ST. LOUIS, Mo. — The nation’s first “transgender” Baptist preacher spoke to a national Baptist gathering on April 8, explaining that the doctor who delivered him as a baby was wrong in declaring him a boy, and that it was an “angel of reason” that caused him to accept his inclinations to identify as a woman.
Daniel Robinson, who goes by the name Allyson Robinson, had been studying to be a pastor at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary in 2005 when he began to wrestle with his gender identity as never before. He had struggled with his desire to be a man since childhood.
“I have known my entire life that the world was wrong about me, that on the day I was born, when the doctor took a cursory glance between my legs and authoritatively declared ‘It’s a boy,’ he was wrong—dead wrong,” Robinson told the Alliance of Baptists in St. Louis this month.
“What if God hasn’t fixed you because you’re not broken?” Robinson said he heard inside of himself.
“That can’t be true,” he thought. “The Bible says I’m broken.”
“What if the Bible is wrong?” the voice said. “What if you’ve been reading it wrong?”
Robinson told those gathered that in that moment he “sacrificed his certainty” and hoped that God would count it as “righteousness.”
In other appearances, Robinson has explained that he went into therapy but kept his gender identity issues as secret until graduating from Baylor due to the seminary’s policies about homosexuality and transgenderism. He also took a position as pastor of Meadow Oaks Baptist Church in Temple, Texas during his time at Baylor.
Robinson’s wife, Danyelle, expressed her support about his desire to identify as a woman.
In 2014, he worked as a transitional minister at Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and was ordained there as a woman.
“Allyson Dylan Robinson is a minister of the gospel, trained for the task, and ordained to the gospel ministry by another community in which she has served as pastor,” former leader Amy Butler wrote at that time. “Over the course of her journey, God has invited her to step into the faithful witness of a new identity, a true identity, and a new name.”
Robinson now speaks as an itinerant preacher and appeared at Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner’s renaming ceremony last year.
“Frankly I consider Job, Gautama Buddha, Joan of Arc, Rumi and Johnny Cash to be my spiritual predecessors far more than Augustine, Aquinas or Barth,” he told the Alliance of Baptists this month. “My hymnal has a lot less Isaac Watts and Fanny Crosby, but it’s full of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tupac and Beyonce.”
However, some have come to the opposite conclusion of Robinson, and state that it is not healthy to support and affirm a person’s desire to live as those of the opposite sex. Christian News
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