Carrie Prejean made headlines last April in the Miss USA pageant when she famously responded in the question period that she believed marriage is between a man and a woman. The question came from celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton, and two days later Prejean was in New York appearing on the Today Show.
Escorting her to those media interviews was her pastor Miles McPherson of The Rock Church in San Diego, CA, where Prejean has attended for the past four years. McPherson spoke about the occasion in the October issue of Church Executive, a business magazine for larger and megachurches.
“When I met Carrie in New York it was the first question I asked her,” he says. “Are you willing to give up your crown? Because if you don’t want to give up your crown, if you want to be politically-correct, then you can answer the questions one way.
“But if you want to stand up for the Lord at all costs, then you’ll answer the questions another way.” She stayed with her beliefs, despite the furor in the media and from the gay and celebrity community. Regnery Publishing says she is writing a book, tentatively titled “Still Standing,” coming out in January.
McPherson has worked quietly in the middle of some culturally unpopular issues. He was involved in the California Proposition 8 issue last year on the definition of marriage. In that issue he says, “My role was to educate the church and the body of Christ overall, not only on the biblical definition of marriage but to honoring the biblical definition of marriage….
“We were simply saying God designed a man to marry a woman; it is the metaphor of our relationship with Christ and that is what we should honor and not condone anything else.”
McPherson believes Christianity is under attack by the culture in which we live, as demonstrated by both the Miss California and the Prop 8 controversies.
“I think what we are to learn is the culture is very strongly opposed to the Bible and people who walk with Christ are going to have to accept the fact that there is going to be confrontation and eventually persecution.
“I mean we [Rock Church] were persecuted, we got emails for months. There’s a new breed of Christian and a new breed of pastor that needs to be raised up, that will be willing to stand up for the word of God in the face of persecution, in the face of criticism, and in the face of apathetic, politically-correct congregations, if they have one. We can’t live to please man and we can’t live to avoid conflict,” McPherson says in the interview.
Possibly within days the Defense Authorization Act will be passed by the Congress with a provision in it that some believe could include the Bible as “hate speech” if spoken from the pulpit by a pastor. Some say the bill criminalizes thought. McPherson says he is concerned about the actions, but from a different perspective.
“It’s not a government thing, it’s a Satanic thing. It goes beyond the government. I think we have to realize who our enemy is; it’s not flesh and blood, it’s not people. It’s Satanic, and the devil has no limit to how far he will go. So we always have to keep that in mind and not take man’s word for it, because man is not the ultimate decider on these issues, it’s the devil,” he says.