How a Bible-Belt Evangelical Church Embraced Gay Rights
That first day at Grace Pointe, an interdenominational church with a membership of about 1,500, the pastors were leading an old-fashioned hymn sing. When they got to “Amazing Grace,” Pastor Melissa Greene said something that “hit me right square between the eyes,” Wigden says. Speaking about the line “that saved a wretch like me,” Greene said the church didn’t agree with the word “wretch.”
“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or who you are, you were born beloved by God,” Wigden says she told the congregation. According these pastors, God didn’t want to punish him. From that moment on, he says, he was “hooked on Grace Pointe.”
While the Grace Pointe leadership, staff, and congregation emphasize love and encourage people to ask questions and voice doubts, this is no hotbed of progressive activism. The town of Franklin is in what Greene calls “the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Half an hour outside...
