In the latest letter to his congregants, Pastor Yang Tuck Yoong of Cornerstone Community Church (remember him?) says nothing about Rony Tan’s odious lies that gay people are paedophiles and zoophiles. Instead he urges his church members to “not dilute, adulterate or compromise” the Truth. Belittling other people’s religions is not kosher, he says, but apparently demonising gay people the way Rony Tan has requires no censure. Here’s what he said:

A THORNY ISSUE

The recent big blow up about Pastor Rony Tan’s highly-publicised sermon on Buddhism and Taoism, and the most recent attack^[1] on his statements on homosexuals is a reminder of the continual scrutiny and the pressure that the Church will face in the coming years. Having watched the video myself, I thought that the reaction from the public was a little excessive. But still nonetheless, we live in a multi-cultural and multi-religious society and the need to be careful and vigilant with our words is vital. I’ve been in touch with Pastor Rony via his personal assistant and Pator Rony has requested for our prayer support, for which we’re more than happy to oblige.

There are a few things we can learn from this painful ordeal. Firstly, in Acts 19, we’ve a record of a riot in the city of Ephesus. The whole city was filled with confusion against Paul and his traveling companions and they had already seized several of Paul’s companions, threatening to injure them. When the riot threatened to get out of hand, the town clerk got up to silence the crowd and look at what he said in verse 37: “For you have brought these men here who are neither robbers of temples nor blasphemers of your goddess.” This is an amazing statement because Paul, in all his preaching, did not attack or belittle any other religion. All he did was preach the everlasting Gospel because the Gospel alone is the power of God unto salvation. And that’s exactly what we need to be doing: we need to preach the unadulterated Word of God and let the Word transform lives.

There’s of course another side to this as well: When preaching the Gospel, we must not dilute, adulterate or compromise on the potency of the Word; because it’s Truth. And truth spoken in love is a very powerful weapon in God’s Hand. When Paul was in a Roman dungeon, he said something very precious; he said that while he may be in chains, God’s word cannot be chained. And that is the truth. In Acts 4, we find the disciples being hauled in for preaching the Gospel and they were threatened by the religious order of their day to cease preaching. Peter, with unusual boldness said: “Whether it is right to listen to you more than God, you judge. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.” Such boldness is contagious and God-breathed. After that, we’ve an account of a prayer meeting the disciples had and as they prayed for boldness to speak the word of God, God answered by shaking the place they were gathered in and the disciples were all filled with uncommon valor. What’s the conclusion then? Let’s be sensitive; let’s be careful; but let’s not compromise on the truth.

Pastor Yang Tuck Yoong
20 Feb 2010

Well of course I am not surprised by Pastor Yang’s message. I’ve heard him preach hell fire and brimstone since I was a little kid back in the day when his church was still called Bedok Christian Centre. But I’ve got news for you, Pastor Yang, if you’re reading this. The public would not be on Rony Tan’s back so much if he had not said such stupendiferous things to begin with.

As for your remarks about “truth spoken in love”? The Buddhists and Taoists sure ain’t feeling the “love”. And neither are the gays.

Hear, hear, from the man who proclaimed that Cyclone Nargis, which devastated Myanmar in 2008, was the “hand of God” teaching the nations righteousness. I wonder if the Burmese felt his love?

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
~Martin Luther King, 1963

Just reread Rony’s response again — is he suggesting that the average Singaporean and the Government agree with him that gay people are paedophiles and bestialists? Horrifying.

This open letter to Christians in Singapore has been republished with the kind permission of Dr Gwee Li Sui. Dr Gwee is a literary critic, poet, and graphic artist. He wrote Singapore’s first graphic novel Myth of the Stone (1993) and a collection of humorous poems Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? (1998). He also recently edited a significant collection of essays, Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysian Literature II (2009).

In less than a year, we have found our faith at the centre of more than a handful of national controversies. It began with events tied to the AWARE saga, followed quickly by Christian allegations of “militant atheism” made even in parliament. Then, a Christian couple was convicted for having circulated anti-Islamic tracts, and an archbishop caused outrage with his strong remarks on non-traditional families and relationships. Most recently, a megachurch’s senior pastor took centre stage for ridiculing Buddhists, Taoists, and gay people.

This is an astounding concentration of events that have cast the Christian faith in a negative light. They have almost all involved leaders in church and society representing Christianity’s place in the world in a defensive and varyingly anti-social way. We may stress that these events are, by and large, unconnected and do not speak of the general state of our faith in Singapore. We can even choose to dissociate ourselves and see these as more about other Christians than about us or our own communities.

But when the social climate has become so toxic that murmurs of Christians being “at it again” recur, we should be vigilant and have an answer. What we cannot ignore is the damage the controversies are already doing to our collective identity as Christians. We must thus be prepared to examine ourselves thoroughly and go beyond just hoping that the spotlight on us will go away. We must learn to draw a clear line between what we believe and the insensitivity of our words and actions, often made without provocation. We must be able to show real commitment to preventing the latter even while we are affirming the former.

But our attempts will not be serious enough unless we first admit that shame has already been brought upon the Christian message here. We should consider how we have failed, directly or indirectly, to follow Jesus’s most basic commandment: we have not loved our neighbour. Who is a believer’s neighbour? When a Jewish lawyer posed this question to Jesus, Jesus answered with a story not of the Good Jew but of the Good Samaritan, someone whose faith was radically different from the Jews’. He concluded his story by challenging his followers to conduct themselves in the same way as his Samaritan had.

What Jesus affirmed was the possibility — and even necessity — of learning real compassion and love from others and not just from fellow Christians. He implicitly required his followers not to value their own righteousness but to embrace a sense of common decency and kindness that is shared with others. In other words, we should never consider our words and actions kind or even Christianly unless those at whom we direct them recognise them as such. This is how God is to be glorified through us.

Given this principle, we ought to take note of our following failings. They have nothing to do with the question of homosexuality that a few Christians have consistently forced us to see:

[1] We should feel shame for being slow to admit wrong and doing so only in a grudging manner. We have already failed when we need the authorities to warn us to be nice or when we are selective in our apology to those we have hurt. We are guilty when we choose to blame others for highlighting our mistakes, even sharpening our knives against Christians who point them out to us. We err when we brush aside every God-given chance to reflect on our own wrongdoings.

[2] We should feel shame for all the times we could have helped to stop others promote hate and fear but did nothing. You and I know that the current trend of narrow-mindedness has been in the making for a long time. Yet, we choose to encourage intolerance through the way we talk, share, and joke among ourselves and how we do not seek peace but converse only in terms of spiritual war. We sin when we treat dialogue with non-Christians aseither pointless or contaminating or when we share a gospel of love while harbouring thoughts of hate, saying one thing in public and another in private.

[3] We should feel shame for having no interest in deepening our religious knowledge while being ready always to act on our ignorance. We mis-educate ourselves by listening and reading in a narrow fashion. We look at religious and social differences without an intention of forming mature responses to them and care for no other theological position beside our own. We condone the words and actions of those who teach us to hate and fear in Christ’s name and yet attack those who remind us to glorify Christ through love.

[4] We should feel shame for caring little about enlarging Jesus’s message of unconditional love. We diminish this message when we take the way Christians see things differently for granted, treating it as an end rather than as a personal challenge to reconcile it with Jesus’s command to love. We sin mentally and emotionally when we do not allow our deep-seated idea of difference to change or the message of love to be made relevant in both our lives and our society.

Shame recognises that our wrongdoings hurt our relationship not just with others but also with God. It has no right to insist that others accept our apology just because we have made it; this is not a bargain. If people do not forgive us, the way forward remains the same as if they do: to strive not to commit the same thoughtlessness again and to show our sincerity through our own transformation. Shame recognises that we owe others and ourselves to be better human beings than we have been before.

We Christians must repent for our self-pride, our self-exclusion, our fear of others who Jesus called us precisely to love, and the way we use our minds, our resources, our time, and our friendships to justify and grow that fear. We must repent for our lack of faith that has led us to close our hearts and guard them with great jealousy rather than to surrender them in love. We must repent for having followed the words and deeds of others without thinking, having thought about serving God and others without feeling, and having felt a form of spirituality without understanding its responsibility. Today must be the day we begin to recognise the sins we normalise in our communities and to answer anew God’s call to His people to share in His sacrifice for others.

Yours Truly,
Gwee Li Sui

A Christian friend reacts to Rony’s response:

I think this just proves that some people’s fear of ISD is stronger than their fear for God.

How true. Oh, how true.

There were so many things that Rony Tan could have said when the Straits Times asked him for a response to the police reports made against him, but what did he do? He stuck to his guns, made no apology for what he said, and instead reminded gay and lesbian Singaporeans that they were criminals in the eyes of the law. Here’s the part of the ST report [behind paywall] that relates to his response:

When contacted by The Straits Times, Pastor Tan, 64, defended his remarks.

He said: ‘I’ve said nothing wrong, you know. Like I said, my stand is with the average person and the Government.’

He said he had always taught his congregation that the homosexual community should not be discriminated against.

‘But, of course, you know there is a law against homosexual acts, so that’s always been my stand.

‘I’ve always taught my people that…if they (homosexuals) are talented, we should not deprive them. And if we have friends, we should still continue the friendship.’

He added: ‘The act is wrong, (but) as a person, there are a lot of good points that we should appreciate.’

Remember Rony’s preposterous claims that gay people were paedophiles and boy-molesters that would run around doing bad stuff to kids if they weren’t stopped? That if the church didn’t warn people about homosexuality, “half the world would turn gay”? That if this problem weren’t nipped in the bud, then people would soon ask to get married to donkeys and monkeys and dogs, and apply for HDB flats with them? Yes. Rony Tan stands by ALL of those claims. “I’ve said nothing wrong, you know.”

I especially love the way he hid behind the law and subtly played the patriotic card:
‘Like I said, my stand is with the average person and the Government…., you know there is a law against homosexual acts, so that’s always been my stand.’

Heartwarming. Makes me wonder what his stand on abortion is? Makes me wonder why he didn’t expend the same amount of energy and time railing against all those sinful baby-killers and the state for abetting them? This reeks to me of hypocriticism of the highest level.

The next line takes the cake. Here’s where Rony’s ‘agape’ love really shines through:
‘I’ve always taught my people that…if they (homosexuals) are talented, we should not deprive them. And if we have friends, we should still continue the friendship.’

I guess we all missed the video for this one! So gay people shouldn’t be deprived only if they’re talented? What should we do with gay people who aren’t talented? Smother them with a pillow perhaps?

I say, this man is devoid of the love, grace and compassion that he preaches about.

More importantly, he can hide all he want behind the court that runs on the law of the land. But he’s totally lost it in another more important court — and that’s the court of public opinion.

Since there appears to be no public relations consultant among the 12,000 members of Lighthouse Evangelism to help Rony Tan formulate his responses to the press, here are a few things I would have advised Rony to say if he had hired me as his crisis communications consultant^[1]:

“First, I must apologise if I had offended anybody. That wasn’t my intention at all. I apologise unreservedly to anyone who has been offended by my remarks made in the Cheryl Bachelor ex-lesbian video.”

“I also acknowledge that I am not the most knowledgeable expert in issues related to homosexuality. I take back my remarks associating gay people with paedophiles and zoophiles, and once again, apologies are in order. I want to assure people that you will not hear me making such comments again.”

“We would like to open the doors of our church to members of the gay community and anyone who took offense to the contents of the video this Sunday [insert time here]. I would like to apologise to them personally for my remarks. Lighthouse Evangelism is a church with open doors, and we welcome EVERYBODY to visit us as they are. No exceptions.”

I know how sorry can sometimes be the hardest word to say. But hey, he wouldn’t have had to compromise one yot or tittle of his faith to say any of the above. And he would have scored so many more points.

Would you believe it. That video has been taken down.

Take a look at Singapore’s very first casino:

What progress we are making.  In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.
Now they are content with burning my books.  ~Sigmund Freud, 1933

Awesome presentation by the great Hans Rosling made at TED India: