Whose Voices are we Centering?
About a year ago, deepening solidarity with queer people brought me to a place of examination of my church family. Both the immediate family who make up the local church I’m serving as well as the extended family formally know as the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches (CCMBC). Hard to support a place with a clear conscious if you don’t know to what extent these organizations causing harm.
This examination process led to some conversations with what the CCMBC refer to as their National Faith and Life Team (NFLT). This is the group who are responsible for setting direction in matters of faith, theology, ethics, etc. One of their documents made reference to biblical convictions around gender expression. This peeked my curiosity so I asked what those convictions were & was told that the CCMBC haven’t yet put language to this. They shared some resources which were being considered, agreed that this is an opportunity for growth, & thanked me for challenging them in this area.
Here’s a link if you’d like to know more. 3 minute read
The resources they shared with me had me concerned this work, once completed would be a hard pill for gender diverse people & their allies to swallow. A couple months later, I learned from John Longhurst’s blog that the CCMBC is planning a resource on gender identity. I tried to remain optimistic and hope for the best but concerns of what voices would be centered remained in the back of my mind.
Fast forward to this fall. I learned through John’s blog that one of the sessions at this year’s equip conference would be discussing why we need a biblical ethic of sexuality, birth sex, and gender identity. With apprehension I began reading what is planned. As John described Dr. Iain the keynote speaker who’ll be addressing this topic that apprehension was replaced by despair, bordering on grief.
Provan, who formerly was a professor of biblical studies at Regent College in Vancouver, founded The Cuckoos Consultancy in 2022. Its goal is to equip Christians “to recognize the non-Christian roots of the powerful, competing ideas of ‘the human’ that they encounter every day and to have the courage to reject them.”
Why that name? According to Provan, it comes from the behaviour of the European cuckoo, a bird that does not raise its own young.
“Instead, it sneaks into another bird’s nest and deposits an egg that looks very much like the host’s eggs. The host goes on to raise the cuckoo chick believing that it is one of its own.”
“Unfortunately, the cuckoo is, from the moment of birth, an assassin. It goes around systematically pushing any other eggs or chicks out of the nest. It grows as a consequence to two or three times the size of the original chicks. In all of this the cuckoo is a superb master of misdirection.”
For Provan, who attends an MB church in Vancouver, “unbiblical anthropological ideas are like cuckoo chicks in the Christian nest. They have been smuggled into it by birds whose natural habitat is elsewhere. They are foreign bodies in our nest, and they are a threat to the survival of the family. They can ‘misdirect’ us to our doom, such that the Church is no longer really the Church.”
This inflammatory language wasn’t added by John Longhurst’s to emphasize a point. This the language Dr Iain Provan has chosen to describe his work. If you visit https://iainprovan.ca you can read it for yourself.
Dr. Provan was on the Here be Dragons Podcast talking about his new book Cuckoos in Our Nest: Truth and Lies About Being Human. That interview is available on YouTube here.
54:24 into the interview Dr. Provan is asked to summarize his thoughts on problems with the emphasis on hospitality in some Christian circles. In his response he describes people holding “radically different ideas about sexual identity” as “threatening the well being of the Christian community” who should be excluded.
The next question, 57:31 in, asked that he describe biblical hospitality. He refers to his bounded set church as a good example where he has a “circle of trust” because he does want “children exposed to a plurality of views when it comes to views of sexual identity in church because they’re already getting enough of that everywhere else”, a group of “adults who all basically believe the same and are going to reinforce what I might be teaching as a parent”.
Dr. Provan goes on to describe how the state is indoctrinating our children and, at 1:09:31, the interviewer invites clarification to address concerns listeners may have about fear-mongering & insular culture. To that we are offered a second helping of fear, a choice between being “afraid of children growing up in bubbles” and being afraid of “children being completely corrupted by a horrendous culture and taken off and sexulized and rendured vulnarable to sexual predation and so on.” Then he coyly dismisses anyone taken aback by his rhetoric with the phrase “if people think those are not realistic outcomes I don’t think they’re paying attention.” Everything is couched in polite academic prose and delivered with a disarming British accent.
Dr. Provan is certainly well equipped to defend the status quo and dismiss ideas which challenge with a wink and a smile. For such an important conversation at such a critical moment for our CCMBC family, restricting other voices to a table discussion is concerning. Of all the conversations which could benefit from diversity of thought, this one is up there.
The question we should be asking ourselves isn’t why the Church needs a biblical ethic of sexualtiy, birth sex, and gender identity. The question we should be asking ourselves is if we can even have an open conversation. Dr. Provan explained that a bounded set group who “basically believe the same thing” is his ideal.
It sounds to me like we’re going to hear a whole bunch more of that this fall.
Thanks for reading.
