We’ve been covering a lot about the He Gets Us campaign over the last few days. Thankfully, Texas pastor Tom Buck has been actively joining in on the exposing of this movement and the Southern Baptist Convention’s proposed partnership with it. This work ultimately led to the reversal by Kevin Ezell, NAMB president, to partner the SBC with He Gets Us.
But it’s always amazing what else is uncovered during these investigations and God ultimately uses these research campaigns by us little guys to uncover greater problems. And one problem we uncovered is this: Matt Chandler and Tony Evans are the mentors behind a “transgender-friendly” megachurch in Dallas, TX.
Disclaimer: It is possible that the person responding to Tom Buck in the email does not represent the church in an official capacity. However, the fact that either an attendee or an official representative of the church believes that a transgender person would be comfortable at this church speaks volumes.
Here’s how we found out. Pastor Buck, continuing his efforts to expose the He Gets Us campaign, reached out to the organization (posing as a transgender “Christian”) asking them to connect him with a transgender-friendly church that wouldn’t “try to change him.”
Here’s the message Pastor Buck sent He Gets Us:
Join Us and Get These Perks:
β Access to Comments and Discussions
β Community Chats
β Full Article and Podcast Archive
β The Joy of Supporting Our Work π
And here was the response that Buck received:
Then, The Dissenter decided to check out the website of this supposedly transgender-friendly church that responded to Tom, and to our shock, we found that Matt Chandler and Tony Evans are two of the prominent mentors listed on this church’s “About” page.
Here, both Chandler and Evans give the pastor of this “transgender-friendly” church glowing accolades:
According to Church Clarity, a website that rates how “LGBTQ friendly” a church is, Community One Church’s LGBTQ policy is “unclear” but appears to lean “non-affirming.” Further, there appears to be no official statement regarding sexuality on the church’s website. So it is unclear at this point exactly how transgender-friendly this church is, but you can rest assured, we’ll get to the bottom of it.
Update: A friend of mine called this church to get to the bottom of it, and not surprisingly, a phone representative of this church said that there is no reason that a transgender person wouldn’t be welcome at this church as long as they’ve “surrendered their life to Jesus.”
