Pastor Louie Giglio, a headline speaker at last years Hillsong conference has pulled out of President Obama’s inauguration ceremony which will mark the start of the president’s second term. The inauguration is the ceremony at which the president is sworn in and usually includes several prayers.

Louie Giglio at Passion 2012 Conference

Giglio had been offered the role of delivering the “benediction”(a closing prayer), at the inauguration. The widow of Medger Evers, the civil rights activist assassinated during the civil rights era, will give the “invocation’, the main speech during the swearing-in ceremony.

Giglio, who heads Passion City Church, Atlanta, has a doctorate from Grace Theological seminary, a conservative evangelical institution in Indiana. His sixstepsrecords recording company features well-known musicians Matt Redman and Chris Tomlin.

Giglio’s role in the inauguration became public on Tuesday, however on Wednesday a liberal website published sermons from Giglio in which he said homosexuality is a sin and advocated gay “recovery”.

“An inaugural official said Giglio was picked for the benediction in part because of his work raising awareness about modern-day slavery and human trafficking” the Washington Post reported. “Those were core issues at his most recent conference, Passion 2013, attended by more than 60,000 mostly young evangelicals in Atlanta.”

ABC news reports that Giglio “pulled himself out of the ceremony”.

A statement issued by Giglio’s spokesperson says “I am honored to be invited by the President to give the benediction at the upcoming inaugural on January 21. Though the President and I do not agree on every issue, we have fashioned a friendship around common goals and ideals, most notably, ending slavery in all its forms.

“Due to a message of mine that has surfaced from 15-20 years ago, it is likely that my participation, and the prayer I would offer, will be dwarfed by those seeking to make their agenda the focal point of the inauguration. Clearly, speaking on this issue has not been in the range of my priorities in the past fifteen years. Instead, my aim has been to call people to ultimate significance as we make much of Jesus Christ.

“Neither I, nor our team, feel it best serves the core message and goals we are seeking to accomplish to be in a fight on an issue not of our choosing, thus I respectfully withdraw my acceptance of the President’s invitation. I will continue to pray regularly for the President, and urge the nation to do so. I will most certainly pray for him on Inauguration Day.”

Thinkprogress, the website that reported the Giglio sermon at the centre of the controversy, transcribed an audio tape of his message:

“(9:20) [God] says very clearly in [Leviticus], verse 22, after he talks about a lot of different kinds of relationships, he says in verse 22: “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female. It is an abomination.” Now if you would look forward into the New Testament context, to the passage that most of us know most commonly with this issue, into chapter one of the book of Romans, let’s read a few verses together beginning in verse 18. If you’re taking notes tonight, you might make this the note of Leviticus 20:13 and the book of Jude, we won’t look at those passages but there is some support and encouragement there to this topic.

“(17:37) Men, women, I can’t say anything other to you tonight than this, that if you look at the counsel of the word of God, Old Testament, New Testament, you come quickly to the conclusion that homosexuality is not an alternate lifestyle… homosexuality is not just a sexual preference. Homosexuality is not gay, but homosexuality is sin. It is sin in the eyes of God, and it is sin according to the word of God. You come to only one conclusion: homosexuality is less than God’s best for his creation. It is less than God’s best for us and everything in our lives that is less than God’s best for us and his plan for us and his design for us, is sin. That’s God’s voice. If you want to hear God’s voice, that is his voice to this issue of homosexuality. It is not ambiguous and unclear. It is very clear.”

Thinkprogess report of the sermon is here: http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/01/09/1422021/inaugural-benediction-to-be-delivered-by-anti-gay-pastor/

The sermon is still available on the http://www.discipleshiplibrary.com site, where thinkprogress discovered it.

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Numbers drop for Americans who believe homosexuality is a sin

New data from LifeWay Research, part of the US Southern Baptist Church,

suggests the percentage of Americans who believe homosexuality is a sin has decreased significantly in a year. A November 2012 survey of adults in the United States found 37 percent affirm a belief that homosexual behavior is a sin. The same question in September 2011 saw 44 percent of respondents answer, “Yes.”

According to LifeWay, Americans in the South (40 percent) are the most likely to select “Yes” to the question “Do you believe homosexual behavior is a sin?” as are Americans who attend religious services at least about once a week (61 percent), and those calling themselves “born-again, evangelical, or fundamentalist Christian” (73 percent).

President of LifeWay Research, Ed Stetzer said on his blog yesterday that there was ” little doubt that the President’s evolution on homosexuality probably impacted the evolution of cultural values. This is a real and substantive shift, surprisingly large for a one-year timeframe– though this was hardly a normal year on this issue.”

In May last year, President Obama affirmed his support of same sex marriage in the United States.