Ken Wilson > Quotes

“If we have a hair trigger on the exclusion gun, shouldn't it be aimed at those who are using their power to abuse someone who is in a weaker, more vulnerable position?”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“The demands of acceptance require us to maintain a relationship of honor and respect with those with whom we may ardently disagree. We accept the fact that our convictions on this matter differ, and those with whom we differ hold their convictions, as we do, unto the Lord. Inasmuch as this is not easy for us to do, we commit ourselves to bearing it as part of the disciple's cross. We don't agree to disagree by diminishing the importance of the question or by insisting that people care less about the issue.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“We so want to be right and so trust that our desire to be right is something that God would surely bless. Yet the desire to be right comes with a price: the fear of being wrong. And so, in a counter-intuitive way, this focus on being right seems to be the porridge we settle for when we exchange our birthright because we're famished and fear that father won't feed us.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“The conscience is a communal organ—a way of knowing that we do with others formed always in reference to others.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“in A Moral Vision of the New Testament. Hays says, “This means that for the foreseeable future we must find ways to live within the church in a situation of serious moral disagreement while still respecting one another as brother and sisters in Christ. If the church is going to start practicing the discipline of exclusion from the community, there are other issues far more important than homosexuality where we should begin to draw a line in the dirt: violence and materialism, for example.” [117] I am convinced that how the biblical prohibitions apply to monogamous gay relationships is indeed a disputable matter and that the teaching of Romans 14-15 should guide our response.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“But sometimes the quest for the right answer keeps us from testing a variety of good ones. In search of the right answer, we assume every answer other than the one we've settled on must be wrong. Forgetting that some things have more than one good answer. I'd like to think for example, that the question, "How can I love Ken?" might have many good answers, rather than one right one.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“We are supposed to listen to the voice within us that says, “Gosh, this just doesn’t sound loving, even though it sounds correct!” Of course, there’s much sorting to be done: what does love really call for in a given situation? Nevertheless, the warning in Scripture is there for a reason.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“But Jesus also had a way of reading Scripture that was surprising, unconventional, and paradoxical. This is part of what first fascinated me about Jesus in the gospels. His reading of Scripture got him into trouble. Getting into trouble is not a goal in our reading of Scripture (with whom and for what?) but we cannot rule it out as a possible consequence at times. Perhaps for this reason I’ve always been attracted to movements (the Jesus movement, the charismatic renewal movement, and the Vineyard) that began, for their time and context, with non-traditional readings of Scripture. This has left me open (one might say vulnerable) to considering such readings.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“This informal “pre-exclusion” is probably the more powerful and widely exerted form in many churches. It is in my denomination. As the divorced and remarried don’t seek communion at a Roman Catholic parish, gays and lesbians don’t seek to participate in most evangelical churches.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“In other words, the biblical writers were speaking to those who shared a rich cultural context, which shaped the way they communicated. I grew up in Detroit and share a rich cultural context with other Detroiters. When I say words like lions, tigers, and wings, I don’t have to specify that I mean the professional football, baseball, and hockey teams. Fellow Detroiters get it because we share a rich cultural context.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“The question of belonging is THE question addressed by the gospel.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“The spaces where I’m walking—grid roads, busy streets, and eventually the shoulder of a four-lane highway that partially encircles a small, provincial capital—are what Marc Augé would call non-places, “the real measure of our time.” While places are
about the possibility of stories, about human action, non-places are spaces of passive spectatorship, of looking—perhaps through the windshield of a car travelling at 110 kilometres per hour or faster—rather than doing. Non-places have no stories, no relationships, no connections. Instead, we interact with various institutions through the prescriptive, prohibitive, or informational signs posted in them for us to read: turn right, no smoking, Saskatoon 205 km. They are spaces with which most of us are
familiar, even if we usually hurry through them, paying little attention. They are more or less the same no matter where we are, and they define much of our contemporary reality: highways, airports,
shopping malls.”
― Ken Wilson

“Get ready for some more mind-numbing detail that doesn’t make for snappy, easy-to-digest sermons.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“While the Bible does speak clearly on many matters—you'd have to be deaf not to hear the condemnations of murder, stealing, adultery, greed, etc.—there are, in fact, many questions at the margins of each of these, for which there are not clear answers. If you are not a pastor it's easier to maintain the comforting illusion that these hard cases are rare. But they are not.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“Over four decades of pastoral ministry—I got started early—you make mistakes. But the mistakes you most regret are the ones that obscure the gospel and hurt the people you love, by saying in effect, "You do not belong," to those for whom Christ died to provide a place of belonging.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“I have learned that there's no way to open yourself to the experience of God while retaining your cool, your sense of ironic detachment.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“Too many congregations look to their pastors for simple answers to problems that their pastors see as anything but simple. And too many pastors don't trust their congregations enough to say, "It's not that simple from my point of view and here’s why.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“Today we have gay people whose relationships, until just recently, have been branded by society as extraordinarily shameful, as uniquely perverse—worse than incest. The cultural heritage of this view had the effect of driving them all underground, where sex is practiced surreptitiously, secretively, for fear of social ostracism, not to mention physical harm. And now, tired of the highway rest stops, tired of the back rooms in gay bars, many in that community have a longing to attempt what can only be regarded as modern marvel regardless of gender: two people willing to attempt lifelong fidelity to each other, come what may. This doesn't seem to me to be a "slippery slope." It seems to me that it might actually be instead, a redemptive trajectory.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“A third way urges disputants to recognize the limits of their personal responsibility for the actions of others and to leave the execution of a judgment to God.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“There is something more powerful that the gospel calls us to give each other: not affirmation, not moral approval, but acceptance. Another word for acceptance is embrace. The opposite of exclusion is not mere tolerance but embrace. The "other" is received as one who is beloved.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“RELIGION IS NO ESCAPE FROM THE MESSY BUSINESS OF HUMANITY.”
― Ken Wilson, Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back

“A pastor stands at the crossroads of a congregation's conflicted conscience. It is a congested intersection, this place. Standing in the middle of it can be dizzying, frightening, awful, especially under the intense scrutiny that comes with religious controversy. You have to keep your wits about you to discern whether the groaning in your gut echoes the groaning of the Spirit.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“For too long, our controversies seem to boil down to conservatives and liberals (or, if you prefer, traditionalists and progressives) talking past each other for the benefit of stirring up their loyalists, as partisans do in the primary campaigns of electoral politics. The rest of us are expected to line up with our team just as soon as they show their colors.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“Virtually every church tradition, by theology, interpretive strategies, or pastoral practice, makes accommodations for divorced people who seek to remarry. These accommodations permit divorced people to enter unions that are outside the rule laid down in the Bible. But we can't have it both ways. We can't apply a strict "biblical marriage" rule to gay people and not apply it to those who are divorced and remarried.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“They say disillusionment is a huge step in a person's spiritual growth, especially when it involves disillusionment with a false view of one's self as someone who doesn't make big mistakes”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“It's easier to offer easy answers when we are not the people facing the hard questions.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“If I say to some kids roughhousing in church, "Don't kill anyone," they know what concern I am addressing. They know I'm exaggerating for emphasis and not speaking in general terms—that I'm not, for example, commenting on the morality of military service. Stripped of the rich context we share, the mere words, "Don't kill anyone" could easily be understood to mean don't kill anyone, anytime, ever.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“We have to be thoughtful about the burdens we insist that other people carry, especially when we don't have to carry those same burdens ourselves.”
― Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian and Transgender in the Company of Jesus

“Kathleen takes my picture. She emails it to me later. I look ridiculous with the orange Buff pulled up over my head. We say goodbye and I continue walking past fields of swathed canola. Houses stand beyond them. I’m walking the interface between the country and the city: a shallow space, with fields butting up against houses, industry and agriculture commingled. The stubble is a rusty colour. Crispy blue J Cloth towels, scraps of sky, are caught in the roadside weeds.”
― Ken Wilson