Will the Southern Baptist Convention be Able to Ban Gay Members


There must be several more cases like this, but a Southern Baptist Convention church in Cobb County, Georgia, accepted gay couple and their children. Whether the church can remain in the Southern Baptist Convention is unresolved. 

The Christian mantra is, "Only our group knows what the Bible means. Ignore those other Christians. What they think the Bible means is wrong." As we all know there are hundreds of disagreements about who is right and who is wrong. The Southern Baptist Convention is struggling mightily about its past certainty mixed racial marriages and integration were sin. There must be plenty of disagreement right now as some in the faith recognize it is digging yet another hole for itself with the gay issue.

Among the SBC recent resolutions is a restatement of its old prejudices that "...God's design for sexual relations (remain) solely within the conventional union of marriage between one man and one woman for life." In addition, it warns Southern Baptists to "...forsake any self-conception or personal identity that is contrary to God's good and holy purposes..."

Another place in the "Resolutions" section makes a sarcastic reference to following the culture. It says (paraphrasing) "What if Paul said, 'Society is looking with favor on abominations. Therefore we in the faith should accept abominations as part of our faith.' " It would be ridiculous, of course, for Paul to have written such a thing and we read it today in the Bible, the SBC says. Southern Baptists are to not bend to conform with the culture but stay on the straight and narrow path the Bible lays out for them.

Well, that is true except for slavery followed by segregation and interracial marriage. For more than a century Southern Baptists were as much against mixing of the races as they are today against gay marriage and homosexuality itself. It is almost laughable SBC takes is so self righteous about gay marriage. 

The church in the link which welcomed a gay couple and their two children knew the rules of the SBC but decided not to leave voluntarily but force the denomination to make a decision about its standing in the denomination. Several preachers did this in the Methodist denomination after conducting gay weddings. Eventually, the denomination had to split up over this issue. 

While the Southern Baptist Convention is organized differently than the Methodists, it too will have to split into factions so that members with views from the Middle Ages can to one way and those with reasonable views on the diversity of humans can go the other. 

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