A leaked church training video has gone viral for its support of practicing “affirmation” in the lives of transgender minors. Stating that churches “cannot be the last place a (trans) student feels comfortable,” the video’s presenter argues that since everyone else is affirming kids, then churches should ignore their teachings and do it too so as not to confuse them further. As expected, the backlash to its leaking was swift and severe.
The training video was produced by a team known as Transit and produced for Pastor Andy Stanley’s Atlanta-based North Point Community Church, a non-denominational, evangelical megachurch. For the last decade or so, it has seen anywhere between 20,000-30,000 people attend weekly, so this is not a small organization by any stretch and impacts countless young people.
Cleverly humanizing this woke approach, the presenter in the video, a man named Britt Kitchen, relates the story of a five-year-old child that was already on their “journey” and boasts how the church made them feel safe, comfortable, and welcome. “There’s one family in particular that’s very helpful for me. Their journey first started when their student was five years old, so it was before any of the middle school hormones of what’s going on could even take place,” he began.
“This family first started going to a child psychologist and seeing a medical specialist. There were time they started using different pronouns at home, but only at home,” Kitchen continued, lamenting how confusing it would be for the child to have to identify with different pronouns and just assuming this five-year-old would be completely fine if only everyone “affirmed” their new identity.
After speaking about the issue of just embracing the child’s new identity in various social settings – school, friends, extended family – the video then casually mentions the transition from identity to more permanent physical changes. “Now, somewhere along the way, medical intervention started for this student, if we’re talking about something in middle school, more than likely medical injections are going to be about stopping puberty, as opposed to having a surgery that will probably come later in life. It would be just a matter of, hey, let’s slow down or stop puberty from even starting for this child,” the video states.
Bringing the point home for churches, Kitchen ends with the supposed a-ha moment that when the child arrived at church, they might as well forgo 2,000 years of Biblical principles since they couldn’t be the only place not “affirming” the child. “And they finally came here, started talking to our care ministry staff, and we realized, oh my goodness, we cannot be the last place a student feels comfortable. That’s the opposite of our goal for church is to be the last place you feel comfortable talking about anything.”
Watch the leaked training video below:
The original post to X, on March 28th of this year, received hundreds of thousands of views for the account Protestia. Hundreds of commenters swarmed to decry what they felt was a wayward church. “Or they could be the only place speaking truth and being a light in darkness,” one user replied to suggest an alternative reaction other than the one proposed by the pro-LGBT training group Transit.
Another comment built on that sentiment, writing that “church isn’t primarily about getting good ‘feelings’. It is a people who love you and are willing to fight for your good, as good is defined in the Bible. Biblical love doesn’t always feel good, but it does good in the long term that brings true and lasting joy.”
Yet another user got stuck on the fact that the child was just five years old. “Wow, encouraging a 5 year old in such a manner? The children leading the parents instead of the parents leading the children. The church allowing confused children to lead, so wrong,” they wrote.
Featured image: Screen shot from embedded video