He's known in MSNBC ranks as "the most radical preacher in America." But it's not the message that makes him radical. It's the messenger himself.
Dylan Robinson is the first openly transgender ordained in the Baptist church. Donning long red hair and thick-rimmed glasses, he told the Alliance of Baptists he was a "white, straight, lower/upper middle class, European-descended man" when he first arrived at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary.
"I have known my entire life that the world was wrong about me, that on the day I was born, when the doctor took a cursory glance between my legs and authoritatively declared 'It's a boy,' he was wrong—dead wrong," Robinson said.
Robinson admits he was so miserable at one point that he contemplated suicide and concludes that "an angel of the Lord" named "Reason" kept him from taking the plunge into death.
"What if God hasn't fixed you because you're not broken?" an inner voice asked.
"That can't be true," he protested. "The Bible says I'm broken."
"What if the Bible is wrong? What if you've been reading it wrong?"
"I don't know," he said.
In that moment, Robinson said he spotted another sacrifice entangled in the bush. “I sacrificed my certainty on God’s altar,” he said. “And I can only pray that God has credited that sacrifice to me as righteousness.”
Delusional.
After that experience with the voice, he became a woman, got re-ordained and proudly does church by his own rules despite what the Baptist denomination believes or what the Bible says.
"I have challenged nearly every doctrine that was entrusted to me and that I promised to keep on the day of my ordination," he said. "I determined to keep those only that keep me alive."
In other words, he's not staying true to his commitment. He considers Buddha, Joan of Arc, Rumi and Johnny Cash to be his spiritual predecessors more than Apostle Paul, Tyndale or Tozer, and he prefers Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen over Isaac Watts and Fanny Crosby.
"Once I let go of all my folk theology and my fairy tales about God and started taking God at God's Word, and started using the meager faculties that God gave me to ponder it all, I could do no other," Robinson said. "What would it mean for the church to embrace all of this? I don't know. I think it would look a lot different than it looks today. All I know is that it would mean a lot to a lot of the people who are sitting in your pews every week."
In other words, we should compromise the gospel to fill churches. The problem is, a compromised gospel leads people to destruction, eternal and otherwise.
"For you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies" (1 Corinthians 6:20).
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