Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Thursday, April 13, 2023
In early 2020, Saddleback pastor Chris Clark and his wife, Elisa, co-founded a Saddleback chapter of Embracing the Journey, a ministry for parents of LGBTQ children, with long-time Saddleback members, Doug and Shauna Habel. By the end of 2021, an ETJ newsletter revealed that Saddleback was hosting four ongoing ETJ support groups and one small group.

“Embracing the Journey: A Christian Parents’ Blueprint to Loving Your LGBTQ Child” by Greg and Lynn McDonald
Megan Carl Basham has done some fine work exposing the movement in Saddleback Church toward embracing homosexual practice and transgenderism. It’s not just Andy Stanley’s church that is going under. Here Megan speaks about the impact of the stealth homosexual front organization (my phrase), “Embracing the Journey,” the group that is putting on a conference for Stanley’s church in September, making inroads at Saddleback as well (all that follows is a verbatim quotation from Megan’s article:
‘In his podcast interview with Russell Moore, [Rick] Warren insisted that concerns of leftward drift in the SBC generally and Saddleback specifically are unfounded. “This is not a battle between liberals and conservatives,” he said. “All the liberals left a long time ago.” Yet there is significant evidence that his church is already sliding toward liberalism when it comes to homosexuality and gender identity.
In early 2020, Saddleback pastor Chris Clark and his wife, Elisa, co-founded a Saddleback chapter of Embracing the Journey, a ministry for parents of LGBTQ children, with long-time Saddleback members, Doug and Shauna Habel. By the end of 2021, an ETJ newsletter revealed that Saddleback was hosting four ongoing ETJ support groups and one small group.
While ETJ does not specify whether it affirms LGBTQ lifestyles and identities, its founder, Greg McDonald, sits on the board of Renovus, another faith-based non-profit that does assert that homosexuality and transgenderism are compatible with Christianity. The two organizations are closely linked.
Billing itself as a religious nonprofit that exists to “[reclaim] faith for LGBTQ+ Christians,” Renovus says its vision is “a world where no one has to choose between their faith and sexual orientation or gender identity.” While McDonald does not offer his views on homosexuality or transgenderism in his ETJ bio, in his Renovus bio, he shares, “It simply breaks my heart when people are told they can’t be a Christian and LGBTQ.”
Along with recommending ETJ, Renovus endorses groups like The Reformation Project, GayChurch.org and Q Christian Fellowship. All are dedicated, in the words of The Reformation Project, to “advancing LGBTQ Inclusion in the Church,” and all claim that “church teachings that condemn same-sex relationships and transgender people cause serious harm in the lives of LGBTQ Christians.” One more commonality: all three activist groups endorse ETJ.
And the connections continue.
On its events page, Renovus lists an upcoming ETJ conference in Atlanta. The lineup of speakers includes Saddleback Pastor Chris Clark, Renovus board member Debbie Causey, as well as a number of authors like Matthew Vines, David Gushee, and Justin Lee, who are well known for rejecting biblical orthodoxy on homosexuality and transgenderism in favor of full LGBTQ inclusion in the church.
But even if ETJ were not so deeply intertwined with openly affirming organizations and influencers, its recommendations and activities should still call Saddleback’s discernment in deciding to partner with the organization into serious question.
Nowhere in its online materials does ETJ characterize LGBTQ identities or behaviors as sinful. Indeed, the vast majority of its recommended resources are explicitly affirming (again, from Gushee, Vines, and Lee, as well as John Pavolitz, Brian McLaren, Colby Martin, and more).
To return again to those who launched ETJ at Saddleback — a close examination of Shauna Habel and Chris Clark’s activism suggests that fears about the connection between churches who shift stances on ordaining women and those who shift on LGBTQ issues are well-founded.
In a Facebook fundraising video for the documentary 1946, which argues that the traditional Christian condemnation of homosexuality traces back to a modern translation error, Habel (who sometimes goes by Habel-Morgan) explains how she came to share this belief.
Describing her attendance at a 2016 Reformation Project conference with her daughter, Habel says, “I saw gay Christians worshipping God. I saw the Holy Spirit. And I knew that God was in that place.”
Habel has been clear on Twitter that part of her mission is persuading churches to abandon biblical orthodoxy with respect to sexuality and gender. In response to trans-identifying actress Ellen Page’s criticism of non-affirming churches she posted, “Churches like Hillsong that mandate queer celibacy should try a year of solitary themselves…God’s end game is love.”
When a journalist posted a story about the gay marriage of Department of Transportation head Pete Buttigieg, Habel replied that she “works with conservative parents to help them become affirming.” And she replied to author Beth Moore’s explanation for why she removed a passage condemning homosexuality from an older book, “I believe the sin the Bible spoke about in regard to homoerotic behavior was the abusive rape or lust of others and not love.”
Habel is also at work on her own affirming materials, assisting LGBTQ activist Kathy Baldock on a forthcoming book titled, How The Bible Became Anti-Gay: Forging a Sacred Weapon.
Chris Clark has little online presence either as a Saddleback pastor or as an activist with ETJ, but he, Habel, and McDonald were all speakers at The Reformation Project’s 2020 conference, “Reconcile and Reform.” Again, The Reformation Project was founded by gay activist Matthew Vines to “equip and empower Christians to advocate for LGBTQ inclusion in their faith communities.”
It’s worth emphasizing that according to ETJ’s newsletter, the Clarks and Habels introduced ETJ to Saddleback two-and-a-half years before Warren retired in September 2022. It’s also clear the church is well aware of its activities as the ministry is listed on Saddleback’s website under “care and support” events.
Though Clark’s LinkedIn page no longer appears to be available, it previously revealed that he has been affiliated with Saddleback in some professional capacity since 1989. It also showed that he has been a Saddleback care pastor at the Lake Forest campus for four-and-a-half years.
His ETJ bio provides the further detail that he leads Saddleback’s counseling training—a role that would presumably include teaching lay counselors how to respond to congregants dealing with homosexuality or transgenderism. Further, both The Reformation Project and ETJ cite Clark as a “Saddleback pastor” in his speaker bios, suggesting the church endorses his activities in this arena.
Finally, the couple Warren selected to lead Saddleback don’t seem entirely clear on the Bible’s stance on homosexuality either. When asked whether a gay “married” couple should carry on with their sinful relationship after coming to Christ, Andy and Stacie Wood answered, “I don’t know. That’s really hard.”
They went on to say “there is no black-and-white answer” and they’d have to ask the couple how they “feel the Holy Spirit is leading them.” The Woods did not cite any Scripture in their response.
I reached out to Saddleback about their decision to partner with ETJ and about the involvement of one of their pastors and two of their ministry leaders with The Reformation Project and did not receive a reply.’
Source
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Picture the sinless Savior willingly submitting himself to God to be born into our sinful world, coming to save those who spurned his name. What love is this? Only the love of Jesus. Only he would take off his crown and robe, replacing them with human flesh and a crown of thorns. He left glory to save us. The Hope of heaven came down for you.

I saw the flashing blue lights against the dark night long before I neared them. I began making my way over to the next lane of the busy highway and glanced in the direction of the cop cars—there must have been at least ten—to decipher the cause of all this chaos. There weren’t any crushed cars or breakage along the road. What happened? I wondered. And then I saw.
A body, covered in a bloody white sheet. My heart picked up speed, my whole body succumbed to numbness, and my lips involuntarily repeated a lament to God: “Oh God. Oh God!” I was shaken.
Maybe having access to stories like this in the news every day has made me a bit numb to reality, but seeing a tragic death with my own pupils jarred me. I thought about the family of that person and prayed for them. Gripping the steering wheel, I was suddenly aware of how dangerous it was to drive a car. I thought about what my children would do if it were me under that sheet, or their father, my sweet husband. The person under that sheet could have been me and it could have been you. Life truly is a vapor.
When faced with reminders that death will eventually come for each of us, some people brush it off, refusing to think deeply about something that seems far away. Others might start to think about the afterlife. As Christians, we know the truth that every human will either die in his or her sin and go to a literal place called Hell or they will die hidden in Christ and be brought safely into Heaven.
The season of Advent is a sweet time of pondering Jesus’s birth. We gently place a star on the tip of our decked-out tree like the star that hung in the sky around the time he was born (Matt. 2:9). The twinkly lights remind us that the light of life has come to men (John 1:4). The red, green, and plaid wrapped packages point us to the gift given to us by God (John 3:16). But the birth of Jesus should also lead our minds to celebrate and reflect on the truth that he came to annihilate death.
The Hope of Heaven. . .
A while back, my husband and I read Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven. It left me awestruck about what’s to come for those of us who are in Christ.
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God is the Unbeginning Alpha and the Unending Omega
This is properly to be, and only this deserves the name of being – that which never was nothing, and never shall be nothing, which may always say, “I am.”
Man is, but look a little backward, and he was not, you shall find his beginning: and step a little forward, and he shall not be, you shall find his end. But God is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.
But who can retire so far backward as to apprehend a beginning, or go such a leap forward as to conceive an end in a being who is the beginning and end of all things, but without all beginning and end? Whose understanding does it not confound? We cannot imagine a being, but we must first conceive it as nothing and in some instant receiving its being. Therefore, canst thou by searching find out God?
A man’s imagination may extend to suppose to itself as many thousands of years before the beginning of time as have been so far. Then let all the angels and people of all generations from the beginning be employed in nothing but calculating this. And then suppose a product to be made of all their individual sums of years. It would be vast and unspeakable, but yet your imagination could reach further. You could multiply that great sum as often into itself as there are units in it. Now, when you have done all this, you are never a whit nearer the days of the Ancient of Days. Suppose then this was the only activity of humans and angels throughout all eternity, all this marvellous arithmetic would not amount to the least shadow of the countenance of Him who is from everlasting. All that huge product of all the multiplications of humans and angels has no proportion to that never beginning and never ending duration.
Our Lives are Fleetingly Brief
But O, where shall a soul find itself here? It is enclosed between infiniteness before and infiniteness behind, between two everlastings. Whichever way it turns, there is no outgoing, whichever way it looks, it must lose itself in an infiniteness round about it.
Though we vainly please ourselves in the number of our years, and the extent of our life, yet the truth is, we are still only losing as much of our being and time as passes. First we lose our childhood, then we lose our adulthood, and then we leave our old age behind us also, and there is no more before us.
But though days and years are in a continual flux about Him, and they carry us down with their force, yet He abides the same for ever. He is the beginning without any beginning, the end without an end, there is nothing past to him, and nothing to come. He is all, before all, after all, and in all. He beholds out of the exalted and supereminent tower of eternity all the successions and changes of the creatures, and there is no succession, no change in His knowledge, as in ours. He is never driven to any consultation on any emergent or incident. He is in one mind, and who can turn Him?
The Being of God is Beyond Us
Now, canst thou by searching find out God? If mortal creatures cannot attain the measure of what is finite, O then, what can a creature do, what can a creature know, about Him who is infinite, and the maker of all these things? You cannot compass the sea and land, and how then can you comprehend Him who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand? (Isa. 40:10).
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