Jeremy Gordon Grinnell, a professor of systematic theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, has resigned as a pastor and been placed on leave from his professorship after being arrested on November 8th for being a ‘peeping tom’, or as they call it under Michigan law, “surveilling an unclothed person.”
According to the charging document, Grinnell went to the home of a 37 year old woman in nearby Cannon Township, got a ladder from the property and climbed up to the second floor where he saw the woman and her partner having sex. After about 20 seconds of checking the two out, the partner saw Grinnell looking through the window and went to confront him. But Grinnell slid down the ladder and got away.
For whatever reason, Grinnell decided it was a good idea to go back the next night for an expected encore. But the woman’s partner confronted him, called police and that’s when Grinnell’s employment situation began a pretty rapid descent.
Grinnell told police he was there to pray for the woman in question. But that apparently didn’t prevent his arrest.
Now, under the ‘not that there’s anything wrong with that’ category, this story just broke and each of the stories I’ve found have pretty much the same information. But I couldn’t help but notice that each of the stories referred to the woman’s ‘partner’ and never used a pronoun to describe the person. So it’s not clear whether her partner was a man or a woman.
That made me wonder if Grinnell’s claim to be praying for the woman had something to do with her being in a same sex relationship. Even from the perspective of an evangelical trying to save someone from the purported sin of homosexuality, I’m not sure watching the person have the illicit sex is a necessary part of the intervention. But who knows?
