The PCUSE is not saving sinners by promoting gay marriage. They are helping them down the broad and wide road which leads to perdition. They are doing no one any favors but rather trying to fill their emptying pews.
Oh? Is this first hand knowledge, my friend?
I know of another prodigal son. This one is a middle child; he has both an older and a younger brother. The eldest was jealous and bitter; he said, why should I forego such pleasures and stay here and take care of the family business (what's left of it after a third was sold off) when I know Dad will forgive my brother if he ever comes home? The youngest merely missed his brother terribly.
The eldest posted ads on every craigslist site he could find saying, 'Brother our father will never forgive you. Stay away. If you come to my house, I will ridicule you and abuse you as you know you deserve. You have made your bed. Lie in it.' The youngest brother posted ads on every craigslist site he could find saying, 'Brother you know our father will forgive you. Come home. If you come to my house, I will help you clean up and kick your habits and dress you in my clothes, so that you won't be so mortified when we go to our father together and you receive your welcome from the whole house.'
Who is doing his father's will?
I say you have to
appear to be 'helping them down the broad and wide road which leads to perdition' these days to avoid frightening most of them away. I say it's better to fill the pews than to bar the doors to all but the Pharisees (who are also sinners, whether they believe it or not). I say it's all well and good to say you're more than willing to help them while running around making noises designed to send the message that you don't even want to breathe the same air as them. Jesus dived right down amongst the sinners. He saved his fire and brimstone for the hypocrites.
PCUSA doesn't care to run a soup kitchen with a big sign out front announcing it has a dress code. If you don't see how railing publicly against a certain group of sinners makes them afraid to even try your church, then you need to practice trying on the shoes of others and seeing how it is to walk in them.
It says nothing about how we are to treat those who willfully and habitually sin (in fact, if anything, it teaches us to allow them to go their own way and live their sinful lives apart from us, even if it means losing our own child, all in the hopes they might turn back from their evil ways and towards the truth and eventually save their own souls...
No, it doesn't say that at all. It doesn't advocate putting them in jail to save them from themselves, obviously--just the opposite. But it doesn't say to send them away lest their sins tempt you into sinning as well. If you're made of stronger stuff than that, like the youngest brother in my version of the parable, then you can walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death where there are rescues to be made, instead of hiding in fear within the walls of your safe church, praying that God will send some repentant, halfway-cured person to you so you can tell yourself later that his redemption was all your fault.
