Texas Pastor Josh Howerton again defended comments he made in February about how men and women should behave on the wedding day and the wedding night, respectively. He also apologized for “careless words” and “if that joke fell on you the wrong way.”
“A couple weeks ago right after, the week after marriage night, I tossed out a joke—emphasis [on the] word ‘joke,’” said Howerton at the beginning of a sermon on Sunday, April 7. “I tossed out a joke at the beginning of a message, about men and women planning their wedding days and wedding nights. And it became a thing.”
“Here’s what happened. Somebody grabbed that clip of that joke,” he said, “they clipped off the part of the joke to men, kept the part of the joke to women, and then clipped off the end of the joke before you could tell it was a joke.”
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That person “then presented it—uh, Dallas Morning News, hashtag—presented it as ‘Pastor Josh’s advice to women,’” Howerton said, alluding to an April 1 article on the controversy in The Dallas Morning News.
Josh Howerton Addresses Wedding Comments
Josh Howerton, senior pastor of Dallas-area Lakepointe Church, began his Sunday message by celebrating the nearly 40,000 people who attended his church in person on Easter, as well as by celebrating the more than 2,000 people who decided to follow Jesus in one week.
Before moving on to his sermon about Jesus turning water into wine, Howerton said that he needed to “address a thing” that he had not wanted to discuss on Easter Sunday. The “thing” the pastor referred to was comments he made during a February sermon that recently went viral after author and podcaster Sheila Gregoire posted them on X (formerly Twitter) March 28.
In those remarks, which Howerton originally introduced as “a gold nugget of advice I was given by a mentor,” he told future grooms on their wedding days to “stand where she tells you to stand, wear what she tells you to wear, and do what she tells you to do. You’ll make her the happiest woman in the world.”
To future brides, Howerton said that on their wedding nights, they should “stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do, and you’re gonna make him the happiest man in the world.”
