Alistair Begg: 'I'm not ready to repent over' same-sex wedding advice
'The fact of the matter is, I'm not ready to repent over this. I don't have to,' pastor says
Pastor and Christian radio personality Alistair Begg says he’s “not ready to repent” over remarks he made in a podcast last year in which he recalled advice he gave to a grandmother to attend her grandson’s same-sex wedding.
The controversy stems from recently resurfaced comments Begg, 71, made in a podcast for "Truth For Life" in September, in which he discussed his new book, The Christian Manifesto.
Begg serves as senior pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio, along with his radio ministry "Truth For Life," carried by nearly 1,800 radio stations nationwide.
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As part of the podcast, Begg touched on a specific question he said a grandmother asked him about her grandson, whom she said was "about to be married to a transgender person," and whether she should attend the wedding.
Despite the podcast being nearly three months old, Begg’s advice resurfaced on social media, leading to a controversy that ultimately led to American Family Radio (AFR), the radio ministry of the American Family Association, making the decision to "no longer air" "Truth For Life" after more than a decade.
After initially declining to comment, Begg addressed the issue in front of his congregation during his Sunday sermon at Parkside Church.
In the message, taken from Luke 15, titled “Compassion vs. Condemnation,” Begg warned about our “inclination toward Pharisaism” that is “alive and well within all our hearts.”
“In that conversation with that grandmother, I was concerned about the well-being of their relationship more than anything else,” he explained. “Hence my counsel. Don't misunderstand that in any way at all.
“If I was on the receiving end of another question about another situation from another person at another time, I may answer absolutely differently, but in that case, I answered in that way, and I would not answer in any other way no matter what anybody says on the internet.”
Begg also pushed back against critics who called on the Scottish native to repent for his advice.
“If people want me to recant and to repent … I repent daily because I say a lot of things that I shouldn't say,” he said before cracking a joke about his wife, Susan. “I mean, check with Sue.
“But the fact of the matter is, I'm not ready to repent over this. I don't have to.”
In his message, Begg compared the different approaches of Jesus and the Pharisees in how they dealt with the culture of first century Palestine.
“All the publicans and sinners who said, ‘We got to go meet Jesus,’ and the Pharisees were grumbling, ‘Can you believe this thing? He goes to the house of publicans and sinners, He meets with sinners,” said Begg.
He acknowledged some dissension over his comments, even among his own pastoral team, and conceded that “on another occasion with a different person and a different context, the advice may be very different.”
But, added Begg, his advice for this particular situation was more about “wrestling with biblical principle” than dispensing with a piece of catch-all advice for every situation.
“You got a problem with the grandmother showing up, sitting on the front row in a context that she absolutely despises, and sitting on her lap nicely wrapped with beautiful paper and a bow around it is her gift — the gift of a Bible for a granddaughter she knows has no interest in the Bible,” he said.
“But because she believes that the entrance of God's word brings light, she is prepared to trust the Holy Spirit to do the work.”
Begg said in his experience such an act of Christian boldness can go one of two ways.
“What happens to homosexual people, in my ‘experience,’ is that they are either reviled or they are affirmed,” he said. “The Christian has to say, ‘We will not treat you in either of those ways. We cannot revile you, but we cannot affirm you. And the reason that we can't revile you is the same reason why we can't affirm you, because of the Bible, because of God's love, because of His grace, because of His goodness.’”
Begg, who has been in pastoral ministry since 1975 and became senior pastor at Parkside in 1983, also pointed out how little attention his years of teaching on biblical marriage received compared with one podcast episode.
“Where were they when I was speaking at the Christian college on the West Coast, and I had a lesbian walk out, and they shut the whole thing down and walked out, and the campus went into chaos for a week?” he asked.
“You know why? Because I was explaining Ephesians Chapter 5, and I made the most unbelievable mistake of saying the only place for sexual relationships is within a heterosexual, monogamous relationship between one man and one woman for life, amen, and at that, they stood up and walked out.
“Well, why didn't somebody catch that one?”
Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post and the author of BACKWARDS DAD: a children's book for grownups. He can be reached at: [email protected].
