When the Church Votes on Desire

What a recent Presbyterian decision reveals about what we've still not learned to ask

Last week, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) made headlines by voting — by a margin of 57 to 43 percent — to open the door to ordaining celibate, same-sex attracted pastors. The decision came wrapped in careful theological language. It reaffirmed the Reformed doctrine of concupiscence. It insisted that disordered desires, not just sinful acts, are themselves sinful. It called all candidates for ministry to renounce, repent of, and regularly mortify such desires.

And yet the vote passed. And critics within the denomination immediately said, " We have seen this before.

I want to take that seriously — not as culture-war commentary, but as a pastoral and theological question. Because I think what happened in that assembly room reveals something important about where the church still hasn't learned to look.

The Question Behind the Question

The debate centered on behavior. It almost always does.

Celibacy became the threshold. If a man is same-sex attracted but remains celibate, repentant, and committed to mortifying his desires, can he be ordained to ministry? That was the question on the floor.

And I understand why the debate lands there. Behavior is measurable. Celibacy can be observed, at least in principle. We know how to evaluate conduct. We have centuries of practice doing it.

But here is what I have learned in forty years of sitting with people in the deep places of their lives: the question of what a person is doing is rarely the most important question. The more important question is what is being formed in them.

Those are not the same question.

A man can be behaviorally celibate and spiritually unraveling. He can be keeping every external standard while his interior life drifts further from Christ. Conversely, a man can be in the early, stumbling stages of genuine repentance — failing more than succeeding — and still be moving in the direction of transformation. Behavior is the surface. Formation is what lies beneath.

The church has become very skilled at debating the surface. We are still learning to ask the deeper questions.

What the Concupiscence Doctrine Actually Says

The EPC's decision leaned heavily on the Reformed doctrine of concupiscence — and that doctrine deserves more than a passing mention, because it is actually quite radical.

Concupiscence is the theological term for disordered desire. The Reformers, following Augustine, taught that the fall didn't just corrupt what we do — it corrupted what we want. Our desires themselves became bent. Twisted away from God and toward things that cannot satisfy, cannot sustain, and ultimately cannot save.

The doctrine says this plainly: disordered desire is not morally neutral. It is not simply a condition to be managed. It is itself a manifestation of the fallen nature, something to be brought to God in honest confession, surrendered in ongoing repentance, and — over time, by grace — transformed.

I think of it this way: if you want to kill the outbreak, you have to kill the root. Treating symptoms without addressing the source is not healing. It is management. And there is a meaningful difference between a person who is managed and a person who is being made new.

The EPC's stated theology, in other words, is quite strong. The doctrine of concupiscence, faithfully applied, does not simply demand celibacy. It calls for the mortification — the gradual putting to death — of the disordered desire itself.

Where the Vote Creates Tension

Here is the problem. The EPC affirmed that doctrine and opened the ordination door — and those two things sit in real tension with each other.

In practice, the vote means a man can present himself as gay, celibate, and repentant — and potentially be ordained. But the denomination has simultaneously said that the desire he is naming as part of his identity is sinful and must be mortified.

You cannot fully hold both positions without significant theological strain.

The Greg Johnson case — the St. Louis pastor whose move from the PCA to the EPC set this whole debate in motion — illustrates this precisely. Johnson doesn't say "I struggle with same-sex attraction." He says, "I am a gay Christian." That is not a minor difference in phrasing. It is a different anthropology — a different account of what a human being fundamentally is.

When same-sex attraction becomes a load-bearing part of a man's identity, the doctrine of concupiscence asks an uncomfortable question: are we mortifying that desire, or are we making peace with it?

What the Church Still Hasn't Learned to Ask

I want to be careful here. I am not writing this to pile on the EPC or to suggest that the questions they are wrestling with are simple. They are not. The people in that room were trying to be faithful, and faithful people can read the same texts and reach different conclusions.

But I have watched this pattern long enough to name it.

The church keeps arriving at the behavior question because it doesn't yet have the tools to ask the formation question. We know how to set a policy. We do not yet know, as a body, how to accompany a person through the long, slow, costly work of interior transformation — the kind that reaches all the way down to desire itself.

What would it look like if the church did?

It would look less like a pastoral letter and more like a community of practice. It would mean elders who are trained not just to evaluate behavior but to listen beneath it — to ask what is happening in a person's heart, not just in their conduct. It would mean small groups and spiritual direction and mentorship structures capable of holding someone through years of difficult, nonlinear growth.

It would mean the church taking seriously what the Reformers actually meant when they talked about sanctification — not a checklist of behaviors, but the deep reordering of the human person toward God.

That is harder than voting yes or no. But it is what the moment actually requires.

A Word for the Reader in the Middle

If you are reading this as a parent of a same-sex attracted child, or as someone who carries this in your own story, I want to speak directly to you for a moment.

Debates like this one can feel cold from the inside. People are voting on questions that are, for you, not abstract at all. I understand that.

What I want you to know is this: the doctrine of concupiscence, rightly understood, is not a hammer. It is actually a statement of hope. It says that our fallen desires do not have the final word — that grace reaches all the way down, even to the root of what we want. God does not simply ask us to manage our brokenness. He offers to meet us in it and to begin the work of making us whole.

That is a long road. It is not a road walked alone. And the church, at its best, is meant to walk it with you.

We are still learning how to do that well. Votes like last week's, remind us how much further we have to go.

Rob Jackson is a licensed professional counselor, life coach, and the founder of Icebergology™ Coaching Academy. He is the author of When Grace Meets Conviction: Loving God and Your LGBT Child (Tyndale, October 2026).