This is a troubling story.

There are support groups of all kinds. Groups that help you stay sober or drug free. There are groups that support you if you battle gambling addiction or even porn addiction. The one thing that all these groups have in common is a bond of privacy. What gets talked about in the group stays in the group.

But what if what you are battling something that others don’t want you battling. Does your privacy go out the window?

A Lutheran Pastor who is opposed to gay clergy suffers himself from same-sex attraction. But this Pastor chooses to live a chaste life. In support of this choice he attends a Catholic support group that encourages those with same-sex attraction to live chastely. Of course it goes without saying that the privacy of anyone seeking such support should be respected.

It wasn’t.

A mean and vindictive gay magazine sent a reporter undercover to the group to report on what the pastor said in the meeting. This is absolutely despicable.

Lavender Magazine sent a reporter to the Faith in Action meeting and reported on the Pastor’s struggle with temptation.

Hope Lutheran’s executive pastor, the Rev. Tom Parrish, said when confronted with the article, Brock “simply said he indeed has been attending this Christian group, both going there and being honest about temptations he has, and is being held accountable so he never would do anything with that temptation.”

Parrish said Brock was put on leave from the job of senior pastor at Hope Lutheran when the article came out, but likely will return after an internal investigation.

“What they’ve done is unconscionable,” Parrish said of Lavender’s covert infiltration of Faith in Action. The group is the Minnesota affiliate of the Catholic Church’s Courage program, described on its website as a “spiritual support system which would assist men and women with same-sex attractions in living chaste lives in fellowship, truth and love.”

What is queer is that Lavender magazine seems incapable of distinguishing between temptation and action. Most likely because the active homosexuals who run it cannot imagine NOT acting on temptation.

Lavender magazine did not out the pastor so much as they have outed themselves as vindictive and despicable.

I sincerely pray for the Lutheran Pastor that he continues to seek chastity and that he does not let this betrayal of trust derail his efforts. As for the dirtbags at Lavender, they should know that if ever they decide they no longer want to be jerks–there is a support group for that. It’s called the Church.