I really think that Lenexa’s obstinant opposition toward churches that are agape to queer people is the result of its turning its back on the call to holiness and its primal mission to the poor. This apostasy is the result in turn of its buddying up to the cool Evangelical kids and quietly adopting the culture, if not the words, of the Evangelical bumper sticker, “I’m not perfect, I’m forgiven.” And so Lenexa imagines churches (at least north of the Rio Grande) that are happy places where “sinners” can get “saved” and everybody can hold hands and sing some insipid “worship” song, while they pledge to abide by a shorter and shorter list of rules and regulations. That dwindling list, as short as it has become, still has some mighty taboos, most of them about sex. Lenexa is mortified that its short list of “the acceptable” will come to include sex acts outside of the “one-man-and-one-woman” abstraction—especially ones that would have given great grandmother the vapors. If Lenexa would read the suicide statistics in America, it would have no trouble figuring out who is poor. If it remembered the call to entire sanctification, which I take as the call to martyrdom, it would joyfully welcome the queer down the path to greater and greater devotion to the Holy God (not someone’s idea of purity). If that journey does not go in a heteronormative direction, then God (You would think) would be praised even in Lenexa, for who’d dare blaspheme the Holy Spirit, as did the hypocrites of Mark 3:22-29.