Insidious Winsomeness
The Stream, an online news source, published on April 3, 2024, an article by Tom Gilson titled “Is Cru Losing Its First Love for Christ?” Gilson and his wife were for 34 years staff members and leaders in the Evangelical parachurch ministry formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ, but which officially changed its name in 2011 simply to Cru, ostensibly to avoid offending Muslims who, holding grudges at least as long as the Orthodox do, don’t like Christians using the word “Crusade” around them.
“Cru,” says Gilson,
has always focused on eliminating needless barriers to nonbelievers’ hearing the Gospel. “This was in our DNA,” as we often said among ourselves. . . . So when the world began to say it was an “offense” to “misgender” people, making it hard to have conversations about Christ, that appeared as one of those needless barriers to avoid. So now, for the sake of mission, Cru’s staff are being trained to go the “winsome” route by using “pronoun hospitality” [that is, identify those who claim to be a sex which they are not with the pronouns they claim appropriate to whatever they think they are].
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S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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