Recently a Nashville area church pastor who professes to be evangelical made headlines by announcing his church’s acceptance of same-sex couples. There was more media for a Portland area minister whose evangelical denomination cut ties with his church after he announced his support for same sex marriage and LGBTQ affirmation.
Debates over same sex marriage and homosexuality were previously until fairly recently reserved for historically liberal Mainline Protestant denominations, who’ve had a 40 year conversation over Christian sexual ethics, having already liberalized theologically in the 1920s or earlier. Those debates have fueled accelerated membership loss and eventually schism for the Mainline Protestants, who have imploded from 1 of 6 Americans 50 years ago to 1 of 16 Americans today, making them no longer Mainline but more accurately oldline or even sideline.
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