NC Pastor: Stop condeming, start healing

The Winston-Salem Journal, my lovely hometown newspaper, published a great column by John Railey. Interviewing an African-American minister, Railey’s column delves into just some of the multitude of issues that make stopping HIV/AIDS difficult in black communities and in the black church:

The Rev. Herbert Miller II won’t engage in theological battles about homosexuality, not as AIDS continues to kill.

“We’re fussing and fighting about who’s right, and these people are dying,” Miller told me last week.

He’s a former truck driver and caseworker at an alternative school who, at age 41, is in his first job as a head pastor, at First Baptist Church on Village Drive in Lexington. He did his senior project at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity on the response of black churches to the AIDS epidemic in America. And now he’s becoming a leader in a renewed push to get more houses of worship, especially black ones, to take up the fight against AIDS and HIV, the virus that causes it, and to help those suffering from the illness.

[…snip…]

HIV is spread mainly through homosexual sex, heterosexual sex and intravenous drug use. Bisexual black men — called “down-low brothers”– sometimes spread the disease to black women, Miller said.

The Apostle Paul says homosexuality “goes against our nature,” Miller said, and Paul also lists other things that go against our nature. But emphasizing such points, or arguing about them, slows down the fight against the problem, Miller said. “I guess what I’m saying is, ‘It’s none of my business what they do in their bedroom, just as it’s none of their business what I do in mine,’ ” said Miller, a husband and father who has gay friends. Those with AIDS don’t need to be “beat up” with talk about how they got it, he said. What they need, he said, is to know that God loves them and that their pastor loves them.

I’ve often had conversations with conservative pastors, tring to place in them the kind of understanding and compassion esoused here by the Rev. Herbert Miller.

In order to effectively battle HIV/AIDS, conservative pastors need to adopt some of the same strategies being used by Miller. Continued condemnation of gay people won’t help.

Stay tuned to Q-Notes‘ Sept. 20 issue… look for it on newsstands or online. My editorial delves deeper into these various issues, and hopefully, will cause some greater conversation among Carolinas’ LGBT communities.

(Photo: Winston-Salem Journal, courtesy Herbert Miller)

Posted in Anti-LGBT, Health, LGBT, North Carolina, Politics, Religion, Sexuality, United States, Winston-Salem |