Letter to COOS and the Anglican Bishop of Singapore

10 January 2001

The Reverend Derek Hong
Vicar, Church of Our Saviour
Block 203A
Henderson Road
#09-13
Singapore 159547

c.c. The Right Reverend John Chew
Bishop of the Diocese of Singapore

Dear Reverend Sir,

Grace and Peace to you in the Name of the Lord Christ.

Since ages past the mission of the Church has been to proclaim to a world the fullness of redemption - a salvation that compasses personal liberation, community transformation and social reform. The message that the Church gives is thus: a personal death to the self with Christ, a rising to a new humanity in Jesus' resurrection, and an active participation in the life of Christ her monarch. And the Church's appeal to the world is to invite and initiate people to share in God's grace, opening the reign of God to all people regardless of race, age, economics, politics and indeed sexual orientation. Any transformation that the Church can expect must rise from that source which is a person's union in Christ, not the other way round.

However we observe that a banner has been put up saying that 'homosexuals can change' and we believe that this message impedes the fullness of the Gospel that the church is trying to share with all.

First, the message discriminates unjustly. The Church's mission is to engage all to share in the church's ministry, regardless of who we are to begin with. Such a message demarcates and delineates inaccurately the respondent audience and implies that homosexual people have to overcome their homosexuality before they can participate in Christ's life.

Homosexuals can change, but so can heterosexuals, capitalists, politicians, law enforcers, social workers, and our next door neighbours - and yet it is the homosexual women and men who are singled out by that banner. The result is that it is extremely off-putting to people who are not exclusively heterosexual, being singled out as a target group. Thus the universal invitation of the Gospel is compromised and a good number of people left out.

While a Christian community may indeed work in a particular ministry, and in your case to people with a homosexual orientation, the banner is again inadequate as it brings us to our second point - its message is contextually dishonest. Interpreted as being a message from a church, most who read it will understand it to say that homosexuals should change their sexual orientation to that of a heterosexual one. Homosexuality is not a description of who one sleeps with - rather it refers to a personal affective orientation to a person of the same sex.

In such a light, the ministry under the auspices of your church, Choices has never ever been successful in changing one's orientation. It may change one's lifestyle, perhaps even on a long-term basis (though from some of us who have been or encountered others who have been in Choices, the number of such successful lifestyle changes from the Choices ministry is very low by any count). But the fact is it has never helped even a heterosexually-married homosexual person to eliminate his/her same-sex orientation. But a reader of that banner would implicitly expect such a change although the fact is a significant number of your clients after having gone through the Choices program have left the Church altogether in a state of disillusionment and disappointment. As a result, the banner not only alienates straight people who understand it as an intrinsically dishonest statement and hence see the Church as mired in homophobic bigotry, it also misinforms your potential clients and worse of all, it misleads the public in general.

Finally, the message on the banner is pastorally irresponsible. Understand where your client comes from. It is likely that since childhood he has been taunted, through adolescence jeered and in most of her life made to feel inadequate and even sub-human. These are victims more of homophobia than being victims of their own sexual orientation. Churches have a responsibility to create a safe environment for these people from such dehumanising prejudice and to challenge homophobia and yet the banner contributes to this homophobic environment through its misinformation. Someone who already carries irrational prejudice towards homosexual persons will only use the banner to reinforce his bigotry however well-intended the banner's message is meant to be.

In conclusion, we say that the banner impedes the message of the Gospel because it drives many away from what Christ has to offer and has a socially damaging effect. It is unrealistically discriminating, contextually dishonest and it encourages homophobia and is therefore pastorally irresponsible. We ask therefore that you remove the banner as an act of Christian responsibility and refrain from similar acts that potentially impede the flow of the Gospel or which further perpetuate or encourage negative and unjust social consequences.

Yours truly
Concerned citizens

[There were 79 signatories to the letter.]