Pastor: Parents of gay children should “turn them over to satan”
“You isolate them, you don’t have a meal with them. You separate yourself from them. You turn them over to Satan.”
— Grace Community Church’s Pastor, John MacArthur, speaking on YouTube channel Grace to You. MacArthur made the comments in a segment titled How to Respond to a Homosexual Child, following a letter from a parent seeking advice after their child had come out. The full transcript of the Pastor’s damaging advice is below:
“If that adult child professes Christ, claims to be a Christian, then that becomes an issue for confrontation of the sternest and strongest kind, because that falls into Matthew 18, that’s a sin for which you go to that person. If the person doesn’t repent and turn, you take two or three witnesses and confront again. If there’s still no repentance, you tell the Church and the Church pursues, and if there’s still no repentance then there’s a public putting out of the Church of that person who professes to be a Christian. That’s how you deal with it.
“On the other hand, if this adult child doesn’t profess to be a Christian, then he or she is just acting like a non-Christian. That’s a whole different issue. In the first case, if they profess to be a Christian, you have to alienate them, you have to separate them. You can’t condone that, it’s inconsistent wit the profession of Christ. So you isolate them, you don’t have a meal with them. You separate yourself from them. You turn them over to Satan as it were, as Scripture says.
“But if that’s a non-believer, you have to treat them like a non-believer and [they] do what [they] do. Then, the issue is to bring the Gospel compassionately, directly, confrontationally to expose that sin and all other sins and call that person to salvation and repentance. In that case, you might want to spend more time confronting and showing compassion but calling for salvation.”
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