Evangelicals...Jesus weeps.....

garysimons
Originally uploaded by Randuwa

This is a story about a guy who seems as quaffed by the "Queer Eye" guys as anyone they ever laid hands on. A guy who's photo could easily rival any in the encyclopedia with the entry "Metro-sexual". A guy who claims to be a "Christian" pastor. A guy who agreed to hold a funeral in his Mega-church for a veteran of the Iraq War, until he crumpled after learning that this American Patriot and Hero was gay.

"Treat one another with the same spirit that you experience in Christ Jesus." ~ Philippians 2:5. Apparently Gary just doesn't have time to read the Bible, I mean, really: You have have no idea how hard it is maintian ones immaculately groomed facial hair, baby-Jesus-soft skin, and Gates-of-Pearly-White teeth!

"Gary's Conundrum, Expanded"

Many evangelicals consider Pastor Joel Osteen to be a modern-day Billy Graham. Like Graham, Osteen is incredibly popular. He heads the Lakewood Church, the world’s largest megachurch, and is the author of the bestselling power-of-positive-thinking-esque “Your Best Life Now” book series. And like Graham, Osteen tends to focus on positive messages rather than on GOP ideology disguised as theology — particularly the hatred and fear of gay people — that has become an endemic trait of today’s Christian church.

Last week, however, Osteen’s brother-in-law and rival, Rev. Gary Simons, who is head of his own megachurch, the High Point Church in Arlington, Texas, made national news when he abruptly canceled the funeral of a Gulf War veteran after he discovered that the vet was gay:
“We did decline to host the service - not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle,” Simons told The Associated Press. “Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it - yes, we would have declined then. It’s not that we didn’t love the family.”

[And…]

“Even though we could not condone that lifestyle, we went above and beyond for the family through many acts of love and kindness,” Simons said.

How did Simons show “love and kindness” to the family of the deceased? By equating their loved one with a murderer:

The pastor said that he could imagine a similar situation involving a different sin. Perhaps a mother who is a member of the church loses a son who is a thief or murderer, Mr. Simons said. The church would surely volunteer to hold a service, he said.

“But I don’t think the mother would submit photos of her son murdering someone,” he said. “That’s a red light going off.”

And then, having proved he is totally unprincipled, at least as it comes to Jesus’ message of love and inclusiveness especially for society’s outcasts, Simons sums up: “Can you hold the event and condone the sin and compromise our principles? We can’t.”

What about the sins of hatred and bigotry, Gary?


The Lakewood Church was founded by John Osteen, the late father of Joel and Gary Simon’s wife, April. According to this unverified account, after the senior Osteen died in 1999, Simons, who was then Lakewood’s youth minister, assumed he would become the next leader of the church, but was passed over in favor of Joel, who had spent 17 years producing the television broadcast of his father’s sermons but who had no experience on stage.

The unverified source says that upon Joel’s ascension, Simons “threw a temper tantrum” and left Lakewood to form the High Point Church, which the source says grew very quickly with funding that was obtained under mysterious circumstances.

Whatever the true story is, eight years after leaving Lakewood, Gary Simons is finally getting the sort of national attention he craves. Unfortunately, unlike his much more famous brother-in-law, he’s more likely to be compared to the late-hater Jerry Falwell than the sainted Billy Graham.