This is a conversation between a reader and myself. It was a most profound exchange, where honesty and confession where more important than posturing for correctness. It was humbling for me to hear this man confess his very personal sins and struggles, and for me to share mine with him. But it reminded me of what God truly wants for us - that is, to be one body, under the same grace, without distinction between sinner and saint, able to love and support those with whom we disagree, ministering out of a weakness saved by grace rather than strength based in laws.

A Letter To Me Hi brother, I looked up Focus on the Family and found you. I briefly read several of the articles that you have written. I feel that what you are doing is unbiblical (without having read all your materials). Here is my reason for this - the Bible says, if a brother offends you, go to him alone. If you are this offended at our brother James Dobson, I ask you, have you contacted him to discuss your feelings, thoughts, etc.? If you haven't, please correct this and suspend your page until you have done do. Dr. Falwell has said many times, "the Christian army is the only army in the world that shoots its wounded". Having worked as one of the associate pastors of ________ Church (with a famous preacher), I have seen many things that could prompt me to write a similar article about some of the things that goes on there. However, I have prayed with ____________, and can sense a genuine desire to please God. It isn't my job to attack another unless they are doctrinally wrong. God is quite able to take care of His business. In reading your materials, I sensed some bitterness towards James Dobson. Is there? Since you are located close to that ministry, (I guess you are) has there been an offense in some way toward you personally? Secondly, I understand some of your frustration. I have a BS in Counseling and have been a Pastor. I am 48 years old and have seen quite a lot of legalism during these years. I personally have had sin problems and have found that you had better keep it private. To give you additional information so that you can see that the spirit of my letter is not to attack you or defend FOTF. I have really been hurt in Church. Some of it is my own fault. To be specific, I recently went through a divorce. I was married for 25 years and 11 months. About three years ago, I sat down with my wife and told her that if something didn't change, I was leaving. We didn't fight, but literally didn't have a relationship. I got more attention from strangers (women) than I got from my own wife. Her response to my conversation was to tell me if I thought I could find some one better to go right ahead, she would sign divorce papers tomorrow. At this time, I was no longer a Pastor, I had burned out. I told her that I didn't want a divorce, I just wanted things to change. I felt that I had a maid, cook, and sex partner (if it was Friday night). I wanted a friend and companion. She told me she was the way she was and wasn't changing anything. Elroy, I didn't want to go home at night. I have helped people put marriages back together, and have done much to strengthen homes. Yet, I found my self struggling so much that my wife became a "boil" in my soul. Prior to becoming a Christian in 1975, I was very abusive, both verbally and physically. I realized that I had done wrong in the past and worked hard to overcome my past failures. Yet, there was always a wall between my wife and me. I could not break it down. (I guess you can handle long-winded letters since your articles are rather copious. Ha.) My wife constantly put me down. Nothing I did was ever right. For instance, I was very active in the last Church I was in - Nashville, TN. She told me that I was doing it for my own glory rather than for God. (Not true!) Sometimes at Church I would put my arm around my wife's shoulders, and she would shrug it off. She would tell me that I was doing it to show off. She often told me that no one would want someone like me. You get the idea. I talked to some women on AOL and asked them for advise. Everything I tried didn't work. I feel that I have some expertise in the field of marriage and family, since I have spent 20 years teaching and studying in that field. I could help others but not my own home. When she rejected my appeals, I finally gave up. I talked to a woman who was in FL who had given up and encouraged her to try and gave her some advise on how to work on her marriage. It was met with the same rejection that I had received. It wasn't long before feelings developed - even though we had never met. We talked on the phone and finally she visited her sister in Nashville. We had an affair or Biblically "committed adultery". We fell in love (if one can do so like that), she went back to FL and soon left her husband and moved to TN. We continued to see each other and finally I got caught. Elroy, you will never know the internal conflict I faced - doing what was Biblically correct - which meant living in misery or being with someone who loved me for who I am. I made the unbiblical decision and eventually divorced. I left home five time and returned home four times because of the guilt. I tried to stop seeing _______ - prayed and asked God to change my desires and to heal my home. My wife has the desire to try at this point, but my heart was closed. When I left her for the final time, she revealed that I wasn't the first one to commit adultery. She had an affair 60 days after we were married with her old boy friend. This lasted for 2 years. Then she had a second affair a year later which lasted for 6 months. She told me that she had always loved _______ more than she ever loved me and if he were still alive, she would want to be with him. When she told me this, I realized why there was a wall between us. I never had the proper place in her heart. She also told me later that both of them had a bigger penis than me. Big blow to the ego. But you get the idea of some of what I put up with and wasn't willing to stay in it. I did my share of failing as a husband. It wasn't one sided. The result of this was that every one of my "Christian" friends turned their backs on me. I know that I sinned and that my continuing in sin broke fellowship. I ask no one to approve of my actions, but I sure needed someone to care. No one cared for my soul. We moved to FL so that ______ could get divorced and we will get married as soon as it is final. The only person who stood with me was a friend who went to Libery U with me. He was struggling with homosexuality and finally went back into that lifestyle leaving his wife behind. We are close friends even though I do not agree with his sin. He told me that he knows it is sin, but can't reconcile his desires with what the Bible says is right. I don't condemn him. If he ever needs help, guess who he will call. I, also, can call on him but no one else in the world. I guess I have written all this to tell you, I understand what you have written about the new Christian. Old Christians also have struggles!!! Since leaving my _________ agency in Nashville and moving to FL I have had major financial problems. The divorce stuck me with all the bills and not enough income to pay them. Starting over at my age isn't easy. For the last four months of 96, I earned what I used to earn in 45 days. I have filed for bankruptcy. No choice. With the world crumbling around me, no real friends to turn to, the only bright spot in my life is having someone to come home to that I deeply love and having that love returned to me. Right now, I have no real walk with God. I guess the guilt along with the Pharisees that I have had to deal with has turned my heart cold. I do pray some. When we are married, I want to go back to Church, but struggle with all the phoney stuff that I know is there. I ask your prayers for me and hope to communicate with you regularly. One final thing. I have recently gotten on the I-NET and am finishing my first web site for ______'s boss. I love doing this and am learning a whole lot. I have spent hours trying to figure out how to code HTML to do what I wanted it to do. The site will soon be on line. Can you tell me how I can find work doing this assuming that I am good at it? Thanks for taking the time to read this. I think it is my longest e-mail to date. See ya!!! My Response My brother, Please forgive the delay in my response. I have been quite literally working around the clock these past few weeks. It gets that way when you own our own business, as I'm sure you know. I wanted to tell you how much your letter touched my heart. I understand the points with which you started, that is, that I should go directly to Dobson with my concerns. Living in Colorado you would think this would not be so hard. The problem is, there are so many people here who oppose Focus on the Family, and some have done outrageous things to the Dobsons, like leave bloody animal parts on their lawn, and other such atrocities, that he has pretty much shielded himself behind his organization. I've been to their offices. I've written them letters. But all I've gotten was a polite defense and a "thank you" for writing. I know it sounds harsh, but it seems these days you have to be a Republican politician, which I am neither, to get a personal audience with this man. Thus, my Web site. But its existence is there for more reasons than above stated. I have seen in this world the amount of pain and strife hidden beneath the surface of our great Christian institutions. No one is willing to expose themselves for fear of the kinds of things that happened to you. No one is willing to confess their sins when they hold positions of "Christian" authority, for fear they would lose that authority. No one is willing to admit that we as Christians are far from unified, and yet we each stake our claim on a part of the Kingdom and proclaim our doctrines as the true doctrines of Christ - and defend it as if our very value as a person depended on it. I pick on Focus because I have approached them and been turned away. I pick on them because of their extremely high visibility, and their extreme hostility toward those whose sins are (I guess) more objectionable to them (such as homosexuality). I pick on them because no one else seems willing to say that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. I don't think Dobson's motives are bad, but I believe they are prime examples of how the illness of judgementalism, and prejudgementalism has infected the ranks of the faithful. This is why I wish they would confess their sins publicly, to break out of the appearance of "having everything under control." None of us have everything under control, but we go to extreme lengths to not show our weakness to others. Your own testimony attests to this. And believe me my brother, I understand your struggle. I was highly visible in a number of churches, including Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches, where my role was quite visible, and people thanked me for being an inspiration to them, and then I would drive right from the church service to the adult bookstore so I could masturbate to the little sex films they show. And then I would agonize over my failures, and then go to great lengths to keep anyone from seeing me drive away from those places. I prayed for twenty years or more for God to relieve me of that sin. But I kept on sinning. I understand deep in my being the kind of stress that creates. Finally I've had to relax in the Lord and know that I have done two things very wrong: 1) I wanted to change my sin out of fear of what other Christians would think rather than because I wanted to get rid of it. The fact is, I really enjoyed what I was doing; and 2) I was letting the fear of sin rob me of the peace that God wanted me to have. During this time I have been taught several truths: 1) God doesn't want my perfection, my good works, or my abilities - he just wants me, as I am, who I am, sin and all. 2) it is not up to me to change myself, my feelings, my desires - it is up to God to do so according to his wishes. 3) if God has chosen not to remove these feelings from me, I must not hide my sin from my brothers and sisters but rather confess it and confess that it is ongoing and ask them to love me regardless and pray for me. And if they reject me for it, then they are judging themselves more than me - for to judge is to place ourselves above the grace of God that we all need to survive. And 4) I must learn to love, and in loving, perhaps, God may still change my desires, and if he never does, then I am of a place where my only existence in this faith is by pure grace and not my ability to be perfect before the Lord or before others. For indeed, it is quite possible that God has chosen not to remove my sinfulness from me in order that I may be forced to admit that my position in any church or Christian body is not by merit or education, by stature or knowledge, but by the pure grace of God, always, every day. In this light, I would commend you to love your new wife-to-be with all your heart, and give her the best love you can give. Are you living in sin now and in the future? I don't really care. It's not up to me to judge that. And, quite honestly, I think God cares less about that than about your desire to be under his grace. Are you less a man, or, more specifically, less a Christian because of your sins and your choices. Absolutely not! If anything, you are a better Christian for having admitted them and for daily needing to live under God's grace because you cannot undo them at this point. So in your sin, live in love and grace. For you cannot live outside your sin, and you should not concern yourself with it anymore. Rather, concern yourself with understanding the true heart of love, that is the love of Christ, the kind of love that does not ask to be right, but instead asks to be wronged for the sake of healing. We spend too much time talking about righteousness as if it were a thing we could attain, and yet does not Romans go to great lengths to show us that the only righteousness we have is through grace. Was Paul no longer a sinner when he wrote those words? Of course not. He still sinned and claimed he was worse than all of us (though I think I've got him beat now, ha). Don't talk about righteous living until you give up being strong. Don't talk about understanding until you learn how to be wrong. Don't talk about truth and justice until you give up all your might. Don't talk about good and evil until you give up being right. Is not this truth, indeed, why your gay friend was the only true friend through your trials? Is not he the only other man in your life who could no longer hide his own sin, and in exposing it and his frailty be capable of giving you the kind of grace that he himself needs to live each day. Consider the power our churches would have if every single Christian did what your gay friend did. In this light, is not your gay friend no different that the Samaritan that Christ said was the true neighbor. It was not the priest or the religious leaders. It was a godless halfbreed Samaritan whom the faithful of Christ's day despised as being the worst kind of human. I am so thankful that Christ chose a supposedly condemned class of people to show what true love is. In this light, we need to look to our gay brothers and sisters to learn about true love and grace. We need them as badly as the beaten man in Christ's parable needed the godless Samaritan. It doesn't matter if it's a sinful lifestyle or not, for it is covered by grace, and to live by the law is to be judged by the law, and to live under grace is to be judged as righteous in God's eyes (Romans). God does not want us to sin simply as a way to gain more grace, but that's not a problem for me. I have enough built-in sins that I need not seek out more. He does want us to spread the same love and grace that he has given us. My brother, I hope you will consider me in the same light as your gay friend, as someone you can turn to. For although I am not gay, I would rather be considered one of their number than be condemned by my own unwillingness to extend the grace of Christ to others, as he has extended it to me. Is that not what the parable of the ungrateful slave was to show. When we get in our pulpits and condemn the homosexual, are we not making ourselves into the slave who was forgiven his debt yet was unwilling to forgive the debt of his fellow slave? When we stand before our peers and belittle the divorced man or the couple living together or the woman getting an abortion, are we not bringing condemnation upon ourselves as well, knowing in our hearts, that we too are guilty of our own secret sins. I would rather be seen in my sin and accepted in love than be applauded for a form of godliness that is merely a façade to hide my true being. Alas, as you so well pointed out, I tend to be long-winded. Forgive me. But I was so moved by your letter I wanted to respond with due attention to what is the greatest need of our time - the need to learn how to forgive and to love without prejudice. May God bless you and those you love, Brian Elroy

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Brian Elroy McKinley
el@elroy.com