Testify To The Wind
How It Is Tragically Easy To Spot The Error
I should have saved one of those curiosities that depressed me so much yesterday, because now I am left with a sort of tempest in a teacup. All over X yesterday there was news about a singing group you might have listened to if you were an evangelical in the 90s and early 2000s. The group was called Avalon and a lot of its major hits are available on the CCM option. Back in 2003, one of the members was “ousted” the stated reason being that he wanted to do other things with his musical career. The real reason, unsurprisingly, was that he had been seen in a compromising place with another man and one of the group had taken it as a personal mission to get him out.
But, as we observe almost daily, a lot has changed between 1990 and 2020 such that a man being found in a sexual relationship with another man is not considered wicked, or a reason to retire from public life, but is rather an occasion to be celebrated.
From the Church Leaders website:
Passons did not share the real reason why he left the band until 2020 when he appeared on the podcast “Jonah and the Whale,” hosted by Josh Skinner. Passons told Custer he made the decision to reveal the reason spontaneously in the middle of that interview.
“I’m like, this is my life and I’m going to reclaim it. I’m going to talk about it,” Passons said. “I’m going to set the record straight. Because there are a lot of people out there who need to hear that they are not alone in the prison cell that they’ve put themselves in.”
About six months ago Passons went on another podcast to tell more of his story. He was really a victim, it turns out, because he had been really jealous and envious of his band colleagues who were getting married and living happy lives. That’s what led him to search out sexual relationships with men even though, at the time, everyone believed that particular path in life to be against God’s best plans for human flourishing. A funny person on X pointed out that in this latter interview, there appears to be a sort of golden bull decorously arranged on the shelf behind the Michael Passons.
The real controversy, though, is that various members of this band are now saying that the song was always about the new religion of sexual love, rather than a song of praise to God. One member, Melissa Greene, wrote this on her Substack:
Years ago, Michael and I were in Avalon together. Testify to Love was our biggest hit. It is a song about love without exception, love that reaches every corner of creation, love that testifies through every star in every sky. We sang it night after night to arenas of people. And then Michael was kicked out of the group for being gay.
The song kept going. He didn’t.
I was a Christian then who believed what I’d been taught, that some love was acceptable and some wasn’t. I was on the wrong side of what happened to him. That’s the truth, and I’m not going to dress it up. The long version of how I got from there to here is part of the memoir I’ve been writing, Testify to Love: Why I Left the Church and Keep Choosing Curiosity Over Fear. It is forthcoming. It took years, cost me a lot, and it is not a tidy story.
But here is what I can tell you about today.
Michael never needed to be redeemed. He was always whole and worthy. What he was denied was his rightful place in the group, in the song, in a community that claimed to sing about a love big enough to hold him. What’s happening today is not his redemption. It’s his restoration.
Ty came into my life later. Our friendship has grown over the years, and we’ve had the opportunity to make lots of meaningful music together. In 2020, Ty re-recorded another Avalon song, Orphans of God, with Kristin Chenoweth and asked Michael and me to sing background vocals on it. A few years later, I had the honor of officiating his wedding to Alex.
To decree and declare that someone, purely on the basis of their sexual preferences, “doesn’t need to be redeemed” being “always whole and worthy” makes plain—in case anyone was confused by this point—that the loving acceptance of the self based on sexual preferences is a new religion.
