This doesn't come as a surprise to those who have been closely watching Chambers' slow abandonment of orthodoxy and his concomitant embrace of the "gay Christian" movement, which promotes the heresy that Christians may affirm a homosexual identity and remain in homosexual relationships. A year ago in an interview with The Atlantic , Chambers articulated a tidbit of his exegetically questionable theology:

Atlantic: Does that mean a person living a gay lifestyle won't go to hell, as long as he or she accepts Jesus Christ as personal savior?

Chambers: My personal belief is that everyone has the opportunity to know Christ, and that while behavior matters, those things don't interrupt someone's relationship with Christ. But that's a touchy issue in the conservative group I run with. (emphasis added)

For those who remain uncertain about Chambers' deviation from the path of theological soundness, please watch this video of his appearance at a Gay Christian Network event. Chambers' transition to heresy has been accompanied by dizzying changes to Exodus' Board of Directors over the past two years. Here's a glimpse into thatprotean board. Feb. 2011 board included Dennis Jernigan, Ron Dennis, and Jeff Winter

By June 2011 board had added John Warren
By Oct. 2011 board had lost Ron Dennis and Jeff Winter and added Mike Goeke and Patrick Peyton
By Dec. 2011 board had added Kathy Koch
By June 2012 board had lost Dennis Jernigan
By August 2012 board had lost Mike Goeke and Patrick Payton By March 2013 board had added Bob Ragan By April 2013 board had lost Bob Ragan
By June 2013 board had added Tony Moore The troubling constant on the board is board chairman Rev. Clark Whitten about whose theology Dr. Robert A. Gagnon has warned.

More recently Dr. Gagnon wrote this about Chambers' transformation: I'm not suggesting that the Exodus leadership wants believers to experience grace without discipleship, dying to one's self, and letting Christ live in them. I am saying, though, that they assure self-professed believers (falsely) that the nature of grace is such that believers can have one without the other.... Alan Chambers now calls "evangelical" a "dirty word" that he no longer applies to Exodus or to himself ("Guests in an Ever Changing Culture-Letter from Alan Chambers March 2013"). He complains that Evangelicalism is too "black and white" and he assures us that God is not "black and white," which presumably means that God's aim is to shade the light into gray. The story of Christ is now the story of Gray breaking into the darkness.

Evangelicalism, Mr. Chambers complains, gives too much attention to "right and wrong" and requires one to "take a stand" on moral issues. Chambers cries: "Gone are the days of evangelizing through scare tactics, moral legislation, and church discipline."

So instead the Exodus leadership prefers to assure self-professed Christians who engage in unrepentant homosexual practice that they are going to heaven irrespective of whether they bring their life into line with a confession of Christ's lordship.

The Exodus leadership refuses to take a stand against "gay marriage" even as it takes public policy stances on issues that homosexual activists support. And the Exodus leadership categorically rejects church discipline despite the fact that it is commanded by Jesus and Paul.

Earlier this month Alan Chambers even went so far as to insert secretly the e-mail address of Jeremy Hooper, an abrasive homosexual activist, into the middle of a private group email thread containing a number of pro-family leaders (including moi). This led to a number of misrepresentations online by homosexual activist sites and even Salon.com.

This deceitful alignment with a person who maligns those who believe in a male-female foundation for marriage is not exactly a model for Christian conduct, certainly not for someone leading what is supposed to be a Christian ministry.

In an Exodus post a couple of weeks ago Leslie Chambers affirmed her husband's severance of the transformed life from genuine saving faith,saying that while obedience to God is preferred it is not "required". Neither Leslie nor Alan appears to realize that a necessary byproduct of true faith is a life lived for God.

As Dr. Gagnon mentioned, Chambers' dissolution of Exodus was accompanied by his serious ethical lapse regarding an email group. A couple of months ago, a well-known and well-respected conservative author sent an email to a group of conservatives. Chambers responded to the entire group, angry that a person or persons in this large group have allegedly used terms in some context that Chambers finds offensive. He never identified the person or persons who used the term/s, nor did he identify the context. One of the email recipients noticed that Chambers had surreptitiously added homosexual activist Jeremy Hooper, who has a blog titled Good As You (G.A.Y.).

When confronted about stealth addition of Hooper, Alan defensively admitted that he had, indeed, done so in the hope that Hooper would report on the email exchange and that the "good and decent people" on the list would be shamed into publicly exposing and rebuking others whom they may not know for offenses Chambers would not reveal. I asked Chambers the following questions, which he refused to answer: Who are the people who deserve public rebuking and what specifically did they do to deserve to be rebuked?

If he thought there was something "unrighteous" and "evil" (Chambers' terms) going on, why didn't he expose it himself and publicly rebuke the person or persons whom he believed deserved public rebuking?

How did he justify betraying a trust and trying to publicly shame "good and decent" people for what he perceived as their failure to rebuke unnamed people for using words he viewed as inappropriate in unidentified contexts-actions, by the way, that he had not done?

No ministry should ever tell those who experience same-sex attraction or any other sin inclination that there's a human way to eradicate all sinful impulses. If Exodus staff conveyed that unbiblical idea to those to whom they ministered, they erred. Conversely no Christian should be told that God will not free them from same-sex attraction or that they will never experience heterosexual attraction, for those too are erroneous ideas.

Scripture tells us that God will free us from bondage to sin, but that full sanctification does not come in this life. We are promised that in this life, God will give us the power to resist our sinful impulses, which for most of us persist at least in attenuating strength. God does not, however, give us permission to affirm our sinful impulses or act upon them.

We are to pursue lives of holiness-which will never include homosexual relationships. Since Exodus has abandoned orthodoxy, it is a good thing that it is shuttering its doors. Fortunately, a far better ministry exists to fill a desperate need: Restored Hope Network When we read about prior heresies, they seem like distant historical curiosities, but right now we are eyewitnesses to the birth and growth of a heresy in our lifetime. Let's hope and pray that it's soon relegated to the dustbin of heresies.

*****

Alan Chambers Goes Back to Egypt

OPINION

By Scott Lively
http://www.christiannewswire.com/
June 21, 2013

The following is submitted by Dr. Scott Lively of Defend the Family:

The headlines in the liberal media are gleefully trumpeting the demise of Exodus International, the leading icon of the ex-"gay" movement. "From 'pray away the gay' to acceptance," chortles the LA Times. But this is not really a story about an organization, but only it's leader Alan Chambers and his unfortunate capitulation to the world. I invite you to join me in prayer for him.

Those of us "in the know" have over the past few years watched Alan slowly transform Exodus into his own private fiefdom, while at the same time he gravitated inexorably away from recovery. By recovery I mean the state of mind which focuses on freedom in Christ from bondage to sin as exemplified by 1 Corinthians 6:9-11: "Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God."

In anticipation of this sad day many former Exodus member organizations broke away months ago and formed a new organization, the Restored Hope Network. RHN will carry on the important work of the church in helping homosexuals to recover from same-sex attraction disorder. I applaud the courage of these men and women to remain true to Scripture in the face of intense hostility and persecution from the "gay" movement and its many powerful allies. Their ministry will not be made any easier by the triumphal gloating and attacks of their now greatly emboldened detractors.

It was this same relentless grinding hostility that undoubtedly contributed to the fall of Alan Chambers (few can bear it for long, just ask the Boy Scouts), but in addition to this "stick" there was also a "carrot" that led him astray: an insidious form of "gay" theology that misrepresents God's grace as a license to sin, or at least a license to embrace a personal identity defined by a desire to indulge in homosexual sin.

Don't get me wrong. I am a pastor whose theology is deeply rooted in the truth of grace, and I don't believe that homosexual sin is any greater barrier to salvation than any other sin. It's one thing, however, to acknowledge that some heaven-bound Christians may struggle with homosexual desires and even conduct, but an entirely different matter to condone and affirm a homosexual "orientation" as if God intended it to be one's basis for self-identification. The former is solidly Biblical, the latter is dangerous heresy. God did not create people to have no choice in a behavior He condemns as an abomination, and He wants us never to identify with our sin nature but to strive always to overcome it. These are fundamental tenets of Scripture.

The world today mocks the notion that homosexuals can change, but what is truly ridiculous, even by secular standards of logic, is the insistence that a person cannot reorient their sexual nature to comport with their heterosexual physiology. Normalcy is, after all, that with conforms to its design, and all of us, even "homosexuals," have a heterosexual design. That fact is simply self-evident to anyone with a rational mind. Yet Christians, among whom Alan Chambers still counts himself, are required to hold to an even higher standard of truth: God's Word. Under that standard, the self-evident truth just mentioned is also the perspective of our Omniscient, Omnipotent Creator God: "Such were some of you." And, of course, there are many ex-"gays" who know the truth of that verse living among us in victory over their former disorientation, just as there were in the early church.

For many years Exodus International was an organization true to the Bible, adopting as its theme the Hebrew exodus from bondage in Egypt to freedom in the wilderness. In that story the hero is Moses who stayed true to God while the people often grumbled and wanted to go back to Egypt where life in slavery seemed less difficult than their struggles under freedom.

Ironically, in the Exodus International story, it is Moses Alan Chambers who has turned back to Egypt, while the people he once led keep pressing on toward the Promised Land. I pray these strugglers will not be overly discouraged by Alan's failure. After all, here, just as in the Bible story, the true leader wasn't really Moses, it was and is God. And He never fails.

END