Dennis & Barbara's Top 25 All-Time Interviews
Society & Culture:Relationships
Messy Grace (Part 1) - Kaleb Kaltenbach
Messy Grace (Part 2) - Kaleb Kaltenbach
Messy Grace (Part 3) - Kaleb Kaltenbach
FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript
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Embracing the Truth
Guest: Caleb Kaltenbach
From the series: Messy Grace (Day 2 of 3)
Bob: How ought we live, as followers of Jesus, in a culture that is moving away from a biblical foundation for life? Caleb Kaltenbach says Jesus demonstrated what life looks like, full of grace and truth.
Caleb: I think another way to say it is that there is a big difference between acceptance and approval. I think that we have to understand that, not just with the LGBT community, but we are moving into a culture where people go with whatever they want to do. There are going to be new things that come out that just really scare Christians, and we don’t know how to handle it. We think: “Okay; do I keep my relationship with this person? Do I not?”
It’s not just the LGBT issue; there are so many issues that are going to come down the pipeline. We have to understand that we are missionaries, and there is a difference between acceptance and approval; and there’s a tension between grace and truth.
Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, July 3rd. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.
1:00
If you’ve found that life is getting harder to navigate, as a follower of Christ, we’ll see if we can help with some directions today. Stay with us.
And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. You know, years ago, there was a lot of controversy around a children’s book that had found its way into libraries. I think it was called Heather Has Two Mommies. It was a children’s book designed to provide a picture of normalization for a child who might be growing up in a household where there were two mommies or two daddies, trying to present that as maybe a new normal.
We have somebody with us today for whom that was the normal, growing up in a home with two mommies part of the time and with a bachelor dad the other part of the time.
Dennis: Yes; and Caleb, I just want to say, “Thanks for being on our broadcast and sharing your story.”
2:00
Caleb Kaltenbach joins us again on FamilyLife Today. Caleb, welcome back.
Caleb: It’s great to be back.
Dennis: He’s written a book called Messy Grace: How a Pastor with Gay Parents Learned to Love Others Without Sacrificing Conviction. The reason I just appreciate you being on the show, talking about this, is I think there are a lot of people, like me, who may not have a lot of gay friends; or if we do, we don’t know it. We need coaching / we need understanding. We need someone to take us near and begin the journey for us. I feel like your book did that for me. I really liked being able to peer into your family, where you were raised by two moms and your dad, who later came out as a homosexual as well. You were raised in the midst of no faith / no Christian worldview.
I think we’re clueless!
3:00
Really, the Christian community’s not really wise about who our audience is, and where they are, and where they aren’t.
Caleb: No; absolutely. I think that we have come to a point in our nation where we have to realize that we are the away team. We are not the home team anymore. We realize that more than ever at our church. We firmly believe in the inerrancy of Scripture / we believe in God’s sovereignty—we believe in all these things—but we’re all very intentional in being missionaries in our context / missionaries in Southern California and understanding, as we talked about earlier, that not everybody is at the same point in the spiritual journey.
We just surveyed our church three weeks ago and found out that 42 percent of our attendants, on any given Sunday, is unchurched—meaning that we’re the first church they’ve been to or they haven’t been since they were a kid—because we’re so intentional about going after the lost sheep that Jesus talks about in Luke 15:1-7. But we do that without compromising the gospel and the message; because we have to learn where we are, and we have to understand—
4:00
—I think, specifically with this issue, or any other issue that we’re dealing with—that there’s a huge tension between grace and truth.
I think another way to say it is that there is a big difference between acceptance and approval. I think that we have to understand that, not just with the LGBT community, but we are moving into a culture where people go with whatever they want to do. There are going to be new things that come out that just really scare Christians, and we don’t know how to handle it. We think: “Okay; do I keep my relationship with this person? Do I not?”
It’s not just the LGBT issue; there are so many issues that are going to come down the pipeline. We have to understand that we are missionaries, and there is a difference between acceptance and approval; and there is a tension between grace and truth.
Bob: You’ve already shared with us that your impression of Christians, growing up, was that they were bigoted/hateful. When you were with your mom, Christians would mock, and would shout, and would be hateful toward your mom.
5:00
Less so with your dad, because he wasn’t out of the closet at this point; but your dominant thought was, “Christians are just not worth much.” You wound up at a Bible study in high school, and you went into that Bible study with the intent of wanting to undermine everything that was being taught there. Over time, something shifted in your heart and your thinking.
Caleb: Yes; because I saw that Jesus was not representative of how people on the street corners were acting. I think today we would say Jesus is not representative of how some Christians act on Facebook®, social media, or Twitter®, Snapchat, Periscope, or whatever—that Jesus is not reflective of that.
When I think about the people who are on the street corners, I think to myself, “What about what Paul said in Romans 2:4, when he says, ‘Don’t you know that it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance?’ What about what Paul said in
Romans 12:18: ‘Live at peace with everyone’?” That doesn’t mean that we agree with...
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