re: Church Celebrates Transgender Pastor's Transition With 'Renaming' Ceremony

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your entire faith is based off a book whose words can be twisted to mean anything you want them to mean

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not entirely true. this only happens when people are not properly trained in hermeneutics/exegesis; i.e. biblical interpretation. they can say it means something false and even build a praxis around it but, they're totally glossing over multiple passages that condemn misinterpretation such as romans 2:15, et al

i realize that someone could complain that it's special pleading to say only certain people hold the "correct" interpretation but that would ignore the historical precedent of doctrine. the meaning of biblical doctrines are not really a secret and they aren't terribly hard to understand with proper training. those doctrines have been the same since the time of Christ. it takes some significant gymnastics to arrive at things like queer theology

this all started in the 1800's when continental thinkers began to search for alternative interpretations to scripture by initially rejecting the miracles recorded in the gospels and the bible as a whole. these skeptical projects branched out in several ways and the liberal church we see today is the result. situations like the op are built on "progressive" interpretation that rejects the inerrancy of scripture. when that happens, an untrained person can pretend the text means anything but, it really doesn't and it's not hard to show that to any reasonable person.

a fun example happened recently when td jakes (modalism) entered a dialogue with jack graham (trinitarianism). once jakes started examining the scriptures with a trained expositor, he rejected modalism. i guess my point is people can see that they're not being genuine. progressive interpretations aren't bringing new or useful scholarship to the gospel and it's being rejected because people intuitively know it. the liberal church is basically dead. the more they accommodate and compromise, the more they diminish.