First Baptist Church Pastor Bubba Copeland Kills Himself After Bring Outed as Trans

this is Baba Copeland and he's a really complicated guy uh we're going to talk about what breaks a church and how to fix it this is Church's lame oh man so this one uh is is tough this is without a doubt challenging I I think but we were talking a little bit before we started recording one of the nice things about this show is almost every episode we get to draw some clear lines about who the victim is and who the perpetrator is who's right and who's wrong who's functional and who's dysfunctional and sadly the story we're about to tell is a story of when everything is dysfunctional at every level so Mark you want to kind of give us the uh The Rundown yeah so you know uh Bubba Copeland uh Bubba was a nickname but you know the article didn't give me his actual first name so I'm just going with Bubba CU you know why not uh he was the Mayor of Smith Station Alabama and he was a pastor at uh First Baptist Church in Phoenix Alabama he was outed online as having been trans and then he committed suicide afterward like he said that it was just an alra ego that he was using to you know online and it was just for stress relief yeah and I'm I'm sure like anybody on any part of the spectrum with this story is going to have strong opinions about everything that happened right let me start here um the one thing I could not get out of my head while kind of coming to grips coming to terms with this story is that we literally the last episode that we did talked about cycles of pastoral care and cycles of accountability yeah um and and usually when things break we we we talk about things like pastors having to resign or church splits or things that although unfortunate are are generally not tragic you know but in this case it really is true tragedy what happens when dysfunction hits a church at every level we have a pastor who wouldn't let himself be known to his congregation we had a congregation who who didn't have I don't know the perception the discernment the the ability to to to see the fact that their leader was was was living a double life unbeknownst to them um and as and therefore there can be no care for the pastor there can be no care for the congregation there can be no accountability you know how much harder now is is the mourning process and the and the healing process there was never any opportunity to have a real conversation of any kind there was the outing and then a week later there was a police chase that resulted in him putting a gun to his own head like you said complicated and hard and truly tragic at on at how many levels words is hard how many levels this situation has failed failed the pastor failed the people failed the church failed the kingdom just failure all around yeah I it just so much is broken here um yeah and there's so many questions you know like as I was reading this I'm like so like what you're telling me is like you were recreationally trans like that's not a thing I mean I guess if you dress up in women's clothing you're either just like a crossdresser or you're a drag queen depending on whether you're straight or gay like you just don't just be trans just occasionally like it it's it's a lot deeper than that so I mean did he understand what the labels meant was he really trans and then he was trying to kind of lie about it and make it seem like it was better than it was you know quote unquote better you know in the eyes of his congregation like I I I really wish I knew but you know for me like I'm just going to kind of lead right into this it's like that's kind of like my first point about what I see is how it breaks a church is that like the church is just not a safe place for you know anybody who's trans or like you know maybe has gender questions at all it just it's not a safe place um and I think clearly he didn't think his church was a safe place either because he just kind of freaked out in short order this was posted by the Christian Post right if you scroll down in the article and at the comments they are brutal they are absolutely brutal towards this man God's punishment and and every every horrible thing you would think only the worst of people would say have been said I have a hard time with the word safe if you can't be broken at the church where the heck can you be broken oh yeah just how does the doctor heal you if you don't come in and say Hey doctor my elbow hurts you know yeah so that's my big problem yeah when if related to being a safe space yeah and and and anybody who's making just just awful comments about this guy it's like this was a person he was a human being had a wife had children had a life um that life has now been been wasted um because the church just kind of sucks I mean like that's what happened here like like regardless of whether or not you think being trans is acceptable or not acceptable in God's eyes a person died if you cannot be sensitive to that you don't have the love of Christ in your heart this is exactly how unsafe the church is is that even pastors kill themselves as a result of not feeling safe let's keep moving on yeah and then the cynical side of me just kind of saw like because the headline was like church expresses love for you know Pastor who committed suicide and it's like well that's great but then when you get into the article it's kind of like now I'm annoyed because I feel like I mean yeah show that person love that's great maybe you should have been better about it while they were alive and I don't know that I have anything to add to that except to say um based off of the comments that were on the Christian Post how differently would these exact same people how different would their response have been if it wouldn't have been their pastor but somebody else's Pastor yeah or maybe like their own father that's the part that kind of gets me is it's because it was somebody in their circle now we have to do a little bit of theater when really in our hearts of hearts that there's pretty much a leld uh tradition of believing that this behavior is abhorent unbiblical sinful whatever other adjectives you want to describe onto that so the hypocrisy of the behavior is a little bit than a little infuriating to me yeah and and I guess might just I want to make like one last point in terms of what I see is breaking is just that like the culture of the church is broken in many cases are theology is broken because if our culture and theology are driving people towards suicide um that's a problem that's not a moral feeling on their part that's a moral feeling on your part you know as the person that's pushing this this culture and this theology um and I'm taken very hard from Catholic priest and psychiatrist Father John mcneel who said you know this is like bad psychology is bad theology if we are causing psychological damage to people to lead them especially into self harm then our our Theology and our culture sucks uh you and I have said this so many times throughout the life of this show the church is designed to be Redemptive it is designed to redeem situations to take the things that are sick and make them healthy to take the things that are broken and make them whole to take people who have found themselves lacking and to find themselves complete in Christ and instead with for this man for Bubba as as his congregation affectionately you know refers to him and his town he's the mayor of a town you know instead of being that that place where he could have not not just the safety but like you said a theology that drives towards Redemption a theology that drives for finding wholeness in Christ this church this denomination this way of thinking this theology uh this denomination tradition maybe um have instead of driven him driving him towards um Christ filled holdiness have driven him to the ultimate demonstration of not believing in the redeeming powers of the Cross and and that like you said is an utter failure of our theology to be made real yeah I mean you use the word you know like wholeness and like that's that's an important thing I because like we're we're not going to find ourselves like truly whole in this life right like like once we're fully in the presence of God um like that's the point which like our holess will be complete yeah um you know now we're just like you know we're making do I think you're right that like making that part of our mission in the in the church is important because like you know when the Great Commission talks about you know making disciples I mean well like how are you making disciples are you just smacking them upside the head of the Bible and saying believe dunking them in some water and and asking them if if they've accepted Jesus as their savior no like or are you as a Christian uh is are you attending to the whole person in front of you quite frankly like the most Evangelistic people I've seen with my own eyes um have not been that way like they're they're concerned about your soul and like let your body burn you know is kind of the attitude all right let's take a break real quick and after we come back from the break let's talk about how we can fix this okay Scott so so um my ideas for you know what we can do to fix this as a church um I mean I feel like in this situation it's just going to be woefully incomplete um like I'm hoping anybody that you know watches or listens to this is going to be smarter than me about this but yeah but but my feeble attempt because it's such a complicated situation right um but like you know I just said like first thing is like we need to be um people and as churches places um where people can be honest about who they are like our leadership our our fellow congregants you need to be able to be honest about what's going on in your life with other people around you I don't think that's so much to ask from people who are supposed to be following Jesus and let me just say this directly at people who lead Ministries who are either paid ministers or lay leaders there's a flip side to this coin that Mark is talking about about being a space where people can be honest about who they are that means that you as the person who's who's listening who's counseling who's taking this in you need to just shut your mouth and take it in mhm don't worry about judgment and don't worry about fixing or correcting or or rebuking or whatever word you want to use that makes you sound holier than you actually are the point of loving somebody is doing life with them no matter what and not making them feel lesser than just because they are not you right so if there's any one thing I could say to the people out there listening about this and and wondering like how can they be better at responding is maybe stop trying so hard to respond and maybe spend a little bit more time and effort in reception mode yeah I think that's a fantastic way of putting things and then uh I'll just move on to my second Point um and this is kind of the weird one because I'm like if I assume um that what you know Bubba said about you know his life I mean I'm I'm using that name in pronouns because that's kind of what I'm kind of given to do right like claiming that this was a stress relief thing going to the extent of claiming online to be trans is a weird stress relief if you're pushed to that level and you think being trans is wrong like you need to be being taken care of you know like we talked about before the the cycle of care for pastors it's like we need to establish good systems of pastoral care in our churches and would include like you know pastoral vacation time sabatical as well as just like you know having you know groups dedicated um you know Elders you know who are maybe dedicated to being there or making sure that our pastors have you know a cohort that they can communicate with anything and everything available to just to help them get through that uh I think would be good I don't know if this is TR or not but I'm just going to say it anyway if you're the pray praying type this Man's family his circle of friends his church his community um I'm sure they cover your prayers right now so if if you are the praying sort I I know that I'm probably not out of bounds by by saying hey instead of being judgmental why don't you spend a couple minutes and and pray for everybody that's been affected by this and why that may not change anything about it maybe in some sense it will change us as a result we're we're church is lame this show exists to talk about the failures of the church and how the failures of the church lead to people who love Jesus and who love the church caused them to walk away this episode is probably the most Stark example I could think of in the history of our show of how mishandled situations cause people to look at the church and go um not so much uh so if you have anything to say by all means um we're Super Active in the comments in YouTube leave us a comment you know the thumbs up thumbs down you know leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast player uh for those of you who who don't know how to write anything less than a three-page essay by all means shoot us an email at churches podcast gmail.com you know like I I don't know what the what the sending should be for this given the situation other than to say uh at least this much is you know what love people like Jesus loved them full stop

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