The Rev. Jo Hudson, senior pastor at the Cathedral of Hope, has written a response to D magazine’s January cover story, How First Baptist’s Robert Jeffress Ordained Himself to Lead America. In the story, writer Michael Mooney claims he was prepared to hate Jeffress.

The Rev. Jo Hudson

“It would be easy to dislike him if he were a hypocrite or a bigot, if he were an insufferable megalomaniac or the kind of man who preaches out of hate and anger,” Mooney wrote. Funny he doesn’t see the bile Jeffress spews at the LGBT community as anything other than pure hatred.

In her response, Hudson points out that “the writer quotes the words of Dr. Jeffress from a sermon he delivered in 2008 called ‘Gay is not OK.'”

“Unlike your writer, I don’t want to hate Robert Jeffress,” Hudson writes. Her rebuttal is on target. I’ve heard her speak and read her writing a number of times, but she’s never been better than in this response.

Rather than spreading more hatred, Hudson compliments Jeffress. She says his arrival at First Baptist “ushered in a revival” and that “anyone who leads a church like that can’t be all bad.”

But she takes him to task for his disgusting description of the LGBT community: “What they (homosexuals) do is filthy. It is so degrading that it is beyond description,” Jeffress said in the “Gay is not OK” sermon.

And she ends brilliantly — she invites him to come and visit the Cathedral as her guest. And I have a funny feeling that what would surprise him most is just how warmly he’d be welcomed. He’d expect protests. He’d expect shouting and depravity. What he’d find are families and friends attending a church service.

A warm welcome — a true show of Christianity — would be the most disconcerting thing that could happen to him. I suspect Jeffress will never take Hudson up on her invitation. Why ruin his good myth with a few facts?