Best-selling Christian author and pastor Max Lucado issued an apology for being “disrespectful” to the LGBT community in a 2004 sermon.
“I now see that, in that sermon, I was disrespectful. I was hurtful,” wrote Lucado, pastor of Oak Hills Church, a nondenominational church in San Antonio, Texas in a letter dated Feb. 11 to the Episcopal Church’s Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Paul in the City and the Diocese of Washington.
Read the Rev. Max Lucado’s full letter here.
“I wounded people in ways that were devastating,” Lucado maintained. “I should have done better. It grieves me that my words have hurt or been used to hurt the LGBTQ community. I apologize to you, and I ask forgiveness of Christ.”
The backlash came after Lucado was invited as a guest speaker at the Washington National Cathedral on Sunday, Feb. 7.
A petition asked the cathedral’s dean, Randy Hollerith, to revoke Lucado’s invite to speak.
The Change.org’s petition was titled, “Rescind Max Lucado’s invitation to preach at Washington National Cathedral.”
It read:
“Lucado’s teachings and preaching inflicts active harm on LGBTQ people. To cite one example, in 2004, he wrote of his fears that homosexuality would lead to ‘legalized incest’ and likened same-sex marriage to incest and bestiality. Fear-mongering and dehumanizing messages from powerful speakers like Lucado have been used to justify rollbacks of LGBTQ rights and to exclude LGBTQ people from civil protections and sacred rites. To our knowledge, Lucado has not publicly renounced these views.”
Bishop Mariann Budde, who was consecrated as the ninth bishop of Washington in Nov. 2011, and who became Washington’s First Female Diocesan Bishop, issued an apology.
“I would like to apologize for the hurt caused in inviting Max Lucado to preach at Washington National Cathedral, and for not heeding the appeals that came to Dean Hollerith and me prior to Sunday, Feb. 7, asking us to reconsider,” she said in a letter, released Feb. 10.
“If I didn’t take the time to truly listen to your concerns. In a desire to welcome a wide variety of Christian voices to the Cathedral pulpit and on the assumption that Max Lucado no longer believed the painful things he said in 2004, I made you feel at risk and unwelcome in your spiritual home. I am sorry.”
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–By CNJ Staff