238 WHERE IS EVANGELICAL FEMINISM TAKING US?
In the United Kingdom, an even more prominent example of an
evangelical leader following feminist methods of biblical interpretation
in his endorsement of homosexuality is Roy Clements. Until his homo-
sexuality was made known in 1999, Roy Clements was the well-known
pastor of Eden Baptist Church in Cambridge, England. He was one of
the most prominent evangelical pastors in England and had a wide con-
ference speaking ministry in the United Kingdom and in the United
States. He was often compared to John Stott, and many thought he
would take Stott’s place as the leading evangelical preacher in the coun-
try. Then when he made it known that he was leaving his family for a
homosexual relationship with another man in 1999, it sent shock waves
through the evangelical community in England. Today his website pro-
motes a homosexual agenda and he explicitly connects the reasoning of
evangelical feminism to the reasoning of homosexual activists, as he
makes clear the following statement:
Christian homosexuals, who formerly would have remained “in the
closet” protected by a conspiracy of sympathetic silence, have little
choice but to “come out”.... For most this has been a profoundly lib-
erating experience, in spite of the bullying hostility to which they have
often been subjected. In many ways their experience has run parallel,
if a little behind, that of Christian women in the last few decades. In
the wake of the secular feminist movement, women have found a new
confidence to claim a role for themselves within the church. They have
developed a hermeneutic to deal with the biblical texts which had been
used to deny them that role in the past. Of course, this was not
achieved without resistance from a conservative rump mainly within
the older ecclesiastical establishment, but the majority of evangelicals
have now moved very substantially in the direction of welcoming
women into Christian leadership. Gay Christians are using exactly the
same kind of hermeneutic tools to challenge tradition in regard to
homosexuality. If it is taking them rather longer to succeed than the
Christian feminists did, this has more to do with the inferiority of their
numerical strength than of the justice of their cause.^3In the rest of this chapter I consider the recent decisions of some lib-(^3) From http://www.royclements.co.uk/essays08.htm, accessed July 18, 2006, italics added.