Pastors need to remember that while evangelism is important, it’s not their first responsibility. Their first responsibility is to feed the sheep, to equip the saints. For too many pastors, concern for showing compassion to the lost means they’re not protecting the sheep from false teaching. They are, in fact, starving the sheep to appease goats.

In September 2019, in Mesa, Arizona, pastor Ryan Visconti was thrilled to find himself at a private dinner with Andy Stanley, pastor of what was then the largest church in the United States.

On any given weekend, Stanley’s North Point church has roughly 31,000 attendees across eight campuses in Atlanta, Georgia. Stanley is also the author of dozens of books, and his sermons are distributed through a vast digital ministry that includes not only podcasts and YouTube videos, but also traditional broadcasts on NBC, CBS, and radio stations across the country. Little wonder, then, that Preaching Magazine ranked him number eight on its list of the twenty-five most influential preachers of the last twenty-five years.

But perhaps over no group does Stanley hold more sway than other pastors. Stanley was in Arizona for his “Irresistible” tour, a conference that promised to teach church leaders how to “expand [their] influence.” Visconti was excited for the opportunity to pick Stanley’s brain, though, at thirty-four, he would be the youngest at a table of about fifteen men and expected to spend the majority of the meal quietly soaking up wisdom from Stanley and the more seasoned leaders. That plan went off the rails when the discussion turned toward homosexuality and how the men’s ministries were confronting increasing cultural pressure to compromise on clear biblical teaching. Stanley shocked the room by arguing that they shouldn’t so much confront it as accommodate it. “He said he would encourage any gay couples in his congregation to commit to each other,” Visconti recalled.

For the next hour and a half, he listened as Stanley went on to contend that modern pastors must make allowances for gay and lesbian couples to be married in their churches because “that’s as close as they can get to a New Testament framework of marriage.” Visconti remembered Stanley likening same-sex attraction to a disability, something that can’t be helped. An expectation of celibacy, he argued, would be unfair.

Finally, Stanley revealed that while he had never officiated a same-sex wedding, he could see himself doing so eventually, especially for a family member. “I know I shouldn’t let experience dictate my theology, but I have. Maybe I’m wrong.”

Visconti was dumbstruck: “I remember thinking to myself, if his church knew what he was saying right now, half of them would probably leave over-night.” He joined several pastors in arguing with Stanley as others “squirmed in their chairs, muttering, ‘That’s not right.’” Host Joel Thomas, then pastor of Mission Community Church, had gotten his start in ministry under Stanley’s tutelage. When the dinner was over, he moved swiftly to protect his former boss’s reputation. Thomas asked the pastors to “honor” Stanley for being willing to “be vulnerable” in front of them. By this he meant they were not to speak of Stanley’s views to anyone else.

Visconti felt torn. It had been a private event, which meant there was an expectation of confidentiality. But another part of him felt plagued by the knowledge that a man with so much influence on his fellow teachers was encouraging them in error. He prayed and pressed several of his mentors about it, trying to decide how to address someone as famous as Stanley.

The mentors didn’t think confrontation was the right approach, even though two weren’t surprised by what Visconti had told them. Stanley had already preached messages about needing to “unhitch from the Old Testament,” seeming to suggest he was laying the groundwork for more liberal theology. And a sermon illustration in which he reproved a husband in his church for committing adultery with another man but not for the homosexual acts involved had raised eyebrows as far back as 2012.

In short, Visconti, who wasn’t very familiar with Stanley’s ministry, discovered that the fact that he might have heretical views had been whispered about for years. Yet this had not prompted the doctrinally sound pastors in Stanley’s circle to warn churches not to host his conferences or to caution Christians not to buy his books or entertain his teaching.

Visconti held out hope that those witnesses who were on more equal footing with Stanley might be the ones to call him to account. He also hoped the famous pastor might just have been processing his ideas out loud.

Yet, as the months went by, there was no evidence that any of the more senior pastors who knew Stanley better had addressed the issue with him. Then, in 2022, clips of Stanley from his biennial Drive Conference—another event specifically targeted at pastors and ministry leaders—made the rounds on social media. In one, he heaped praise on LGBTQ individuals, saying their desire to come to church despite receiving judgment from Christians showed they had more faith than heterosexual church members. He went on to call 1 Corinthians 6, Leviticus 18, and Romans 1 “clobber passages,” echoing a phrase common among gay activists when referencing Bible verses that address homosexuality. At no point did he indicate that homosexual acts or desires were sinful.

When Stanley’s remarks had given rise to similar questions in 2012, a North Point spokesperson claimed he was being taken out of context, though the representative did not clarify Stanley’s views. Now that Stanley was being asked again to explain whether he believed, as the Bible teaches, that homosexuality is a sin, his church declined to respond entirely.

Amid all the speculation about Stanley’s meaning, another clip from the Drive Conference especially pricked Visconti’s conscience. In it, Stanley seemed to encourage pastors to lead their congregations carefully and strategically toward acceptance of homosexuality.

Visconti feared that further silence would allow Stanley to use his platform to sow error and confusion in many churches across the country. Fifteen pastors knew in which direction Stanley was trying to nudge evangelical churches. And for more than three years, none of them had said anything. Visconti decided enough was enough. He posted an explosive thread on Twitter revealing what Stanley had said and naming his views “overtly heretical.”

Two other pastors who had been at the dinner that night confirmed that Visconti’s account was accurate. But that was as far as they were willing to go.

One told me he didn’t feel comfortable providing details because the dinner had been private. The other shared this concern about confidentiality but added, “[I’m] not sure I want to get into a political battle on this.” The most unsettling thing about my exchange with this man was the implication that because Stanley’s unbiblical stance centered on homosexuality, raising any alarm about it would have been “political.” A highly influential pastor was compromising the Word of God and encouraging other church leaders to do likewise. If any matter could be classified as ecclesiastical rather than civil in nature, this was it. Especially as it turned out there was a lot more going on at North Point to spread LGBTQ ideology through America’s churches than just Stanley’s pastors’ conferences.

In 2000, Jon Stryker, gay heir to a one-hundred-billion-dollar surgical supply conglomerate, launched the Arcus Foundation, a grant-making institution that soon became the largest funder of LGBTQ initiatives in the United States. But after legislative defeats like the passage of a 2008 California law banning gay marriage, Stryker’s foundation began devoting tens of millions of dollars to, in its words, “challenging the promotion of narrow or hateful interpretations of religious doctrine” within every major Christian denomination. Between 2013 and 2018, for instance, it gave over two million dollars to the Reconciling Ministries Network to “secure the full participation of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the United Methodist Church,” the last mainline denomination still resistant to full affirmation of the entire rainbow panoply. Given that the UMC went through a schism in 2022 over LGBTQ ordination and gay marriage, it seems Stryker’s money was well spent.

While evangelicalism’s decentralized and independent nature makes any wholesale attempt at reshaping doctrine unfeasible, it, too, came in for the Arcus treatment, albeit with more scattered outlays of cash. One particular expenditure proved strategic, as it managed to harness the influence of both North Point on the Eastern Seaboard and another internationally famous megachurch in the West, Rick Warren’s Saddleback.

Between 2014 and 2018, the Reformation Project, a brand-new organization led by twenty-three-year-old Harvard dropout Matthew Vines, received $550,000 in grants. The purpose of the funding, according to Arcus, was to “reform church teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity among conservative and evangelical communities.” On the surface, the Reformation Project would have seemed an unlikely vehicle for making inroads with the most resistant strain of American Christianity. Anyone watching the viral 2012 YouTube talk in which Vines argues that God does not condemn loving, gay relationships, only same-sex rape and orgies, might have guessed he was a nervous high-schooler. But youth and inexperience were lesser obstacles than his overt branding as a gay-affirming evangelical. Vines has even called affirmation of homosexual unions “a requirement of Christian faithfulness.” For Vines and the Reformation Project to have any hope of fulfilling their mission, they needed partners who looked and sounded like the conservative Christians they were trying to convince but whose teaching was equally committed to the project of undermining Scripture.

Enter Greg and Lynn McDonald. In 2015, they founded Embracing the Journey, an organization for Christian parents of LGBTQ children, at the urging of North Point’s executive director, Bill Willits. They had recently relocated to the Atlanta area and had begun attending services at the church. Over a breakfast meeting with Willits early in the year, Greg happened to share that his son had come out as gay in 2001, and he described how his and Lynn’s process of acceptance eventually led them to become informal counselors to other parents of gay and transgender kids. Willits was “captivated” by their story and revealed that North Point had already begun exploring new ministries in that vein. He urged them to film a video for Stanley’s Drive Conference that May.

As Stanley introduced the McDonalds’ video to approximately two thousand church leaders from all over the country, he urged those leaders not to view homosexuality through a “political” lens. Instead of suggesting that ministers use the Bible as their foremost frame of reference, he urged the audience to approach the issue through a “relational lens.” His example for relational was the McDonalds’ story.

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