Popular Christian author and speaker Jen Hatmaker said that Christians should embrace the LGBT community.
ChristianToday.com reports that Hatmaker, author of 7 and For the Love had previously held more conservative views regarding the LGBT community.
In 2014, Hatmaker wrote that she believed "God's original creation is how we were crafted to thrive: in marriage, in family, and in community, which has borne out for millennia in Scripture, interpretation, practice, and society (within and without church)."
However, she recently made waves when she wrote in a Facebook post that “It is high time Christians opened wide their arms, wide their churches, wide their tables wide their homes to the LGBT community.”
"So whatever the cost and loss, this is where I am: gay teens? Gay adults? Mamas and daddies of precious gaybees? Friends and beloved neighbors of very dear LGBT folks? Here are my arms open wide. So wide that every last one of you can jump inside. You are so dear, so beloved, so precious and important. You matter so desperately and your life is worthy and beautiful,” she continued.
Hatmaker told those in the LGBT community that there “is nothing 'wrong with you,' or in any case nothing more right or wrong than any of us, which is to say we are all hopelessly screwed up but Jesus still loves us beyond all reason and lives to make us all new, restored, whole."
Hatmaker’s post received 35,000 likes and nearly 7,000 shares, but there were also many who disagreed with her, saying that being lesbian, gay, or transgender was not a lifestyle Christians should condone.
Publication date: April 26, 2016
