Author and well-known Christian speaker Brian McLaren led a commitment ceremony for his son Trevor Douglas McLaren and his same-sex partner Owen Patrick Ryan this past Saturday. According to a Christianity Today blog, the ceremony was held in Chevy Chase, Maryland at the Audobon Naturalist Society after the couple’s formal wedding, which was held in Washington D. C. earlier in the day. The New York Times reported the commitment ceremony contained “traditional Christian elements.”
The Christian Post reported McLaren’s reaction when his son Trevor came out to him. McLaren had been shifting his thinking about homosexuality as a sin, and “had gone through the change in this view before I ever guessed that one of my kids might be gay.”
“Couple of years after that, when I really in some ways come out myself as a person who no longer supported the traditional view and one of my sons came out to me, I just remember I cried and cried because my thought is ‘Oh no, if my son has been going through the same kind of pain so many other people did and I didn’t know it, I just couldn’t live with that,'” McLaren continued.
McLaren told NPR about why he changed his views on homosexuality: “I was a good kid, I believed what I’d been told. And as a pastor, I started having gay people come out to me and what became clearer and clearer to me is that their experience was not explained by the theology I inherited. And that it would be unjust to continue to uphold what I’d been taught. Maybe I could say it like this: My call to love God and love my neighbor was in conflict with what I’d been taught the Bible required me to say and do.”
McLaren is the author more than 20 books, including A New Kind of Christianity and the more recent Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross the Road? and helped form Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland. Time magazine named McLaren as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.
This article was written by a churchleaders.com staff writer.
