Ray Boltz Coming Out

Ray Boltz, a popular Christian Recording artist in the 80's and 90's has come out of the closet to announce that he is gay. This is of course heart-breaking for Christians who have been touched by his music and for the face of Christianity that he paints with this announcement. Christianity Today has posted this news on its blog, but what really gets at the issue is one of the comments left on that blog:

Really, the issue isn't whether he's attracted to men, but what he's doing about it.

The Blade article addresses this:

He and Carol Boltz remain close (their divorce was finalized early this year). ... Boltz declines to go into specifics about the first time he was with a man, but says he has been dating and lives “a normal gay life” now.

“If you were to hold up the rule book and go, ‘Here are all the rules Christians must live by,’ did I follow every one of those rules all that time? Not at all, you know, because I kind of rejected a lot of things, but I’ve grown some even since then. I guess I felt that the church, that they had it wrong about how I felt with being gay all these years, so maybe they had it wrong about a lot of other things.”

As he sorted out his faith, Boltz began building a new life for himself. He took some graphic design courses. He found he could be almost completely anonymous in Ft. Lauderdale. The mullet he’d sported in the ’80s was long gone and CCM had always been a somewhat insular community.

Here we have a Christian man living in public sin and the expectation from him seems to be that it should be celebrated. Rather than celebrate, we should all be heart-broken for the entire Boltz family as we lift them up in prayer.

In case you do not remember who Ray Boltz is, Denny Burk has posted some of his videos in his report of this story.