Springsfield, MO Reverend Phil Snider Supports LGBTQ Rights

Details: Published on Monday, 22 October 2012 16:05; Written by E-Li

reverend phil snider

We could have believed by listening to the beginning of the Reverend Phil Snider's speech during a city council having to rule on an ordinance allowing more LGBTQ rights, than the Reverend is firmly opposed to this ordinance and yet, when we watch the video until the end, we understand that the Reverend Snider from Springsfield, MO is in fact in favor of this ordinance.

Here the video in which you can watch the intervention of the Reverend Snider during this city council:

Yesterday, on his blog, the Reverend explained his position by quoting Brian McLaren:

I inherited a theology that told me [that] homosexuality is a sin, so although we should not condemn (i.e. stone them), we must tell people to “go and sin no more.” Believe me, for many years as a pastor I tried to faithfully uphold this position, and sadly, I now feel that I unintentionally damaged many people in doing so. Thankfully, I had a long succession of friends who were gay. And then I had a long succession of parishioners come out to me. They endured my pronouncements. They listened and responded patiently as I brought up the famous six or seven Bible passages again and again. They didn’t break ranks with me and in fact showed amazing grace and patience to me when I was showing something much less to them.

Over time, I could not square their stories and experiences with the theology I had inherited. So I re-opened the issue, read a lot of books, re-studied the Scriptures, and eventually came to believe that just as the Western church had been wrong on slavery, wrong on colonialism, wrong on environmental plunder, wrong on subordinating women, wrong on segregation and apartheid (all of which it justified biblically) … we had been wrong on this issue. In this process, I did not reject the Bible. In fact, my love and reverence for the Bible increased when I became more aware of the hermeneutical assumptions on which many now-discredited traditional interpretations were based and defended. I was able to distinguish “what the Bible says” from “what this school of interpretation says the Bible says,” and that helped me in many ways.

So – many years before I learned I had members of my own close family who were gay – my view changed. As you can imagine, when this issue suddenly became a live issue in my own family, I was relieved that I was already in a place where I would not harm them as (I’m ashamed to say this) I had harmed some gay people (other people’s sons and daughters) earlier in my ministry. [read the rest of Brian's post here]

The Reverend Snider has specified that this perspective of McLaren deeply resonates with his experiences as a pastor.

He also shares the link of a sermons series he preached in July titled "What Does the Bible Really Say About Homosexuality?" that you can read here:

What Does the Bible Really Say About Homosexuality? (And how does it matter for our church?) – Part I

What Does the Bible Really Say About Homosexuality? (And how does it matter for our church?) – Part II

In these sermons, he explains for example one of the sentence of the Leviticus which says: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, they’ve committed an abomination."

He explains then that "clearly, these verses prohibit same gender relations. It’s obvious. It’s explicit. So the easy thing for us to do is say that this settles the matter, and for many people it does. So why in the world would some Christians say this doesn’t settle the matter? Well, the response to this is pretty simple, and you likely know it already: There are a bunch of biblical passages in Leviticus and in the Bible that we don’t follow whatsoever, and we have no problem with it. Many of us eat shellfish. We eat pork. We wear clothes made from two different types of materials. We lend money with interest. All without batting an eye. So why do we hold up some verses as authoritative but completely disregard others? Such a lack of consistency makes it difficult to justify our reasons for condemning one thing as taboo while ignoring other taboos that lie side by side in the text."