25 years ago yesterday, on Valentine's Day of 1999, Dr. Rosaria Champagne—a 36-year-old tenured English professor at Syracuse University specializing in Queer Theory—darkened the door of a conservative Psalm-singing Reformed Presbyterian Church.
She and her partner owned a couple of homes together and were members of a Unitarian Universalist Church, where Dr. Champagne coordinated the church's gay and lesbian advocacy group.
In April of 1997, when the local paper published her piece claiming that Promise Keepers was a danger to democracy, one of the elders at the church slapped the editorial down on Rev. Smith's desk and said, “We need to shut this woman up!”
The pastor, who was nearly 70, replied, “Well, perhaps Floy and I should invite her to dinner.”
So in May of 1997, he wrote her a letter.
Nearly two years later, in 1999, after many conversations and meals together, God broke through and did a decisive work in her heart.
Rev. Smith is now 96.
Rosaria Butterfield, age 61, is now a pastor's wife and a grandmother.
The two talk about their story together here, and in her book on "Five Lies of an Anti-Christian Age" (https://t.co/jCHqUyaL6p) she reprints his first letter to her and the Bible overview that he gave her.
#HeSavesUs
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