Note: This is the fifth article in a multipart series. Read Part 1, which details how Anne Edward came to the Lord and found freedom from same-sex attraction. In Part 2, Edward and John Paulk marry and the couple become poster children for ministries seeking to help people dealing with same-sex attraction. In Part 3, scandal rocked their marriage, and Paulk left his job at Focus on the Family to move back to Oregon. In Part 4, Exodus International hires its last executive director, who ultimately brings the organization to its knees.

As Exodus International was crumbling, so was Anne Edward’s marriage to John Paulk. It had been unstable for years, with Edward repeatedly getting a spiritual nudge that something was going on — and then seeing that thing proven true.

“I just had a sense something was off. And then I would fast and pray, and then something would be shown. And then I would deal with whatever that was. But the mess was much bigger than I was aware of, and I still don’t know it all. And I don’t actually want to know it all at this point.”

She went through a years-long cycle of Paulk falling short of his marriage vows (through watching gay porn or flirting with men), getting caught, and apologizing. Things would seem to get better — until he acted out again. And as the years wore on, “that cycle was getting shorter and shorter.”

Edward was starting to increasingly feel the pain of Paulk’s unfaithfulness. “His behaviors felt rejecting of me as his wife,” she says. “I gave my all for our family and yet here he was still dabbling in the old — in homosexuality.”

In 2007, Edward and Paulk separated for about seven months.

After the couple got back together, their marriage continued to suffer. In May 2012, Edward wrote Paulk a letter saying if he acted out romantically or sexually outside of their marriage again, that would be the last straw. But within a matter of weeks, by looking at Paulk’s text history on his phone, she found out he had again visited a gay bar — and then he lied to her about it when she confronted him.

To add insult to injury, Paulk cried on Edward’s shoulder because a man she had previously seen holding Paulk’s hand had broken off their inappropriate relationship. Edward was crying over Paulk’s lack of commitment to her, and he was crying about another man.

“My heart just severed at that point,” Edward says. “I said, ‘I’ve had it. I gave him the ultimatum. He’s crying about someone else. I’m crying about him. I’m done. I’m not going to cry about him anymore.'”

So in 2012 Edward permanently separated from Paulk and filed for divorce.

Even then, Paulk was reluctant to leave the marriage. But when Edward told him she expected him to honor his vows — to be committed to her (and only her) both romantically and sexually for as long as they both lived — he agreed to sign the papers.

A Correlation in the Crumbling

Both Edward’s marriage and Exodus International crumbled “for similar reasons, amazingly.” She sees a connection between the theology that Exodus’s last executive director, Alan Chambers, had adopted and the reality that Paulk was living out. “There’s this horrible correlation between my married life and the organizational life that would impact so many more,” Edward says now. 

Neither Chambers nor Paulk, both prominent leaders of a movement proclaiming freedom from homosexuality in Christ, were faithful in both word and deed to the value of closing the door on the old nature and old relationships. Chambers said that regardless of what a person did with their homosexual desires, their relationship with Jesus wouldn’t be affected. Meanwhile, Paulk flirted with men and kept connections with old boyfriends en route to acting on his feelings.

“I was constantly having to confront Alan on so many things,” Jeff Buchanan, executive vice president of Exodus from 2011 to 2012, told The Stream, recalling a time when Chambers spoke at a plenary session of an International Exodus Conference at Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina. “He made an illustration and said that you could be sleeping with somebody and just had a one-night stand and get up out of bed and declare that ‘I am the righteousness of Christ.'” Afterward, Buchanan asked Chambers, “Alan, wait a minute, what are you trying to say here?” Chambers continued down a path of increasing acceptance towards homosexuality. “That’s the reason I left,” Buchanan says. “It started to go theologically astray.”

Buchanan and Edward both attributed Chambers’s theological departure to the teachings of his pastor and long-time board member. Buchanan and others say the pastor promoted anti-nomianism. On July 12, 2012, Christianity Today published an article titled, “Exodus International’s Alan Chambers Accused of Antinomian Theology.” According to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, an antinomian is someone “who maintains, through a misreading of arguments in Paul’s Epistles, that the moral law is not binding upon Christians under the law of grace.”

Chambers’s teaching encouraged a mentality that says, “Go do what you want. You’re still going to Heaven. Your behavior doesn’t matter,” Edward says. He apologized for preaching that “change is possible.” Paulk did go do what he wanted, accepting the notion that change is an illusion. And in the end, he projected that lie onto the entire movement.

Whether in word or action, the key thing neglected by both men was walking closely with Jesus away from the sins of the past — the process of sanctification. In the end, neither stayed faithful to scriptural truth about homosexuality.

As the year-long Oregon divorce process began, Edward and others still faithful to Exodus’s original mission began building a new organization — the Restored Hope Network.

Look for Part 6 of this series tomorrow.

Aliya Kuykendall is a staff writer and proofreader for The Stream. You can follow her on X @AliyaKuykendall and follow The Stream @Streamdotorg.