‘If you won’t ordain me, don’t baptize me.’ SBC Church Plotting to Leave SBC Over Anti- Women Pastors Push is LGBTQ…Friendly?
Richmond’s First Baptist Church is ready to pull the plug on its membership in the Southern Baptist Convention, a move they’ve been plotting ever since the SBC approved the Law Amendment. Senior Pastor Jim Somerville offered a public rebuke to their actions on account that their church has multiple pastrixes, writing that they’ve taken steps to disaffiliate over this issue:
“This is an emotional decision for many in the church, some because the Southern Baptist Convention has been their denominational “home” all their lives and they can’t imagine leaving, but others because the SBC is disrespecting our female clergy, telling them they can’t be pastors when we know that they can.
…I know this is going to be painful for them. I wish it didn’t have to be that way. At the same time I love our female pastors and have been supportive of women in ministry from the very beginning. My last SBC meeting was in New Orleans in 1990, where my five-year-old niece wore a button that said, “If you won’t ordain me, don’t baptize me.”
…And let’s be truthful: we haven’t been “An SBC church” in a long time. We haven’t sent messengers to the annual convention in more than thirty years.”
Southern Baptists should view their departure as a purification to be rejoiced over and celebrated rather than a tragedy to mourn. While repentance and the termination of their pastrixes would be the ideal resolution, the next best action for them is to cut ties with the denomination. This is especially crucial, given the various other ways the church has drifted.
As revealed by The Dissenter, Sommerville recently confirmed on his blog that the church has finally approved a new welcome statement which reads “We affirm the biblical truth that all people are created in God’s image and therefore seek to welcome every person in the Spirit of Christ” but that it took a “little while to get there” over considerations for LGBTQ people.
“One of our deacons wondered what we were really trying to say with such a message and I made it clear that I wanted to have something I could point to when members of the LGBTQ community asked me if they would be welcome at our church. At our November meeting I had taken an informal survey, asking the deacons how the church relates to that community currently. I asked, “Do we exclude, tolerate, welcome, or affirm?” There were nearly fifty deacons in attendance: a good representation of our congregation. This is what they said.”
Sommerville asked the deacons how they should relate to the LGBTQ community and the results were significantly different, leading him to suggest there is a leadership gap that needs to be closed. He concludes: “I suggested that we could read books, have conversations, listen to the stories of actual members of the LGBTQ community, but yes, we could also put a welcome statement on the website. That might be a start.”
The Dissenter further reveals “we were able to find other pro-LGBTQ resources on the website, including a recommended book about leading a church to “publicly affirm its LGBTQ community members” and another blog post that calls on people to “to declare the value of black lives, to loudly defend LGBTQ people, to stand alongside your Muslim brothers and sisters, to denounce the degradation of the planet.”
About Author
When a church has to ignore/deny Scripture to fill pews, they are no longer Christ’s church, they are of the world.