The Southern Baptist Convention executive committee on Tuesday voted to remove four of its churches, two on policies deemed too inclusive for LGBTQ people and two more to hire pastors convicted of sex crimes.
The actions were announced at a meeting marked by warnings from two leading leaders that the SBC, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, was damaging itself with divisions over several critical issues, including race.
“We should lament when racist and cabinet confederates feel more at home in our churches than many of our people of color,” SBC President JD Greear said in his speech opening.
The two churches expelled for LGBTQ inclusion were St. John’s Baptist Church. Matthews in Louisville, Kentucky, and Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Georgia.
Towne View Pastor Rev. Jim Conrad told The Associated Press last week that he would not appeal the removal and plans to affiliate his church, at least temporarily, with The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which allows churches to establish their own LGBTQ policies.
Towne View began admitting LGBTQ faithful as members in October 2019 after a same-sex couple with three adopted children asked Conrad if they could attend, a decision he defends as the right one.
“The alternative would have been to say,‘ We’re probably not prepared for that, ’but I couldn’t do that,” said Conrad, a pastor since 1994.
St. Matthews Baptist was among more than a dozen churches that lost their membership in the Kentucky Baptist Convention in 2018 because they made financial contributions to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which had recently lifted a ban on hiring LGBTQ employees.
In a statement Tuesday, St. Matthews said the SBC’s decision to remove her was based on its membership policy including LGBTQ, which states that “belief in Jesus as a personal Savior is the only criterion for being a member of our Church.”
“Nothing in the Southern Baptist Convention decision modifies the deep commitment of St. Matthew’s Baptist Church to the realization of what God calls us to do in our worship and spiritual growth,” the church said.
SBC officials said West Side Baptist Church in Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, was fired because it “conscientiously employs a registered sex offender as a pastor,” while Antioch Baptist Church in Sevierville, Tennessee, has a pastor convicted of legal rape.
Baptist Press, the SBC’s official news agency, identified the Baptist pastor of Antioch as John Randy Leming Jr., and said he had pleaded guilty in 1998 to two counts of legal rape of oral sex with a 16-year-old congregant when he was pastoring at Shiloh Baptist Church, nearby Sevier County in 1994. The Associated Press could not find a phone number for Leming Church and there was no an immediate response to a message sent through your Facebook page.
West Side Baptist had made it clear on its website that its pastor, David Pearson, has a troubled past.
“More than 29 years ago, Pastor David lived like a great sinner and rebel,” the site says. “But Christ Jesus is a great Savior! Today Pastor David has gone from misfortune to amazing grace and has now served the Lord Jesus Christ on the West Side for 18 years. “
Pearson is listed on the Florida Sex Offender Registry as convicted of sexually assaulting a child in Texas in 1993.
Also on Tuesday’s agenda was a report from an executive committee working group on the SBC’s public policy group, the Ethics and Religious Freedom Commission, and its chairman, the Rev. Russell Moore. Moore has dismayed some SBC conservatives with various stances, including criticism of former President Donald Trump and support for a more welcoming immigration policy.
But the executive committee did not take any action on the report, and refused to adopt any recommendations aimed at curbing Moore’s frankness.
The two-day meeting opened Monday in Nashville, Tennessee, with a calendar with speeches by Greear and executive committee chairman Ronnie Floyd complaining about the denomination’s multiple acid divisions.
“This sound of war in the Southern Baptist camp worries me, and I know it does for many of you, too,” Floyd said. “As we listen and see how American culture is so out of control, my friends, our own culture within the Southern Baptist family is also out of control.”
Floyd noted that the divisions reflect ideological, political, and racial differences at the national level.
“In this feverish environment, each of us has to be very careful with the words we write, speak, tweet, or post,” he said. “As SBC leaders and followers of Jesus, our public behavior is important.”
Greear addressed racial tensions at the SBC, a long-standing problem that has recently recovered. Some black pastors have left the SBC and others express dismay at the statements of the six presidents of the SBC seminar, all white, who restrict the way in which the issue of systemic racism can be taught in their schools.
In the future, Greear said black Baptists in the south should be included in discussions on the issue, including the SBC’s stance toward the concept of critical race theory, which the seminar presidents repudiated.
“The reality is that if we at the SBC had shown so much grief over the painful legacy that racism and discrimination has left in our country as a passion to denounce the CRT, we probably wouldn’t be in that mess,” Greear said.
“Do we want to be an evangelical people or a people of southern culture? What is the most important part of our name: South or Baptist? ”
After the two speeches, the executive committee unanimously adopted an expansion plan called Vision 2025. It would increase full-time Southern Baptist international missionaries from 3,700 to 4,200, increase the number of congregations by 5,000, and try to reverse the decline of baptism. from 12 to 17-year-olds.
Floyd said SBC churches beat 38% fewer teens than in 2000.
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Associated Press reporter Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed to this report.
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This story has been corrected to reflect that the name of the Pennsylvania church is West Side, not Westside.
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