Boldness is walking in truth when the prevailing culture mocks you for it. Fear is when you compromise your values and accommodate to the prevailing winds of belief. No, we do not walk in fear. Candidly, we walk in faith, in great faith. The Kingdom of God will do great. The authentic churches across America – and there are tens of thousands of them – are doing and will do great.

Skyline Church, the Rancho San Diego megachurch known for hosting conservative speakers such as Glenn Beck and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, was harshly judged this week by a former Episcopal bishop famed for defending gay marriage, including his own.

In a column for The Daily Beast, the Right. Rev. Gene Robinson wrote about attending a Sunday service at Skyline and finding a mood that turned dark.

“In between the uplifting songs, the message is: They’re coming to get us. One by one, the speakers lay out the parameters of the siege under which Christians live, attacked by liberal and godless forces on every side.”

In a piece headlined “Even After Hobby Lobby, the Religious Right is Still Terrified,” Robinson wrote:

Every message, action and gesture seems calculated to ratchet up the anxiety of those who are listening. And then it’s over. Just like that.

I honestly don’t know how typical such a service is among evangelicals, bent on making people fearful, but if you left that service feeling hopeful, at peace with God, and eager to help the poor and needy, then you weren’t paying attention.

Now a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, Robinson concluded his 1,100-word column posted Sunday with this:

“Anti-gay sentiment is waning in American society, and with that forward progress, conservative churches will see a loss of credibility and a diminished effectiveness of their fear-mongering. That is as it should be. Neither the church nor the state is served by it.”

On Tuesday, Skyline senior pastor Jim Garlow responded.

Answering a Times of San Diego request for comment, Garlow said: “We did not know the writer was in the audience on that Sunday morning service. We did invite him to a Sunday night service.”

Here is Garlow’s full response to Robinson, which he termed “my thoughts.”

Although I do not affirm the lifestyle decision of Gene Robinson, I do consider him my friend. In fact, I emailed a warm note to him and said, “I can answer the question you pose in your article.” I had also read that he had recently divorced the man he married. I asked him how he was doing, and asked if we could talk by phone. He wrote me back this morning, and we are going to talk.

The writer had many wonderful things to say about our church and we appreciate that. Skyline Church is a loving, biblically convictional and very fun place to be. The church has a great sense of humor. Laughter is quite common in our place of meeting.

He misunderstood the nature of fear. We do have fear, but it is a healthy fear, or reverence, for God. We fear or reverence God rather than fearing people.

If we had fear, I would not have invited Gene Robinson, the poster child for same-sex “marriage,” to come speak on our platform. We invited him so that he and I could model thoughtful, respectful, civil discourse.

If we had fear, we would not have asked John Corvino, a homosexual man who has a male partner, who is the head of the Philosophy Department of Wayne State University, come and speak the same day.

If we had fear, we would not, as a Protestant church, have had a Roman Catholic speaker preach the sermon that day.

If we had fear, we would not have a woman preach (some churches do not believe in female preachers) that day.

We believe that marriage was established by God as one man, one woman. Gene Robinson and John Corvino do not. Yet, they were our invited guests that day.

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