P.S. Mark June, The guy was raised by Southern Baptist missionaries. His parents also had him in conversion therapy when he was a teen. Where do pagans fit into that? Also which pagan faith are you refering to? Or are you just using the term loosely like saying christian murderers when talking about the murder of abortion Dr's?
danny, I see you've been Googling in another attempt to dredge up disparagement on Christians.
I continue to wonder why?
Pagans has been contextualized through the centuries and I have no idea what your context is,
but Scripture refers to pagans as non-believers. Gentiles is also a common context although some scholars include the Judaizers (I don't hold that belief). That's what my context is.
As far as this person, or any person, they are made in the image of God, and there's no grey area at all... we as believers are to love that person and work as a church body "together" on issues of sinful behavior.
I spent yesterday after class at a Coptic Christian Church and it was wonderful. 450 (mostly Egyptian families, or someone who married into an Egyptian family) in the north Dallas area began this church and recently baptized 4 families converting from the Muslim faith. Father Boylis leads the church and they couldn't be more conservative (politically and religious) but he was serious when he told me people in America see someone with his accent and his skin color and 99% of the time assume he's Arab and that he's a Muslim. His admin Dorian is from Bethlehem, now Palestine, and she sure didn't have much good to say about the atrocities of the Arabs who have overtaken her native homeland. She was secretly raised Christian by her mother, and raised in a Muslim school and fled to America in 1999 when she turned 21.
Since St. Mark (I had a good name in this church!) started the Egyptian church, and Alexandria was a major city in the world in the 1st century, Egypt (Africa) played a major role in the spread of the gospel until as Father Boylis told me yesterday, the hordes of Arabs brought Islam to Egypt in the 7th century and people were made to pay a high tax, convert to Islam, or die. These Egyptians are TOUGH people and it was wonderful to hear Father Boylis' stories of how the Coptic Christians are standing firm in the dogma and traditions of the early church and right now are working, like the Anglican Church worldwide, against the abominations that Western churches are importing into the Christian faith. Homosexuality is the big cause right now for so many liberal churches and it is not biblical, historical, or orthodox and what is called the "Majority World" - Africa, Asia, and Latin America are standing stronger on conservative issues than the USA, Canada, and Europe.
That's where we're at in 2022, and just like what I witnessed at this church, as immigrants (we hope they're legal but the government is so antiquated and bloated in what it does so much is a mess) come to America, like Father Boylis and Dorian, they bring a conservative theme of life in general which would places certain way of life as a delight to God, and these ways of life over there as an abomination to God. How do we know which is which? We read God's Word.
As I said, we are not surprised when we see unbelievers (called pagans by the Apostles in Scripture) so what they do.
We are, as a faith, working to maintain the One, Holy, Catholic (Universal), Apostolic Church even as the father of lies never stops.
He still thinks he can change to end of the story.
Blessings,
Mark