Restore Our Father to the Lord’s Prayer

by Dennis Gladden, By Green Pastures, ©2025

(Aug. 11, 2025) — Heresy in the church is corrupting our culture.

A United Methodist minister, waffling about God’s pronouns, alternated between “he” and “she” in a sermon about how Progressive Christians (including himself) understand sin.1

A friend tells me that his pastor recently began the Lord’s Prayer with the anonymous opening, “May your love be done on earth…”

God the Father has been exiled from His own house. Progressive churches worship instead a goddess, or Mother Earth, or some innocuous being, or You-Who-Is-Out-There. The Lord’s Prayer is so gutted we can no longer call it The Our Father.

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Rather than clear the confusion about family and gender, progressive churches are compounding it, starting from the pulpit.

Clergy utter fatherless prayers into a fatherless heaven.

Clergy like my friend’s pastor undercut scriptures where God is “a father of the fatherless”2 and administers justice for them.3

What a travesty when there is a scourge of fatherless homes on earth.

Nor do they minister to this gender-crazed generation when they pander to a genderless or “fluid” deity.

Neuter God, and the church ceases to be the salt and light Jesus calls us to be. We are left with the dreadful, “If the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned?”4

These are fundamental truths:

• The true and living God is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ;
• Jesus is the Son of God who came so that, through Him, we might know His Father as our Father.

Scrub God of gender and relationship, and Christian theology is in shambles.

Progressive theology has swamped the church with confusion, a flood that is spreading into our society. We have a Supreme Court justice who cannot define “woman” (although she appears to be one). A generation reared on crisscrossed identities cannot tell if they will be mothers or fathers or even be certain they are human beings.

I can hear the Apostle Paul chastising us: “If we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.”5

I close with a final observation.

Many of us took mandatory DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) training a few years ago to affirm LGBTQ+ and Black Lives Matter, and we were instructed to declare our pronouns and to address others as they preferred. It was disrespectful to uphold traditional definitions and could be considered harassment, subject to discipline and even termination.

God has told us His pronouns.

Throughout His Word, He reveals Himself as He/Him and a Father to Israel and the fatherless. Jesus established the fatherhood of God as critical to our eternal well-being, saying, “If God were your Father, you would love Me… You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do.”6

Let’s respect and honor God for who He is and flee our imaginations.

Our Father in heaven would want it that way.

1 Wolsey, R. (2024, May 10). Why must I chase the cat? A progressive sermon on sin. The Holy Kiss.

2 Psalm 68:5

3 Deuteronomy 10:18

4 Matthew 5:13

5 Galatians 1:8

6 John 8:42, 44