Still Time to Care is an important work and teaches more than the author intended. Despite obvious theological and practical deficiencies (covered by other reviews), his book unwittingly reveals the cloudy future of the celibate gay movement. If pastors, elders, and laymen have time to care, they still have time to learn the right lessons from Johnson’s book.

Greg Johnson, a gay PCA minister who has sworn celibacy, wrote a revealing book detailing how Evangelical efforts to assimilate homosexuals into their churches have failed. It may become the sort of classic that Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s 1989 After the Ball became among culture warriors.

Since America had not fully accepted gays, Kirk and Madsen declared the sexual revolution a failure. To remedy that, their book outlined a strategy for LGBT liberation by dressing up the carcass of the gay lifestyle with Madison Avenue techniques to normalize the sexual revolution.

Johnson’s work comes from the other side of that book’s narrative. He declares the anti-gay counseling efforts of the 1970s to be a failure. Those efforts were dubbed ex-gay: Christians renouncing their homosexual attractions, striving to be straight. Johnson disavows this approach yet tries to resurrect gay support ministries by urging Christians to restructure their church life for the benefit of LGBT people.

While Johnson makes the standard arguments that you hear from pro-gay religious leaders like Wesley Hill, he offers evidence and details hard to find anywhere else. That rare content is key to its importance, inadvertently illustrating the dangers of gay ministries.

Johnson insists that care should be the foundation of any gay outreach, one that keeps a steady eye on the world’s opinions. Thus, he demonstrates his effort to morph the ex-gay movement into a less-demanding call in the following: “The world is saying Christians hate gay people. Your children and grandchildren need to see you prove them wrong. The path forward is not a new sexual ethic. It is a new love.”

That “new love” is the well-trod rhetoric of the celibate gay (Side-B) crowd: stop the shaming, ignore the labeling and start giving gays free access to your fridge. The insistence upon love and acceptance permeates the book, while the law and the call to mortify attraction to the same sex takes a backseat.

His attachment to the LGBT community is so strong that he thinks our churches should lose members if anyone pushes back against the queering of the church. This affection for them is helpfully summarized in the story of Mark, a gay Christian who backslid with a “sexual encounter” at a bookstore. This sin brought so much guilt and despair on Mark that Johnson is prompted to write: “One wonders if there couldn’t have been room to breathe, room to fail.” Are promiscuous encounters at public places the kind of failure we should turn a blind eye toward?

However, when he pulls back part of the curtain of the sordid history of the ex-gay movement, the book’s instructional value becomes evident.

The failures of the ex-gay Christian ministries of the 1970s include the most obvious: the typical person involved in these groups did not change his orientation. Besides the negligent leadership and accountability failures, there was an ongoing effort to market their ministries. As one leader, McKrae Game of the group Hope for Wholeness, explained: “We in the ex-gay world are propagandists trying to propagate an ideal.” Then there are the porn addictions, suicides,and the astronomical divorce rate of gay men with straight women.

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