Marketplace Chaplains: A lurking homophobic organization giving invocations at Dallas City Council meetings. PART TWO Update.
A group doesn't necessarily have to be out in the open attacking Gays, some can be slithering underground quietly undermining the security of the Gay community.
Update: Dallas Observer has run an article on this.
This is Part Two of a series about Marketplace Chaplains from which the Dallas City Council has people giving invocations. Below is the link to Part One. Part Two follows after.
This is the link to PART ONE, Part Two follows in this post.
PART TWO
Marketplace Ministries
As we left off in Part One, Marketplace Chaplains is a subsidiary of Marketplace Ministries.
This is a 2009 article about Marketplace Ministries. The article doesn’t entirely represent Marketplace Ministries as will find out.
The URL https://www.marketplaceministries.com is no longer a website, but instead redirects to https://www.mchapcares.com/ .
Using the Internet Archive you can see the www.marketplace.com website as it was in previous years. The Internet Archive is at https://archive.org/ Submitting will get you saved webpages going back to 1998.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220701000000*/marketplaceministries.com
Sometimes the Internet Archive which has currently (11/19/2022) has 767 billion webpages stored can be a little slow on loading.
Looking around you can find this link which has the application form with where you mark with your initials that you have read the Articles of Faith and the Standards of Conduct.
The Articles of Faith are pages 5 and 6 on the application form and appear to be an Evangelical set of Articles of Faith. Article XIII states that “gifts of tongue” are not to be practiced in MMI activity.
The Code of Conduct is on page 7.
Under the heading, “GOD — Holy Living Through Jesus Christ,” item #3 states, “All unbiblical sexual relations are prohibited.” (Boldface added.)
On archives webpages after 2006 the Articles of Faith and Code of Conduct can’t be found.
The Marketplace Chaplains Articles of Faith and Code of Conduct in 2022
I did not find the Articles of Faith or the Code of Conduct in 2022 on the Marketplace Chaplains, but fortunately carelessness on the part of an officer of the Marketplace Chaplains gave a summary of the contents of these two items. Basically it appears that they are anti-Gay.
This is a video created at the Dallas Theological Seminary.
Douglas Fagerstrom is mentioned as the CEO and Executive President of Marketplace Chaplains USA in this D Magazine article.
The discussion how how they select chaplains the theological reguirements starts at 12:30 into it.
At 12:30 in the video you also learn that they see peoples problems as a chance to prostylize the Evangelical Christian faith.
It is saved also as a tablepodcast. This archived video is finicky. You start it by pressing the little arrow and you don’t stop it until it is done.
The archiving of the YouTube video doesn’t include the video.
He mentions that they have a Statement of Faith and it is “rather Evangelical” at 12:55. He doesn’t state the content, but he then says,
The NAE would be proud of us, the National Association of Evangelicals, and we ask all our Chaplains to be able to agree with our statement of faith and it would be probably similar to what you have here at Dallas Theological Seminary.
The Dallas Theological Seminary is one of the local colleges that is on the worst list at Campus Pride. https://www.campuspride.org/worstlist/
The link below is to the Dallas Theological Seminary statement on Marriage & Human Sexuality Policy.
https://www.dts.edu/about/policies-procedures/marriage-human-sexuality-policy/
Quoting from the document:
Marriage: Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) defines marriage as the permanent, exclusive, comprehensive, and conjugal “one flesh” union of one man and one woman, intrinsically ordered to procreation and biological family, and in furtherance of the moral, spiritual, and public good of binding father, mother, and child.
Sexual Immorality: DTS believes that sexual acts outside marriage are prohibited as sinful. Consequently, DTS students, faculty, administration, and staff must resist and refrain from any and all sexual acts outside marriage — including but not limited to co-habitation, adultery, fornication, incest, zoophilia, pornography, prostitution, voyeurism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, sodomy, polygamy, polyamory, sologamy, or same-sex sexual acts.
Sexual Orientation: DTS believes that God created and ordered human sexuality for the permanent, exclusive, comprehensive, and conjugal “one flesh” union of man and woman, intrinsically ordered to procreation and biological family, and in furtherance of the moral, spiritual, and public good of binding father, mother, and child. Consequently, DTS students, faculty, administration, and staff must affirm the sexual complementarity of man and woman and resist the temptations of same-sex sexual attractions and refrain from any and all same-sex sexual acts or conduct,
The National Association of Evangelicals has a whole page devoted to being anti-Gay.
https://www.nae.org/topics/lgbtq/
The whole thing is full of this “Love the sinner, but not the sin” stuff and nonsense.
A sample of their beliefs.
https://www.nae.org/supreme-court-hears-historic-marriage-case-2/
https://www.nae.org/supreme-court-redefines-marriage/
When President Obama had an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against LGBTQ they had all sorts of problems with it, and basically it was alright to discriminate against LGBTQ if it was your religious belief.
https://www.nae.org/letter-to-the-president-on-executive-order-on-hiring-decisions/
Even if the Marketplace Chaplains suddenly released what they said was their Statement of Faith, I would have to question if was real or just something to evade public censure.
I think that it can be understood that this is a stealth anti-Gay Evangelical Christian organization insinuating itself into workplaces as caring supporters, but actually having an Evangelica agenda, exploiting the distress of employees to advance their religion.
Summary
The Mayor of Dallas and the Dallas City Councilpersons absolutely shouldn’t be asking members of the Marketplace Evangelicals to speak. Continuing to do so after being informed of their agenda is enemity against the Gay community.
Nor should any other elected body have them as invocators.
Companies should not be hiring them or having them in their workplaces.
I plan on presenting my findings to the Dallas City Council and asking them to not have them give invocations.
A link will be added to this post to the post about the presentation and the reaction.
The subscription is free.
This is the link to the petition to get a Human Rights Commission at Change.org https://chng.it/XrsMZ9P8cR Please sign and share. With groups like these in Dallas we need a human rights commission.
Yes confirmed they are against man-on-man anaI