Normally, it wouldn’t be important for Canadian Mennonite Brethren who are interested in LGBTQ+ welcome and inclusion to pay much attention to Iain Provan and his idea about cuckoos in the Christian nest.
But since he was invited to be a feature speaker in October at the national Equip conference put on by the Canadian Conference on Mennonite Brethren Churches, it can be assumed his views are important to Conference leadership.
Not only that; Provan was profiled in the MB Herald, which is the official organ of the conference. Nothing gets published there without the blessing of the Conference.
Another signal of his importance came October 30 when he was interviewed by British Columbia Mennonite Brethren Conference Minister Rob Thiessen for the BCMB Pastor to Pastor podcast. The title: A biblical response to the lies of our time.
During the interview, which ranged over several topics, Provan was asked to share some of his thinking in the area of inclusion. The quotes below are taken from that podcast transcript.
Thiessen asked him about his view on marriage.
He stated that the scriptures are “very clear that a marriage is between one man and one woman for life, till death do us part . . . no matter what other people may say. So that gives us our fundamental orientation point, really, for thinking about marriage, the place of sex in human relationships, sexual intimacy, and so on.”
Later, Thiessen asked Provan about inclusion, one of the “prevailing cuckoos in the nest,” as he put it.
Christians, said Thiessen, want to be hospitable and welcoming, since that’s what Jesus was like. But, he asked, is this “the deceptive lie that's jumping into the church under this framework?”
Provan responded:
“Well, I think the fundamental problem here is that once you remove Jesus in the Gospels from the Old Testament before it and the New Testament after it, you can almost make Jesus stand for anything that you like. And there's been a long history, in fact, of doing that, not least in the modern period where the liberal Jesus turns out to be a Jesus who's much like me.
“No matter what the search for Jesus may involve, it always turns out that Jesus is much more conveniently available to me, and not somebody who challenges me or questions my assumptions and so on.
“And so you get a situation here on this hospitality issue where somehow, because Jesus ate with sinners from time to time, somehow that becomes therefore the church should not have any hard boundaries with regard to the culture roundabout. And the problem is that when you look at both the Old Testament and the New Testament, the remainder of the New Testament, that's not what you find at all.
“And there's a good reason for that. And that is that if you're going to have a discipleship community holding to a very distinctive countercultural idea of what it means to be a human being, you're going to have to protect the sheep from the wolves who want to destroy those ideas and the community that holds them.”
He went on:
“You're going to have to make sure that the boundaries there are actually quite hard. Not because you don't respect people, not because you don't treat other people with dignity, but simply because you recognize that they don't believe what you believe.
“And if you want to protect your people, particularly your young people, from what they believe, and get them to continue to believe what you think is true, you're going to have to take steps to make sure it happens.
“I don't think there's a more dangerous recent idea in the church than this idea of hospitality, as it is currently being articulated. I don't think it's a biblical idea of hospitality. I think it's a postmodern philosophy from France kind of view of hospitality. And in that view of hospitality, even holding strong beliefs is held to be oppressive. Right. You can't even articulate strong beliefs. That is a form of violence in the philosophy of Derrida and the quasi Christian people who are following Derrida. But it's coming from French philosophy. It's not coming from the Bible.”
Thiessen then asked: “How would you describe a more biblical view of hospitality then? How would a church practice be biblically welcoming, or what would be some of the markers of that?”
Said Provan:
“Well, I think communities of any kind, typically, unless they're very close communities, typically have ways of welcoming other people into their midst that don't compromise their fundamental integrity. So, for example, I wouldn't be having and I don't think the Bible permits us to have people inside the discipleship community who are not actually walking as disciples, because that undermines the whole viability of the enterprise.
“But does that mean that we can't invite people to church services? Does it mean that we can't invite people to lunch? Does it mean that we can't work with them? No, it doesn't mean any of those things. So having a hospitable posture in terms of friendliness and welcoming and, you know, and being a human being together, that's all fine and good and proper and all of that. But when you get confused about which level of thing you're dealing with, that's when the problems arise.
“And there's something of a cry now, a demand now, that the church ought to be inclusive in a way that actually in any community, if you were to adopt that same view, would destroy the very nature of the community.”
“It's always dangerous giving other examples, because they can sound trivial. So let me just take a very foolish example in a way, a silly example. If I'm a member of a golf club and I have somebody wanting to join my golf club on the basis of inclusion and diversity, who wants to play rugby on my putting greens, likely, I don't imagine there's any golf club in the world that would allow that to happen. Why? Because the person is asking for something that destroys the fundamental point of the community they're demanding to join. It's no different, really, by analogy, when people with very different views of what it means to be a human person want to become core members of our Christian discipleship community.”
Replied Thiessen: “Yeah, that's good. And it reminds the pastors listening of their role of protecting the flock that's a serious command that we're accountable for as shepherds with the church.”
Said Provan:
“Well, I would say that's a primary command. I shake in my boots when I hear people being casual about this issue. There's so much about protecting the sheep, looking after the sheep and all that. And I think that's our primary duty as church leaders. Our primary duty lies not in the direction of the culture at large. I would suggest our primary duty is to make sure the church remains the church, and therefore able then to preach the gospel to the culture to be salt and light. If there's nothing there in the first place to go and do those tasks, the tasks can't be done. So if we get confused about this, we not only risk destroying the church, we also risk destroying the witness of the church in the world.”
You can listen to the whole podcast and read the transcript
here.
Read some reflections on Provan's presentation at Equip here.
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