After Exodus
“If my sinfulness,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together, “appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all.” This idea, which is hardly original to the German martyr, only really made sense to me when I came across it in the context of a living, breathing religious community. That’s where saw that it is not a truism masking false humility but rather the stubborn fact of entering into evaluation of a sister or brother. Once we start ranking our own failings alongside those of another, we forget what sin is.
I thought of Bonhoeffer’s words today as I read the remarkable news that Exodus International, an evangelical ministry that promised “freedom from homosexuality,” has closed its doors—and the still more remarkable apology from its current leader, Alan Chambers.
Chambers’s apology deserves to be read in its entirety. There are many who will find it unsatisfying—as well as many who will encounter it as a betrayal, sitting as it does next to an active “give now” link. But I found it very moving. Chambers admits not just to being mistaken—which is hard enough in our world of entrenched ideological niches and finicky funders—but to being wrongly disposed in his own heart:
