Season 6, Episode 7
This week, Nikki talks with Bill White, co-pastor of City Church Long Beach. Bill shares the story of his son coming out and how that experience challenged his theology and ultimately deepened his faith in Jesus. He discusses his church’s journey of transformation through challenging conversations, and how critical it is for church communities to practice healthy modes of disagreement.
You can also check out Bill’s coaching work at Small Church, Big Table.
20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action.
Host and Producer: Nikki Toyama-Szeto
Edited by: Wiloza Media + David de Leon
Music: Andre Henry
Transcript
[00:00:00] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Hello, this is Nikki Toyama-Szeto, Executive Director of Christians for Social Action, and your host for today’s episode of 20 Minute Takes. Today we talk with Pastor Bill White. He’s a pastor of a church in Long Beach, California. He joins us today to give us some of the background of that story, as he is an evangelical pastor who’s wrestled with his gay son’s coming out and what that means for him as a pastor, but also the larger journey of questions and exploration that the church went on together. Join us for this episode of 20 Minute Takes.
Bill, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20 Minute Takes.
[00:01:06] Bill White: So glad to be here.
[00:01:08] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Was there some sort of an incident that caused your church to go down a journey of deeper grappling with the question of sexuality?
[00:01:18] Bill White: It was a confluence of a few things, but one stood out. So our denomination was sort of tearing itself apart at the seams about this. And leadership of the denomination said we should be having these conversations.
Now, secondly, we’re in Long Beach, California, which is super gay. It’s, I think, the fourth or fifth most gay city in America. And ours is a very neighborhood-centric church. I think I have something like 20 gay neighbors.
So those things were obviously really important. And then, in 2015, my son came out. And we realized we are definitely gonna have to talk about this.
[00:02:02] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: And can you tell us a little bit about before your son came out, before you started on a journey, asking the questions of how does your Christian faith inform how you show up to the gay community?
Can you describe who you were then? And then can you talk to us a little bit about the journey that you had with your son?
[00:02:17] Bill White: Ooh, yeah. I mean, I was a good evangelical, you know, I really was. I’m from the standard white-guy, sort of megachurch model—Saddleback, Willow Creek, you know—it’s all about leadership and evangelism and, you know, we might pass the plate twice during a service because you got to raise money. These sorts of things. I was an outreach pastor, I counted, and I made sure our numbers were bigger this week than last week. I mean, it was some of the stereotypical aspects of evangelical culture, which included a conservative theology around LGBT people.
And I was tortured inside, because my brother came out in 1990. Okay. And I was just tortured, because I’d seen how Christians treated him so poorly.
And so I was just angsty. I’d always prayed that my son would not be gay, because I worried. And I think I knew.
[00:03:25] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: So even from the very beginning, you always were praying.
[00:03:32] Bill White: I prayed specifically about that. Yeah. And we named our son after my gay brother. There’s a certain irony there.
[00:03:40] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: I understand that you had a relationship with your son even before he was born.
[00:03:46] Bill White: Oh yeah.
[00:03:47] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: And what did that look like?
[00:03:49] Bill White: I mean, I write a lot of letters, I write a lot of journals, I had a lot of journal entries for my son before he was even born.
I wrote multiple letters to my son’s wife. Before he was born. Before he was born… I mean, it’s a little awkward now. He’s like, “Wow, Dad. Nice, nice job there. Kinda missed the mark a little bit, Dad.” Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. So yes. He and I have always been close, so I actually knew in 2013, and he came out to himself in 2015.
So I knew about 18 months before he did that he was gay. That was actually God’s gift to me, because I got to go on my own journey and be like, “Okay, look, you can’t hide anymore. You need to do the work.” And it was hard for me. I mean, there was screaming and crying and yelling at God. And I read everything and prayed and blamed myself and blamed everybody.
You know, all this stuff that you do when life doesn’t turn out the way you want. And you’re confronted honestly with an entire people group that you’ve excluded, and now you realize: This is me; these are my people.
Uh huh. And yeah, I mean, it wrecked me. Yeah. And it was one of the greatest gifts God’s ever given me to have a gay son.
[00:05:19] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Two things that seem really opposite. How did that shift come?
[00:05:45] Bill White: Yeah. So, it’s a double shift. It’s the personal shift and the more communal shift. The personal shift is… I don’t, honestly, I just get real with Jesus, ’cause I’d done the pray-the-gay-away thing with a bunch of folks over the years, and no one had ever changed.
And so many of my friends who were queer had given up their faith. And Jesus is the best thing in my life. I’m like, “I’m not letting my son miss out on the best thing in my life.” And so I just felt like I went toe-to-toe with Jesus: I know you’re bigger than me. I know you created the universe, and I don’t give a damn. We’re going to argue, and we’re going to fight this out.
And I’m not holding back. You are not going to stop loving my son. And I realized, I probably shouldn’t be talking to you like this. There are a few F-bombs in there too, you know…
[00:06:48] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Jesus was able to handle it?
[00:06:49] Bill White: Apparently he was. Apparently. Who knew? And I think for me, that was it. I was so scared that if I loved my son, I would lose Jesus. And so I just had to tell Jesus that.
And I said, Look, I actually believe you’ve called me to love. And so I’m going to love my son, even though a lot of my religious culture tells me not to. And if I’m wrong, send me to hell.
If you sent me to hell for loving well, then okay. Then, then you’re not the kind of God I want to follow anyway.
I think a lot of that internal stuff then started working out externally and I realized, Oh my gosh, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
I actually get to follow Jesus. I mean, I was scared to death of thinking about racial equity. Of course I had gave lip service to it and gave the occasional sermon, but scared to death because it’s so big, and what am I going to do? There’s so much guilt and shame and all the white fragility stuff.
I was terrified, but now I’m like, “All right, let’s go. Wow, Jesus, if you’re big enough, you can handle my absolute inability to think about these things.” Yes. I mean, I am so limited. I’m so privileged in all these things and so, yeah, send me a trans person. Let’s go. If you can call me to love my son and still love me and I can still love you, oh my God, I could love anyone…or at least try.
[00:08:34] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Yeah. Wow. So it sounds like in just hanging with Jesus, going through that journey, there was sort of this, if Jesus can be present to me and if I’m also surviving this with Jesus, bring it on.
[00:08:48] Bill White: Yeah. Bring it on.
[00:08:49] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: There’s nothing that I can’t do…
[00:08:50] Bill White: I know. And I think, and to be honest, there’s a sort of second internal piece which is what do you do with the Bible?
Oh, the Bible. I think I was really scared that I was going to lose the Bible also. I was mostly scared that I was going to lose Jesus, but then I realized, okay, I’m going to get Jesus, but I might lose the Bible. Oh no, I love the Bible. I read the Bible every day.
I’ve grown up on this, and I teach from it. And that was really scary, too. And that’s been a very similar journey. You know, I had a pastor in a conservative church email me this week and say to me like, “Hey, I want to go on this journey. I’m becoming affirming. My church is full of PhDs. They’ve read everything. And they’re not convinced. What book would you recommend?” Then they mentioned all the books that you would read.
And you know what book came to mind for me? It was The Womanist Midrash. Have you read it, by Wilda Gaffney? Oh my gosh. It is fantastic. Wilda Gaffney is an Old Testament professor. Womanist theology is feminist theology from a Black perspective. And she goes through every woman in the Hebrew scriptures. And as she does, you realize like, “Oh my word, I have never seen any of this.” And what she’s doing is giving the Bible back to people like me, who are scared of losing it, not realizing that what we had done is come at it with these lenses.
That’s what I was losing—my lens. I wasn’t losing the Bible. And so Wilda Gaffney, amongst many others, queer theologians and others, Mujerista theologians like Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, right? I mean, these folks who are seeing the Scriptures with new lenses and loving it, honoring it, and showing me Christ there in ways I’ve never even seen before.
I’m like: “Oh my word, I’m not going to lose the Bible. I’m going to get it back.”
[00:11:03] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Yeah. That’s so interesting because I think even as you’re describing it, I’ve had a similar experience where, when you understand the context of the stories and some of the things that are happening in the Bible, you recognize that the Bible is actually commenting on some of the different things we see today.
And what I didn’t realize is I had scrubbed it of all of its specificity in order to make it universal, but there’s sort of a way that God actually shows up in the specific as a first-century Jewish man. And this specificity actually helps us—God’s not an amorphous being, you know?
[00:11:42] Bill White: I love that.
That is so profound. Yeah. That is very much my experience.
[00:11:50] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: So what did you do with those troublesome passages? ‘Cause I think sometimes people feel like, “Oh, it’s troublesome.” You know, they’re scared: “Oh, I’m going to have to cut that part out of the Bible.”
What happened for you with some of those “troublesome” passages?
[00:12:04] Bill White: There are a few things that happened to me and they sort of interconnect. So one is, just as a good evangelical, I use that phrase to say, “Hey, I love the Bible. I love hermeneutics. I’m going to exegete. I’m going to do word studies.” There’s actually a lot of great stuff out there where you realize there actually is a different way of looking at Romans 1 and Leviticus 18 and these passages when you unpack the Greek words and look at their context and things like that.
And so that was very freeing to do that in the way that I had known and to realize that, along with that is a good evangelical white academic tradition, like studying theology and studying church history and realizing, oh, people’s theology changes.
I see. And so there’s word study stuff. There’s the history stuff. And then I think there’s some of the stuff around what is inerrancy, how does inerrancy work, and how really does inerrancy support the status quo of those in power? So all the theology I read in seminary was from dead white males or a couple of living white males.
And for all I know, all of them were straight, cisgender.
And when you start to read some Womanist theology and Mujerista theology, you realize there are different ways to think about this. And there are different ways to come at the Bible where inerrancy is a construct that allows those with power to keep it.
[00:14:04] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Wow. It sounds like this journey with your son ended up really having implications on big, fundamental questions like Is the Bible trustworthy? Is it inerrant? Can Jesus love me? Can I love Jesus? How do you think this journey that you had with your son—this deeply personal one that then led you to really wrestle with a lot of assumptions about your faith—affect your church, and how did that affect you as a pastor?
[00:14:38] Bill White: Yeah, well, one thing it did was it almost killed our church.
[00:14:43] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Were you sharing this life as you’re wrestling with these things or…?
[00:14:46] Bill White: Yeah. So we pulled together a study team, and the study team was fantastic. We had three true conservatives, three true progressives, and a bunch of folks in the middle. And we studied for 18 months. I mean, we did word studies, we brought in experts who were conservative and experts who were progressive, and we read the commentaries. We did everything. For 18 months.
[00:15:05] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: I love that you did that in community.
[00:15:07] Bill White: It was great.
[00:15:08] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: That’s amazing.
[00:15:10] Bill White: It was wonderful. And we invited the congregation with some town hall meetings along the way. Part of what happened at that time, though, is my co-pastor had left, and so I was left leading as a solo pastor, and I am not gifted in that area… I’m just not. And so the confluence of those two things, our LGBT study team and me being a solo pastor and not good at it….I like to say that that a bad pastor can grow their church in half.
But you have to be a really terrible pastor to grow it to a third. And I achieved that. So we were worshiping at like 165 and dropped down to about 55 people.
But what happened is that those 55 people stayed, both conservative and progressive people stayed, because the study team came out unanimous. No one changed their theology in that process. They said, Hey, I’m still progressive or I’m still conservative, but I recognize that people see there’s a diversity of theology around this and it’s not a litmus test for orthodoxy.
And so the study team stayed, and people in the church stayed who wanted to be part of that.
And what that meant is that, as a church, we could enter into hard conversations.
[00:16:26] Bill White: So for example, we could have a conversation about abortion that you can’t typically have openly. As opposed to This is what the Bible says, or This is God’s perspective.
So we could do that. One Sunday we had a local friend of ours who does training around racial justice. People came in and the chairs were all set up in small groups. She led us in dialogue around difference around our ethnic journeys.
And so it wasn’t a typical Sunday service. It was actually an exploration of our racial identities and how those come in conflict with each other. So we can do things like that because we had built all this muscle around having really hard conversations.
[00:17:18] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Oh, that’s amazing. In the early part of this discernment process, when your church was starting to trend towards a third, what made you decide to keep going with it and not say, Okay, enough. People aren’t going to church because of this. We just need to stop this. It’s divisive. What made you all decide to keep going?
[00:17:43] Bill White: A great question. Let me think about that. I mean, for one, I was a solo pastor at that point, and so they were kind of stuck with me, and I’m stuck with my family, right?
[00:17:57] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: So this mirrored a process you had to go through because you’re in relationship with your son.
[00:18:03] Bill White: I think, personally, we had the advantage of being a church plant, so we didn’t have a building, we didn’t have a mortgage, we were very streamlined in our budget. My wife’s got a good job, she carries our insurance, those sorts of things. And so in some ways we were set up well to shrink. And not perish.
And then, I had to take an emergency sabbatical in this process, because I was just becoming undone. I was not leading well. It wasn’t even about the LGBT stuff. I just did not treat my staff well. I didn’t treat myself well. And I was just sort of falling apart. So I took a emergency sabbatical in the summer of 2017, which was a real gift.
Some mentors came around and said, “I need you to do that.” And on that sabbatical I said to Jesus, “Okay, look, should I just give up pastoring, because I’ve made a mess of this?” The church had been shrinking consistently, and I just wasn’t leading well.
And there was one day when I was just stuck. And for whatever reason, I felt led to go out in my backyard. I went out and took some chairs that I had in the house. And I set them up and realized, Oh, we can get 25 chairs in the backyard. So if we lose the place we’re renting and we don’t have a worship team, what I really want is to go on this journey towards Jesus with other people who are going to wrestle with the hard things and actually try to see the Kindom of God come.
And I’m okay with that, whether I get paid or not. And I think that was one of those moments where I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to keep going.”
[00:19:57] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Yeah. It distilled it down. It sounds like, this is about the people. It’s not about the numbers anymore. I love that.
You know, I do think that there are a lot of folks who may be hearing your story, and maybe the pressure points might be different, but they are in a church that is navigating something pretty tricky.
Maybe the church is wrestling with their posture towards LGBTQ Christians and how to be hospitable. Some of that might be about asking “What does Christian faithfulness look like?” What advice would you give to folks who are on the front end of some of these hard conversations?
[00:20:42] Bill White: My co pastor and I have so many of these conversations, right? So we started a small nonprofit coaching group called “Small Church, Big Table” where we have these conversations all the time.
So I think part of what I would say is that the conversation’s not going away. You can’t make it go away, so therefore you need to have it, but there are ways to have it better and there are ways to have it worse. So choose better. There’s a process where you have to look inwardly, and you have to do some of your own work as a leader.
What does it look like to lead through change? And what does my congregation look like? Yesterday I was on a call with half a dozen pastors, and we’re working through this very conversation. It’s a coaching call. We’re in the book of Acts, and we’re looking at the first council and how they manage Gentile inclusion.
I’m not saying it’s an exact parallel, but we’re thinking about this letter that says, Okay, don’t eat food sacrificed to idols. Well, what’s super interesting is that in Mark 7, Jesus says that all food is clean. Now, in Acts 15, the council says, some food is not clean. Then Paul says, in 1st Corinthians 10 through 12 and Romans 14:15 that all foods are clean.
And then Jesus comes back in the book of Revelation, chapter three, and says, some food is not clean. Don’t eat food sacrificed to idols. And so, we we’re having this conversation, we’re looking at these passages, and one of the pastors in a conservative church says, context matters. Hmm mmm… So your church context is gonna matter in how you have this conversation.
[00:22:38] Bill White: So, in a Pan-Asian church that’s coming out of a more sophisticated intellectual background, it’s gonna look one way. I’m talking with an African American pastor who himself is affirming in a very non-affirming urban setting. It’s going to…
[00:22:54] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: look different there.
[00:22:55] Bill White: Yeah. It looks different there. I’m working with a Korean American pastor who grew up in Korea and is in a completely affirming church, but she’s not sure she’s affirming. So, again, there are better ways and worse ways. Learn the better way.
[00:23:17] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Bill, this is so fascinating, and I appreciate the honesty of both how difficult it’s been, but also some of the gifts that have come through the process. Last question: What is something that you have learned about Jesus as you’ve journeyed through this process?
[00:23:34] Bill White: He’s just so much better than I thought he was.
[00:23:37] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Yeah.
[00:23:38] Bill White: I mean, when my son was coming out, I was terrified that Jesus would leave me, that I wasn’t good enough, that Jesus couldn’t love people who were different, divergent in whatever way, and then, along the way, other things get opened up—like racial justice and equity, thinking about capitalism and poverty and all these things that I grew up with in my life.
And I was terrified that Jesus didn’t have anything to say. But he does, and he loves so well. My mind is just blown by how good Jesus is, how strong Jesus is, how true Jesus is in all these settings. I used to think that, “Oh yeah, I kind of got Jesus down.” Now? Oh my, I don’t know 1%. I don’t know anything. Ah, it just keeps getting better.
[00:24:50] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Well, Bill White, thank you so much for sharing both the story of your church and also your personal journey here with us on 20 Minute Takes.
[00:24:57] Bill White: Thank you. It’s so great to be with you guys.
[00:24:59] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: 20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. Our music was created by Andre Henry. And this episode was mixed and engineered by Wilowza Media. If you liked this episode, spread the word by subscribing, reviewing, or sharing. I’m your host, Nikki Toyama-Szeto. If you want to find out more about our work, visit the website at christiansforsocialaction.org.
