MB Conference wants to minister well to LGBTQ+ people, but not sensing interest in fostering larger conversations about it: Ken Esau of the National Faith and Life Team

2026 is the 5th anniversary of when over 450 Canadian MBs signed an open letter asking the Canadian Conference of MB Churches to discuss the issue of LGBTQ+ welcome and affirmation. The Conference said no. In 2022, I started this blog, pausing it in 2024 after my church at the time, River East, was expelled. Five years later, I decided to check in with the eight congregations that left or were expelled to see how things are going. 

I also wanted to check in with Ken Esau, director of the MB Conference National Faith and Life Team. Whatever you think of the MB Conference when it comes to this topic, I give Ken full credit for always responding to my queries for information and presenting the Conference’s view. Unlike some other provincial MB conference leaders, he never ducked a question or failed to reply to an e-mail asking for a response. (Even if the answer was he couldn’t provide an answer.) 

You might not agree with is responses, but he is a model of how to do good media relations—and he helped make this blog more balanced and informative. 

As part of my five-year catch up, I asked Ken: “What is the status of this topic at the Conference? Is the topic still coming up? Are other churches asking about it? What is the Conference position?” As before, he replied. Here's what he said. 

In terms of the status of this topic in our Conference, our churches do want to minister well to all people including individuals who identify as LGBTQ+. However, other than a very small group, I don't sense interest in fostering larger conversations about moving away from historic orthodoxy, revising the Confession of Faith, or making these questions into disputable matters within our family of churches. 

Here is how the NFLT responded to the Open Letter as published in the MB Herald May 12, 2021: 

Recently we have been actively giving more time and effort to this exact question about how our churches can show Jesus’ love more effectively to LGBTQ+ people. We are creating new written resources that provide guidance for how the convictions of our Confession of Faith on sexuality and marriage can be taught and practiced in our churches more compassionately.

We are making other resources (e.g., our 2013 and 2015 Sexuality Study Conferences) more accessible on our website and continuing to gather together key resources to support our churches*. We are revising the existing Confession of Faith’s “Commentary” and “Pastoral Application” sections in order to better clarify the biblical and theological foundations of our convictions and the ways that these convictions can be lived out by all of us today. 

We are partnering with Posture Shift to provide a more loving and missional response to LGBTQ+ people, and we are committed to fostering deliberate conversation groups with MB pastors and leaders who want to explore what application of our convictions means for their contexts. 

In order to improve our ability to listen to our larger MB family, we are introducing a new email account (listeningwell@mbchurches.ca) to receive input from you and others in our MB family about how we can love LGBTQ+ people better. 

In terms of updates related to these commitments: 

2021 Commitment #1: We are creating new written resources that provide guidance for how the convictions of our Confession of Faith on sexuality and marriage can be taught and practiced in our churches more compassionately. The NFLT has distributed to the Provincial Conferences two documents entitled "Loving Well Our LGB Family, Friends, and Neighbours" and "Loving Well Our Trans Family, Friends, and Neighbours"—for provinces to distribute to their member churches. 

Here is a small excerpt of the Preamble to both documents which highlights the importance of a loving welcome combined with honest and winsome invitation: 

You are welcome here—we love you and are glad you are here! Whatever your past experiences of brokenness and alienation, we welcome you here. We hope that you feel our love and concern for you as a person loved by God. 

We believe that it is in the context of deep love within a community that we are best able to hear and respond to this challenging message from Jesus. Jesus is our number one allegiance, and we welcome all people who are interested in Jesus and are considering the possibility of joining God’s beautiful story centred on Jesus. 

We believe that building healthy relationships with each other and serving both inside and outside our community is key to our calling. We want all people inside and outside our community to be free from hostility and physical threats, so if you believe that you are at risk of this here or elsewhere, please let us know. We want hostility and violence to stop. 

We want to be open and honest to you about who we are and what we believe worshipping and following Jesus is about! Like the preamble to some TV shows that provides a content warning, you need to know that we are an alternative community living out an alternative story to the one followed by the vast number of people in our culture. 

We are not simply a social group of like-minded people following the latest cultural trends but an alternative community bowing in front of Jesus. Jesus is writing a beautiful Kingdom story for the whole world, and this, we believe, is the only story that ultimately leads to human and creational flourishing for all people. Worshipping and following this Jesus involves many steps that Jesus describes as “death to self” (cf. Mark 8:34-35) but these hard steps are the pathway to real LIFE! 

We want to place all of our present identities before Jesus and receive new identities more true of us than anything else. Jesus gives us new identities as children of God, citizens of God’s Kingdom, and members of the body of Christ. If following Jesus and living into these new identities is the path to life, it would be unloving to not communicate to you what this looks like—even if it seems profoundly hard. We hope you will see and experience the fullness of life that is available nowhere else but in and through Jesus! 

Because we believe that human and creational flourishing is only possible through Jesus and joining his Kingdom story, we will be inviting you and everyone else who visits us to consider joining this story. We believe that God’s good news story in Jesus is the most important news any person could ever receive so it takes centre stage for us. We are not embarrassed about inviting people to this story because this is central to our calling and mission (cf. Matt 28:16-20). We respect everyone’s right to say no to the invitation, but we will keep spreading wide the good news even if people choose not to respond to it. 

If you respond to the invitation and become a worshiper and follower of Jesus, we hope you will consider baptism and membership within our church community. We believe that the journey of following Jesus and living into our new identities in Christ requires all of us to grow together and become a more faithful church family—seeking first God’s Kingdom and his righteousness (Matt 6:33). If you are (or are open to become) a disciple of Jesus and you can embrace the vision, convictions, and mission of this church family, we would love to have you join our family! 

2021 Commitment #2: We are making other resources (e.g., our 2013 and 2015 Sexuality Study Conferences) more accessible on our website and continuing to gather together key resources to support our churches.  

We did not follow through with this commitment, after recognizing that some of the material associated with the 2013 and 2015 Sexuality Study Conferences was both dated and not reflecting the tone that we are committed to. In addition, we have not actively maintained an updated list of recommended resources since this turned out to be come complex than originally assumed. 

2021 Commitment #3: We are revising the existing Confession of Faith’s “Commentary” and “Pastoral Application” sections in order to better clarify the biblical and theological foundations of our convictions and the ways that these convictions can be lived out by all of us today. 

The "Explanatory Notes" have been completed for Article 3: Creation and Humanity and Article 10: Marriage, Singleness, and Family (both are available on the CCMBC website), but the "Living the Confession (FAQs)" are still in process and hopefully will be posted on the website in 2027. 

2021 Commitments #4 and #5: We are partnering with Posture Shift to provide a more loving and missional response to LGBTQ+ people, and we are committed to fostering deliberate conversation groups with MB pastors and leaders who want to explore what application of our convictions means for their contexts. 

While there was significant energy initially about partnering with Posture Shift (a Christian organization that believes that God calls us to offer His presence, love, care and protection to LGBT+ people” and that “holds to a traditional biblical ethic regarding marriage and sexuality”), some of that energy has dwindled over the past five years. In addition, while we have been open to fostering these deliberate conversation groups with MB pastors and leaders, we do not have any active groups at present. 

2021 Commitment #6: In order to improve our ability to listen to our larger MB family, we are introducing a new email account (listeningwell@mbchurches.ca) to receive input from those in our MB family about how we can love LGBTQ+ people better. This email account is active and the NFLT receives input from our MB family related to these and other questions. 

I hope that this provides an adequate "update" related to how the NFLT at least is engaged in questions about how to love LGBTQ+ people better. We are certainly a work in progress on this question but continue to seek to grow in this area together.