| Roy Clements | |
| Birth Date: | 4 1946 df=yes (age 75) |
| Birth Place: | London, England |
| Nationality: | British |
| Occupation: | Pastor, preacher, author |
| Religion: | Christian |
| Church: | Baptist |
| Congregations: | Nairobi Baptist Church, Eden Baptist Church |
Roy Clements (born 1946 in London) is a British author and former Christian minister. He was a leading figure within Britain's Evangelical Christian movement for more than two decades until in 1999 he left his wife, resigned from his pastoral ministry and revealed that he is gay.[1] [2] [3] [4]
Roy Clements grew up in the East End of London and earned a PhD in Chemical Physics, before working for the University Colleges Christian Fellowship in Nairobi and serving as pastor of Nairobi Baptist Church in Kenya.[5] He returned to the UK in 1979 when he became pastor of Eden Baptist Church, Cambridge, where he developed a highly successful ministry to students.[6] Over a period of some twenty years, he gained a reputation within the international Christian movement as an accomplished preacher and teacher.[5] Until 1999 he served on the boards of a number of leading evangelical organisations, including the management council of the Evangelical Alliance, which represents more than a million British Christians across 30 denominations.[1]
In 1999, his ministry within British evangelicalism ended. He had entered a relationship with another man; Chris, a Christian student who had originally sought his help with unwanted same-sex attraction. Clements had planned to leave his pastorate and undertake new career "as a Christian thinker engaged in the public communication of science". He confessed to his wife about his same-sex attraction and she gave him an ultimatum: undergo conversion therapy to cure his homosexuality and cease all contact with gay friends. He suggested that they should try to work on their marriage while he undertook a master's degree. Neither came about, as the Evangelical Alliance published a press release stating that he had left his ministry and marriage to begin a relationship with a man, and multiple stories were followed in the press.[7] [8] [9]
With the uproar, Clements went into hiding. He resigned from his church ministry and left his wife and four children. His funding from a Christian charity for his master's was revoked, and the Inter-Varsity Press had his books withdrawn from sale. He and his wife officially divorced in 2001.
He has now been in a relationship with Chris for more than 20 years, and they entered into a civil partnership in 2015.[10]
Theology books and biblical commentaries
Jubilee Centre papers
Clements published a number of papers with Cambridge Papers, a non-profit quarterly publication of the Jubilee Centre, a Cambridge-based centre for contemporary theological reflection which he helped to found. These papers include: "Can Tolerance become the Enemy of Christian Freedom?" (an examination of pluralism in two papers); "Officiously to Keep Alive" (a two-part examination of euthanasia); "Demons and the Mind" (a two-part study of mental illness in the Bible); and "Expository Preaching in a Postmodern World".[11]