBTQ children, at the urging of North Point’s executive director, Bill Willits. They had recently relocated to the Atlanta area and had begun attending services at the church. Over a breakfast meeting with Willits early in the year, Greg happened to share that his son had come out as gay in 2001, and he described how his and Lynn’s process of acceptance eventually led them to become informal counselors to other parents of gay and transgender kids. Willits was “captivated” by their story and revealed that North Point had already begun exploring new ministries in that vein. He urged them to film a video for Stanley’s Drive Conference that May.
As Stanley introduced the McDonalds’ video to approximately two thousand church leaders from all over the country, he urged those leaders not to view homosexuality through a “political” lens. Instead of suggesting that ministers use the Bible as their foremost frame of reference, he urged the audience to approach the issue through a “relational lens.” His example for relational was the McDonalds’ story.
In the video, Greg and Lynn talk about their two children, especially their son, whom we glimpse at various ages smiling shyly from gilt-framed photos that decorate the tastefully furnished living room of a million-dollar home. Greg Jr. came out to his parents when he was seventeen, after Greg found gay porn on his computer. The couple share how the news changed them. Greg describes developing a new sensitivity to gay jokes; Lynn tears up as she remembers worrying that if she “chose to love her son, would that mean [she] would have to abandon God.” She explains that her fears were based on her conservative upbringing, because that was “how verses of the Bible were taught to [her].” But over the years, the McDonalds met dozens of their son’s LGBTQ friends, who told them that the deepest hurts they experienced came at the hands of the Church. Toward the end of the video, the camera pans across a new family photo, lingering a bit on the smiles of Greg Jr. and his male partner. The music swells as Greg grips his wife’s hand and says, “We’re not interested in trying to change people; we’re just interested in trying to love them.”
The not-so-subtle implication is that conservative churches that are clear on what the Bible teaches have little to offer the same-sex-attracted beyond condemnation and trauma, certainly not love. This is a theme developed much more explicitly in the McDonalds’ book. While they never offer their opinions on whether the Bible permits LGBTQ behavior and identities, it’s obvious they think it does and that they believe other Christians should as well.
“In our experience,” write the McDonalds, “as soon as someone says sin in a conversation about LGBTQ issues, battle lines are drawn.” From there, the only time they bring up the question of sin is to cast doubt on the idea that homosexuality qualifies. They share that they “once believed” gay acts were sinful [emphasis mine]. And they contrast churches that “publicly [support] including the LGBTQ community” and “[make] every person feel welcome in God’s kingdom” with churches that “double down on six verses in Scripture that seem to condemn homosexuality.”
Nor are they content simply to encourage skepticism of orthodoxy. They also promote heresy, teaching that parents cannot know what God wants in regard to their son or daughter’s homosexual behavior. “Only God knows how and whether your child should change,” they write. This is a theme the book returns to again and again as they reflect with embarrassment on the simplistic mind-set they once had.
Nowhere do the McDonalds feature any Christians who have chosen to turn away from LGBTQ sin to follow Jesus, but they characterize quite a number of practicing homosexuals, including their son, as faithful disciples of Christ. When describing a Bible study hosted by two “married” men, they even suggest that LGBTQ individuals are more spiritually mature because of their unrepentant sin.
The book doesn’t spend much time on the issue of transgenderism, but there, too, it is clear the McDonalds are fully affirming, especially when they describe their success at counseling a Christian couple to embrace their daughter’s belief that she is a man.
Arguably the most insidious counsel the McDonalds offer to vulnerable Christian parents coming to them for help is to encourage them to dismiss the idea that a lack of repentance in this area destines their child for Hell. While they confess that they once feared for their son’s soul, they later rejoiced that while he continued to pursue homosexual relationships, he never denied Christ, and he assured them he “would never turn away from God.” This they took as evidence that his salvation was secure.
Author Rosaria Butterfield left a life of lesbianism when she became a Christian. She has described her process of dying to self to live for Christ in several books, but in her latest, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, she offers a haunting rebuke to anyone peddling false peace in these matters: “How sad indeed for someone who is already weighed down by sin to be denied the true remedy for the problem. That is what gay Christianity does. It denies the sexual sinner repentance.” Without repentance, there is no salvation.
Vines (along with his backer Arcus) has unabashedly stated his aim of “chang[ing] every Christian church worldwide, no matter how conservative their theology,” to become fully affirming of same-sex relationships and gender transitions. While theologically conservative churches might conversely say they would like to see every affirming church embrace biblical standards on sexuality, gender, and marriage, they’re not training activists to infiltrate affirming denominations in order to transform them from within.
As might be expected, given how seriously he takes his mission, Vines’s courses are far more rigorous than the kind of light, Wednesday night discussions the typical evangelical church offers on such subjects, if it offers them at all. Over a period of three months, the Reformation Project requires participants of one program to complete the equivalent of an advanced college course, all for the purpose of preparing to subvert the faithful churches Vines has called “the last stronghold of homophobia.”
In 2020, the Reformation Project began partnering with the North Point-backed Embracing the Journey, bringing in the McDonalds not only to speak at events, but also to help design conferences and lead their “parents-in-process” program. Embracing the Journey, in turn, began recommending Vines’s book and other content as “Bible-based” resources and directed Christians wrestling with how to respond to a gay or transgender child to Reformation Project events.
The McDonalds’ also helped to whitewash the Arcus-backed Gay Christian Network (now called Q Christian Fellowship), describing its mission as “advocat[ing] for stronger relationships between the church and the LGBTQ community.” The Arcus Foundation had a slightly different way of putting it when it funded a GCN program called the “Evangelical Education Project.” Similar to the Reformation Project, it was designed to “develop, test, and refine a pilot program that prepares young adult evangelicals to support pro-LGBT dialogue within evangelical communities.”
Of course, if these were simply affirming “Christian” organizations working together, that would hardly be newsworthy. The issue was that the McDonalds, following in Stanley’s footsteps, were careful to play coy about their views in front of mainstream evangelical churches and ministries. Greg McDonald’s Embracing the Journey bio, for instance, doesn’t mention that it “simply breaks [his] heart when people are told they can’t be a Christian and LGBTQ.” No, this is from his bio at Renovus, an openly affirming organization where he serves as a board member. Meanwhile, North Point began providing Embracing the Journey concrete support to maintain the illusion that it was a conventional Christian organization.
The megachurch helped with “branding strategy to make sure [Embracing the Journey] didn’t veer off message,” and a staff pastor recorded an endorsement video sharing what “big fans” the church was of the McDonalds and how the church “completely” trusted the couple “to lead [parents of LGBTQ children] towards a better relationship with God.” Though the amount was not disclosed, Embracing the Journey’s 2021 financial records list a “record donation” from North Point.
Leveraging Stanley and North Point’s influence, Embracing the Journey was well equipped to make inroads with the biggest names in the evangelical landscape. After an interview with the McDonalds in 2019, popular faith and family authors Mark and Jill Savage recommended Embracing the Journey to their audience. If the Savages’ names don’t ring a bell, some of the organizations they’re associated with probably will: Crosswalk, Family Life, and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. The Savages are frequent contributors to each, meaning the McDonalds were within striking distance of having access to the most trusted Christian media platforms in the country. Then, in 2020, the McDonalds landed a whale: Rick Warren’s Saddleback.
With thirty thousand weekly attendees spread across fourteen Southern California campuses, not to mention international campuses in Hong Kong, Germany, the Philippines, and Argentina, plus online extension groups around the world, Saddleback was in the best position to boost the McDonalds’ bona fides among average churchgoers.
In April 2019, two longtime Saddleback members flew to Atlanta to learn more about Embracing the Journey. Shauna Habel had been engaged in efforts to subvert church teaching on sexuality since attending a Reformation Project conference in 2016, where she said she “saw the Holy Spirit and knew that God was in that place.” Only a month before meeting with the McDonalds, she openly described her mission with another Arcus-funded group, FreedHearts, as working “with conservative parents to help them become affirming.” When her stepdaughter came out as a lesbian, she was able to bring her husband, Doug, into the enterprise, and they began exploring options for launching a ministry for parents of LGBTQ kids at their church. Embracing the Journey fit the bill for both of Shauna Habel’s goals.
Upon returning home, the Habels spent the next few months meeting with Saddleback pastoral staff until longtime counseling pastor, Chris Clark, and his wife, Elisa, agreed to help them in the venture. In early 2020, the four launched the first Embracing the Journey support group at Saddleback. By the end of 2021, they had added three more, plus an ongoing small group. Saddleback was apparently so pleased with the ministry that it provided the McDonalds an endorsement video. It’s possible the church later added more groups, but after I reported on its involvement with Embracing the Journey in the spring of 2023, Saddleback took down all web pages associated with the group.
The question is whether Saddleback got duped by Embracing the Journey or whether it, like North Point, understood what kind of organization it was partnering with and was hoping to gradually “nudge” its members in an affirming direction. I reached out to Saddleback about these questions but never received a response. But the best-case scenario is it had a shockingly poor vetting process and an equally shocking lack of discernment. The worst case is that Warren and, certainly, the husband-and-wife team he hand-selected to take over pastoring duties in August 2022 knew exactly whom they were letting in the door. Sources close to the church tell me Saddleback is still using the ETJ program, though it is no longer posting meeting times on the “Support Group” and “Events” pages of its website.
Then there is the fact that Saddleback didn’t seem concerned with the engagements its counseling pastor was accepting under its name. Within a year of launching the Embracing the Journey chapter, Chris Clark was speaking at a Reformation Project conference himself. At some point, he and his wife joined Embracing the Journey in a more official capacity, as counseling group leaders. And North Point’s September 2023 conference to help ministry leaders “discover ways to support parents and LGBTQ+ children in their churches” included Clark in the lineup alongside a number of openly affirming speakers.
The Saddleback name, which featured prominently in promoting Clark’s involvement with these groups, helped legitimize them as sound resources for evangelical audiences. Could it have been a case of a rogue pastor taking liberties with his title? Perhaps. But after I inquired with Saddleback about the nature of Clark’s activities, his name and photo also mysteriously disappeared from the website with no explanation. Before Clark’s LinkedIn page similarly disappeared, it revealed that one of his pastoring responsibilities at Saddleback is teaching lay counselors, which would, presumably, include training them in how to respond to congregants dealing with homosexuality or transgenderism. One can’t help but wonder how many trainees came under his tutelage and what exactly they learned.
The couple Warren chose to replace him as the main pastors of Saddleback appear rather muddled on the Bible’s stance on homosexuality themselves. During a Q&A segment of a podcast a few years ago, Andy and Stacie Wood were asked whether a gay “married” couple should continue their relationship after becoming Christians. Andy Wood responded by saying that the question may not have a “black-and-white answer.” Citing no Scripture, the Woods then said they would encourage the couple to consider how they “feel the Holy Spirit is leading them.”
Finally, there is Warren himself. During an interview with him in May 2023, Premier Christianity reporter Megan Cornwell asked if same-sex marriage could be considered a secondary matter over which churches in the same denomination could agree to disagree. It took four attempts before Cornwell at last pinned Warren down enough that he tepidly admitted LGBTQ affirmation is a justifiable reason for schism. But even then, he did not directly name homosexuality a sin. He said only that blessing same-sex civil unions “[strays] too far from Scripture.”
This is not to suggest that, like Stanley, Warren may be secretly affirming. It is only to point out that the Bible’s standard for marriage and sexuality are no longer issues he speaks about with conviction and that he will engage in verbal gymnastics to avoid addressing them at all. He also doesn’t seem especially concerned to see the church he founded, which he still serves in an advisory role, maintain sound doctrine on these issues.
While evangelical leaders have danced around the issue, a veritable army of trained wolves has been sneaking in among the sheep. In 2016, Vines told the gay news outlet The Advocate that at the end of its first two years of operation, his organization had trained about a thousand people in affirming theology. Extrapolating out six more years, and taking into consideration the Reformation Project’s financial growth—which saw its annual revenues going from one hundred thousand dollars to more than nine hundred thousand—it would be a conservative estimate to guess he has now trained at least ten thousand. Ten thousand activists carrying out Arcus’s mission of reforming conservative evangelical churches so that they will no longer teach their “narrow” doctrine.
In recent years, Vines has turned his attention to Pastors in Process, a confidential program that secretly trains pastors to stealthily “move the conversation on LGBTQ inclusion forward in [their] congregation[s].” Faithful American Christians could soon be facing—if we’re not already—thousands of Andy Stanleys. And the Reformation Project is only one of the many organizations carrying on this work. That’s to say nothing of the courses and extracurricular groups at ostensibly Christian colleges and seminaries dedicated to the same effort.
Many pastors, doctrinally sound but unaware of the boot camp efforts that have been under way for years, have, out of a desire not to appear judgmental or overly focused on one sin to the exclusion of others, been successfully shamed into barely mentioning homosexuality, transgenderism, or the rest of the LGBTQ array. Given this imbalance in commitment to our respective beliefs, faithful Christians can hardly wonder at the fact that the LGBTQ movement is chewing up ground and claiming new converts as quickly as evangelical churches are meekly ceding the field.
These shepherds should recall the warning of John Calvin: “Ambiguity is the fortress of heretics.” Well, the heretics are here. They are all around us, and their numbers are growing. Pastors need to remember that while evangelism is important, it’s not their first responsibility. Their first responsibility is to feed the sheep, to equip the saints. For too many pastors, concern for showing compassion to the lost means they’re not protecting the sheep from false teaching. They are, in fact, starving the sheep to appease goats. John 10:12–13 has a word for them: “The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.”
Shepherds who aren’t teaching their sheep to understand in depth what the Bible teaches about sexuality and why God has prohibited homosexuality are creating sitting ducks for Reformation Project wolves.
SHEPHERDS FOR SALE. Copyright © Megan Basham. Reprinted here with permission from Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Megan Basham is a culture reporter for the Daily Wire.
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