We got our first question about so-called gender pronoun hospitality exactly five years ago in December of 2019.

Many emails since, most recently, in this urgent question from an anonymous elder.

Hello, Pastor John.

Thank you for this podcast and for taking my question.

I serve as an elder in my church.

We are blessed with a college

nearby where we have an active ministry presence. There we team up with a large parish church

ministry helping churches serve college campuses. During a recent training session, this ministry asked

us to consider using gender pronoun hospitality on our local campus.

A suggestion that has now come before the elders of the church to see if we will allow our

members and those we support locally who work on the campus to do so.

The argument is that there are times when, for the sake of evangelism, one may decide to

call a person by their chosen gender if such an act removes a possible

barrier in sharing the gospel. The ask for our church is for a person to have the freedom in the moment

to do this, limited to evangelism contexts, limited to conversations with those who are not believers.

If someone claims to be a follower of Christ, such pronoun hospitality

would not apply. But Article 7 in the Nashville statement seems to me to show no wiggle room here

at all. Pastor John, what do you think of this so-called gender pronoun hospitality? I see five

issues that need to be addressed in this question.

I'll take them from what I think is the least to the most important.

First, when you're dealing directly with a person who says he is a woman or she is a man, the pronoun that you use is you, not he or she.

Hello, how are you? So it may be possible to engage a person directly without touching the issue

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