September/October 2007 Featured Stories
A Radical Change of Heart

by Vicky Thompson

Bishop Carlton Pearson

Bishop Carlton Pearson had a successful Pentecostal ministry - leading a 5,000-member mega church in Tulsa and rubbing elbows with famous Evangelicals including Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker and President Bush.

But today, Bishop Pearson has been denounced as a heretic by the Evangelical community.

What happened? Bishop Pearson found out that his best friend was gay, which put his faith in a vengeful God to the test. The pastor chose not to condemn his friend, and instead he decided to teach about Christ's love and acceptance through a new Gospel of Inclusion.

New Connexion spoke with Bishop Pearson about his radical transformation and his new role as a spiritual bridge builder.

Q. How did learning that your friend was gay change your theological viewpoint?

A. This was my best friend and my son's godfather, and when he outed himself my love for him did not change at all. He's still my very close friend and he has a partner that he slowly introduced us to. I walked with him through telling his parents, his nieces and nephews, and it just changed my perspective because as a doctor, he has the most consistent, loyal and very kind bedside manner. That helped me to change my judgment. I wasn't vociferously or adamantly opposed to gays - I just felt that Christians should not be that. I thought that it was some kind of a mental illness or demon possession, or that they just needed to give their hearts more readily to the Lord and get delivered - the same thing we've all preached for years.

But I kept having conversations with him, then other gay people. After those conversations and meeting others, I realized that we had been, I think, in error - overreacting to some very wonderful human beings who'd made valuable contributions to the culture and society. I couldn't dismiss all these people because they were musicians, poets, prophets, preachers and doctors in all social, educational and economic stratas. So that helped me open my eyes and stretch my concept of the love of God and the acceptance of God of all creation. And I started saying, "God has many children."

[Around that time], I made the statement that the whole world is saved, they just don't know it. From the Christian perspective, Jesus has saved the world - so unless he failed, then the world is saved. Most Christians believe you have to confess Christ, be born again and go through all the dogmas, doctrines and disciplines of the religion in order to make it into heaven. When Jesus said, "It is finished," that means he's finished redeeming humankind, and the church's responsibility is to inform the world of the grand news, which is called Christ. And that's what triggered everything and caused [the Evangelical community] to question me.

Q. How did that inspire you to create the Gospel of Inclusion?

A. Christianity is full of duality and duplicity. I'm disillusioned by it, but I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I would like to do what Jesus intended, because I don't think Jesus intended to start a new religion - he just wanted to reform his own. And I don't necessarily believe that Jesus came to represent God, but to re-present God in consciousness, to make us think differently about the God of the Old Testament - an angry, visceral, intolerant, invisible entity. We've made a God out of Jesus and I don't think he intended to do that. We Christians insisted that he become God because he could be a better God than the one we heard of.

So my question has been: do we need Jesus to protect us from God? And that's what Christianity has become - like Jesus is the gentler, kinder, more approachable mother in an abusive relationship with a father in God who is unapproachable.

Q. So in New Dimensions, your new ministry, do you have to profess Jesus as your savior?

A. I ask them to believe that they are accepted. I think it's more important that we are accepted by God, than that we accept God. It's really not about us accepting God - we can't see God, we can't know God, we can't scientifically prove God. We have to, by faith, believe that there is a God who believes in us, and if we screw up, redeems us. The onus is on God. If Salvation is necessary, it would have had to have been God's idea to save us, not ours. And if it's not God's idea and salvation is not necessary, then we don't have to worry about it. That's what inclusion means. Everybody counts, everybody's enclosed by the grace of God, by the love of God, everybody is redeemable and also unique - and that ultimately no one will be able to resist the extravagant, opulent grace and love of God.

Q: You now believe that there is no hell, which is a very different point of view from traditional Christianity.

A. The English word hell is not in the Bible. The only word that was ever used in the Old Testament is the word is sheol which is what the King James version translates as hell. It just means concealed, out of sight or unknown. The New Testament has it as gehenna, meaning gorge or valley.

There's a scripture in Jeremiah that suggests that hell was never in the equation, in God's intention, but it was something that man made up. So if hell didn't enter God's mind, it would be man's invention and not God's intention. But we've used it to make God an ogre and then we're told to serve this monster? And we're scared to death of it.

I didn't realize all these years that this was what I was doing to people. I was causing people to feel completely alienated from any real safety - they called themselves saved, but they never felt safe. That was my issue: all these years, I had considered myself saved - a born-again, Christ-confessing Christian, but I never felt safe from this God who, at the slightest error would dismiss me, would banish me to hell. The Gospel of Inclusion actually takes you from self-loathing to self-loving. So many mixed signals that were coming across to people, and I was preaching all this loud, strong and long - and wrong. And I just got to the place where I could no longer hide my theological crisis successfully in my ministry, so I outed myself as an inclusionist.

Q: How have people reacted to the Gospel of Inclusion?

A. All the people I thought weren't saved enough, were hell-bound, were carnal, were secular humanists, were unspiritual or not Evangelical or not Pentecostal - the Unitarians, the Episcopalians, United Church of Christ - we have now joined. So there's really millions of people who were here a lot earlier than I arrived to this mentality, and they've been very embracing. Planned Parenthood has asked me to come on their board, and I'm a huge pro-life advocate. And now I'm actually on the Planned Parenthood board. I'm still adamantly opposed to legalized abortion on demand, but I'm also adamantly supportive of a woman's choice - what kind of dichotomy is that?

Q: It sounds like you're straddling two worlds. Are you a bridge?

A. I felt I had an experience in 1974 - I was on a 21-day fast in the mountains of Pennsylvania and that's when I had what I would consider a revelation.

I remember I was on my knees one afternoon and I thought I heard God say, "The number one trait in your ministry will be love." And the same voice said, "And you will be a bridge between the people and the nations." I remember I got up off my knees and danced, and then I heard the voice say a third thing. "Bridges get walked over, run over - they're not even functioning unless something is on top of them." So when all this happened, people were running over me, and it was easier because I think I had been forewarned that this would be part of my fate.

Q: Can you share some practical ways that readers can live a life of inclusion?

A. It would begin with loving yourself. When you love yourself, it's much easier to love everybody else. I don't think we have as much conflict with the vertical relationship because everyone thinks they have a relationship with God, even drunkards will tell you that. But they can't get along with themselves, their kids, their spouses and their friends. So it's the horizontal love problem that is the issue - and that stems from our inability, somehow to love ourselves. And religion has made us self-loathing instead of self-loving. If I can get people to love their authentic self, their immutable, immeasurable, immortal self - I call it your pre-incarnate consciousness. Remember who you are, that way you won't forget who you aren't.

For more details on Bishop Carlton Pearson, author of The Gospel of Inclusion, visit www.bishoppearson.com.