A church should welcome a transgender person the way it welcomes anyone who does not yet follow Christ: with an open door, the full gospel, and a love that does not wait for agreement. Jude 3 Project holds that God created humanity male and female, that this design is good, and that real distress about one’s gender is suffering, not sin. Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues that the real danger in this situation is a church afraid that this issue is bigger than the gospel.
Those commitments can sound like they pull against each other. Many Christians assume that a firm conviction about identity requires some distance, and that warmth means quietly giving the conviction up. That assumption is the confusion this article untangles. The way through is to take the doctrines in order, because each one explains why the next follows.
What does a Christian actually believe about identity?
Start with the conviction itself, since everything else depends on it.
Mohler describes the current debate as a clash between two accounts of what a human being is. In one, people are creatures made by God in his image. In the other, people are autonomous individuals who decide their own morality and meaning. He observes that the idea of choosing one’s gender identity apart from one’s biology is very recent, and that people historically never spoke this way at all.
The Christian account begins with Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Mohler draws the consequence plainly: “Christians really do believe that there are certain things that can’t be changed.” He adds that “the biblical worldview is that our identity is a part of God’s gift to us in our birth.”
A gift comes from someone else. Mohler is careful on this point. When he names identity as one of the things that cannot be changed, he notes that he did not put sexual or gender in front of the word. His claim is broader than one debate: who you are comes to you from God before it comes from you.
A common misconception enters here. People hear that identity is a gift and conclude that a Christian must treat a transgender person mainly as someone holding a bad argument. That does not follow. A conviction about how God made us says nothing against the reality of a person’s pain, and the church has too often answered that pain with slogans. The conviction stays in place. What remains to be explained is what it requires of a church when someone walks in who does not share it.
Who is the church for?
Here Mohler makes his most useful move. Asked how a church should respond to a transgender visitor, he turns the question around: first consider how the church responds to anyone who visits.
Some congregations expect visitors already to believe what they believe and live as they live. Mohler sets that expectation against the people the church actually exists to reach: those who do not yet know Christ, who have no idea how to follow him, and who have no desire yet to be faithful to him. His answer comes without hedging: “we want everybody to walk into our churches. And if we don’t mean that we’re just not being faithful to Christ.”
That sentence carries a doctrinal point. Mohler grounds the Christian call to obedience in the Great Commission, which he describes as a charge to baptize people while also teaching them to obey Christ. Matthew 28:20 puts that teaching this way: “Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” Obedience is something disciples are taught over time. A church that demands it at the door has made it an entrance fee.
Mohler holds the other half just as firmly. He says the church wants everyone who walks in “to hear the full gospel” and everything God’s word reveals. The door is open so the truth can be heard.
An analogy may help, as long as we see where it stops. A school does not ask new students to prove they can already read before it enrolls them. Teaching reading is the reason the school exists. A church likewise exists for people who do not yet know or obey Christ. The analogy breaks because a church is no neutral classroom. It gathers around a Lord, and what it teaches is a call to follow him. But the order holds. You come in first. You are taught after.
Can a church welcome someone without agreeing with them?
Yes, and this is the hinge of the whole question. Mohler admits that a transgender visitor “isn’t just like any other visitor” and that the situation brings unique challenges. His example is concrete: someone clearly biologically male introduces himself as a woman named Stephanie.
Mohler names two wrong responses. Flatly telling the person she is not a woman is, in his view, probably not the best way to continue a conversation. Yet he also says a Christian cannot simply affirm the claim. Both responses fail for the same reason. Each ends the conversation on the spot, one by shutting a door and the other by surrendering the truth that makes the conversation worth having.
His alternative is the instruction of Ephesians 4:15, “speaking the truth in love,” joined to a sequence he states directly: “we’re gonna have to learn how to love people before they agree with us.” Love comes before a shared worldview, he says, and even before a shared faith in Christ.
Love goes first because that is the order in which God loved us. Romans 5:8 says, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” God acted in love before we agreed with him. A church that withholds love until a person agrees is asking for something God never required of the church’s own members.
Mohler does not pretend this is simple. He says “there’s just not a boilerplate conversation,” and adds that “I’ve had already dozens of these conversations,” with no two beginning the same way. Welcome before agreement is a fixed order of priorities, lived out differently with each person.
The Stephanie example also raises names and pronouns. Mohler’s answer shows where he stands, but Christians who share the same conviction about creation do not all handle that question the same way. It is usually worked out in real relationship with a particular person.
Why is fear the real danger?
If identity is God’s gift, if the church exists for people who do not yet follow Christ, and if love goes before agreement, then the visitor poses no threat to the church’s faithfulness. Mohler locates the threat somewhere else. He calls it the first and last thing he wants people to hear: the gospel is all we need for responding to any human problem, and so the church should not respond in fear. In his judgment, “too many Christians are just deadly afraid that somehow this issue’s bigger than the gospel. It’s not.”
Fear runs the order backward. A frightened church asks for agreement before it offers welcome, because welcome feels risky. It leads with correction, because correction feels safer than relationship. It treats one person’s struggle as a special kind of threat, as if this were the one place where grace might finally fail. Each move quietly doubts that the gospel is enough.
That is why the danger sits inside the church. A visitor cannot make the gospel insufficient. Only a congregation that stops trusting its sufficiency can act as though it were.
What does brokenness have to do with it?
Mohler gives one more reason a church need not be afraid, and it may be the most freeing. He says that “every one of us, uh, is broken” in his own unscripted way, and then puts it fully: “Every one of us has found wholeness only through Christ. And that wholeness is not fully evident in us yet.”
The theological word here is sanctification, the lifelong process by which God makes believers holy. Mohler’s point is that this process remains unfinished in everyone until glorification, when Christ makes his people whole. He applies it directly. When a transgender person comes to faith, he says, “there’s gonna be an incompleteness to their sanctification that’s going to be obvious,” perhaps in how the person talks, presents, or looks, for the rest of their life.
A fearful church would treat that visible incompleteness as a problem to manage. Mohler treats it as a picture of every member. Let it be a sign, he says, that all of us have deficiencies “that will be obvious until Christ makes this whole.” The church is “made up of broken people, and some of that brokenness is gonna show.”
He ties this to Paul’s words to the Corinthians. After listing sins that are incompatible with the kingdom, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:11, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” Paul keeps the standard and reminds a church that every member came in from somewhere, washed by God’s work. Mohler describes the hope he wants churches to carry: looking across a congregation and seeing “the beautiful picture of brokenness being made whole.”
Here is why welcome costs the church none of its conviction. The church welcomes people because its whole membership is made of people whose brokenness matters and whom Christ is still putting back together.
Doesn’t this leave the hard questions unanswered?
In part, yes, and that limit should be stated plainly. Mohler’s account in this conversation is about welcome and posture: who may come in, what they should hear, and in what order love and truth arrive. It is not a membership policy. He gives only hints beyond that. He distinguishes ordinary public life, such as getting a restaurant reservation or a seat on a plane, from a role like teaching Sunday school, which he treats as a different matter. He says that a transgender person who comes to faith should present themselves, as best they can, faithfully as God made them, and that God’s people should love them in that effort and see it as a sign of grace. He does not lay out how a church should handle membership, leadership, or discipline. Congregations will still have to work those questions out with wisdom, and this account does not do that work for them.
A second objection is sharper. Some will say that holding this conviction at all hurts transgender people, however warmly it is delivered. That deserves honesty. A person who does not share the Christian view of creation may experience it as rejection, and no order of priorities removes that tension entirely. What Mohler’s sequence changes is where the person meets the conviction. They meet it inside a community that welcomed them first, loved them before they agreed, and admits its own unfinished brokenness. That is very different from meeting it as a verdict at the door.
Nothing here promises that a person’s distress will go away, or that following Christ will feel easy for them. A church that trusts the gospel can afford to be patient with pain it cannot fix. That patience may mean years of walking alongside someone, along with encouraging good counseling and medical care, and if a person’s distress ever becomes a crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text. Fear demands fast answers. Conviction can wait.
So the question a church faces is larger than whether it can welcome a transgender person without betraying what it believes. A church that will not welcome that person has already shown what it believes about grace. The way it greets the visitor at the door reveals whether it trusts the gospel it preaches inside.