His/Her name is Drew Stever.

She holds a position as a female minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Drew is a transvestite who identifies as a man. I’m fairly confident she has found much support within her denomination, which is headquartered in Chicago.

The ELCA, of course, is a mainline Protestant denomination. If officially formed on January 1, 1988, with the merge of three  Lutheran church bodies. Church records claim that as of December 31, 2023, it has approximately 2.79 million baptized members in 8,498 congregations.

Back in the day (the 1950s), my father was the business administrator at Lutheran Bible Institute in Seattle, Washington. Our family frequently identified with (I love that phrase…not) The American Lutheran Church (ALC)—one of those groups that merged into the ELCA. While I am confident there remains a plethora of biblically-minded Lutherans in the ELCA, that number appears to be dwindling.

The hierarchy has impacted their theology.

The ELCA belongs to the World Council of Churches, a group loaded with “progressive thinkers” from groups including the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), Reformed Church in America, United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church. All of these denominations are commonly considered “welcoming” to varying degrees of aberrant behavior contrary to the scriptures.

So if the news report I read was correct, “pastor” Drew Stever “recently generated controversy by suggesting that gender ideology’s incompatibility with biblical teaching, particularly about sex, demonstrates “a deficit in the Bible.”

You might want to read that last line again. And then start crying.

Appearing on CBS Mornings, Stever was offered up this juicy thought from host Lisa Ling. Host Lisa proposes,

“There is (are) a lot of people who say that according to the Bible, God made man and woman, and that couldn’t be any more clearly defined.”

Ooooh. Speak the truth, my child.

Ms. Ling continued to dive deeper into evangelical thought by citing results from a 2017 Pew Research poll that 63% of American Christians say that gender is determined by sex at birth. Then added that 35% of Christian respondents alternatively said that gender can be different from sex at birth.

Hmmm. But what doth the pastor say?? The one whose sex is “on the move.” Ready? The not-quite-so reverend Stever said,

“It’s hard to relate it to modern-day times. Because it wasn’t written for 2024; it was written for then.”

He/She then offered a bit more.

“When we read in the Scripture that God created man and woman—yes,  and God created everyone else as well.” 

Everyone else?? Wow. These new paraphrases have taken some real liberties. Or should I say…license.

As the article I cited for this story notes, the Human Rights Campaign claims on its website that

“scripture doesn’t suggest that respecting biblical authority means Christians should reject experience as a teacher.”

And they add to their craziness by saying,

“While gender complimentarity is indeed rooted in passages from Genesis 1 and 2, it is worth noting that these stories say God began by creating human beings of male and female sex (defined as the complex result of combinations between chromosomes, gonads, genes, and genitals) but there is nothing that indicates in Scripture that God only created this binary.” 

The way such thinking is supposed to get straightened out is through clear thinking, biblically loyal, and literate pastors and academicians within the Christian faith. One example is the way the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) stood up to the theological drifters as I wrote about recently.

One might ask (and wisely so), “How in the world did we get here?” In reality, it WAS the world that got us here. The fallen world. Regrettably, we have allowed the thinking of the fallen world to fall right into the pews of our churches.

Nothing new here.

Read Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. They started out well but it quickly became a secular-minded group. The apostle writes in the fifth chapter of 1 Corinthians,

“It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?” (Vs 1-2, NIV)

Pastors are called to lead the way in teaching God’s word. May the ELCA see a revival of pastors who pursue the truths of Scripture.

Let’s pray for Illinois to lead the way!