I dropped into a Christian bookshop yesterday down near the Octagon in Dunedin and browsed some material, before leaving with a copy of a magazine “Leadership” about church leadership.

It’s an interesting resource, and it will be good to see a similar thing for ISKCON.

There was also an interesting book there called “Preaching Re-imagined” that I scanned while in the shop, and finally I had them put aside a copy of the Interlinear Bible, which has the original text in Hebrew and Greek, word for word translation, and (I’m not sure which) English translation. That is for my brother Levi, who I will be seeing next week in Auckland after the retreat in Taupo.

I’m blogging about the LCA conference on my livejournal blog, and the rss feed has been added to the LCA 2006 Planet.

I checked out the web presence of Leadership, and found an article by Brian McLaren, a Christian pastor who is part of the “emergent movement”. He is speaking about a response to homosexuality in the contemporary cultural context, and I found a lot of his feeling and thinking resonating with me, and he articulates things well.

He says:

I hesitate in answering “the homosexual question” not because I’m a cowardly flip-flopper who wants to tickle ears, but because I am a pastor, and pastors have learned from Jesus that there is more to answering a question than being right or even honest: we must also be . . . pastoral. That means understanding the question beneath the question, the need or fear or hope or assumption that motivates the question.

We pastors want to frame our answer around that need; we want to fit in with the Holy Spirit’s work in that person’s life at that particular moment. To put it biblically, we want to be sure our answers are “seasoned with salt” and appropriate to “the need of the moment” (Col. 4; Eph. 4).
….
We see whatever we say get sucked into a vortex of politicized culture-wars rhetoric–and we’re pastors, evangelists, church-planters, and disciple-makers, not political culture warriors. Those who bring us honest questions are people we are trying to care for in Christ’s name, not cultural enemies we’re trying to vanquish.
….
That alienates us from both the liberals and conservatives who seem to know exactly what we should think. Even if we are convinced that all homosexual behavior is always sinful, we still want to treat gay and lesbian people with more dignity, gentleness, and respect than our colleagues do.

For me, as someone who thinks about how to present Krishna Consciousness in the current cultural context, and as a person who wants to care for other people, these are questions that I consider, and the approach of Brian McLaren resonates with me the most. It says what I want to say about how I feel on this issue.

I’ve written about this before, that devotees are neither liberal nor conservative, they are spiritually progressive - that means that they are interested in progressing spiritually, and helping others to progress spiritually.

Here is another article, entitled Family Matters, I believe written by His Grace Matsyavatara Prabhu, a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, that I also consider demonstrates a sensitive, spiritually progressive perspective.