The Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee voted on Tuesday to topple four of its churches, two over policies considered too inclusive of LGBTQ people and two more to employ pastors convicted of sex crimes.
The actions were announced at a meeting marked by warnings from two top leaders that SBC, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, was hurting itself over divisions on several critical issues, including race.
“We should be sorry when racists and closeted neo-confederates feel more at home in our churches than many of our blacks,” said SBC President JD Greear in his opening speech.
The two churches expelled for LGBTQ inclusion were St. Matthews Baptist Church 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 expulsion 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 started admitting LGBTQ worshipers as members in October 2019 after a same-sex couple with three adopted children asked Conrad if they could attend, a decision he advocates as the right thing to do.
“The alternative would have been to say, ‘We are probably not ready for this’, but I couldn’t do that,” said Conrad, a pastor there since 1994.
St. Matthews Baptist was among more than 12 churches that lost their affiliation with the Kentucky Baptist Convention in 2018 because they made financial contributions to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which recently lifted the ban on hiring LGBTQ employees.
In a statement on Tuesday, São Mateus said that the SBC’s decision to expel her was based on its LGBTQ membership policy – which states that “belief in Jesus as a personal Savior is the only criterion for joining our Church ”.
“Nothing in the decision of the Southern Baptist Convention changes the deep commitment of the São Mateus Baptist Church to fulfill what God calls us to do in our worship and spiritual growth,” said the church.
SBC officials said the West Side Baptist Church in Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, was expelled because “they consciously employ a registered sex offender as a pastor”, while the Antioch Baptist Church in Sevierville, Tennessee, has a pastor who was convicted of statutory rape .
Baptist Press, the official SBC news agency, identified Pastor Baptist of Antioch as John Randy Leming Jr., and said he pleaded guilty in 1998 to two counts of oral sex rape with a 16-year-old congregant when she was a pastor. near Shiloh Baptist Church in Sevier County in 1994. The Associated Press was unable to find a telephone number that works for Leming’s church and there was no immediate response to a message sent through its Facebook page.
West Side Baptist made it clear on his website that his pastor, David Pearson, had a troubled past.
“More than 29 years ago, Pastor David lived as a great sinner and rebel,” says the website. “But Christ Jesus is a great Savior! Today, Pastor David has gone from disgrace to incredible 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 having been convicted of sexual assault on a child in Texas in 1993.
Also on Tuesday’s agenda was a report by an executive committee task force on SBC’s public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and its chairman, Rev. Russel Moore. Moore dismayed some SBC conservatives with various positions – including criticism of former President Donald Trump and support for a more welcoming immigration policy.
But the executive committee took no action on the report, refusing to embrace some recommendations aimed at containing Moore’s candor.
The two-day meeting opened on Monday in Nashville, Tennessee, with a schedule featuring speeches by Greear and executive committee chairman Ronnie Floyd lamenting the multiple bitter divisions within the denomination.
“This sound of war in the Southern Baptists camp is worrying to me, and I know it concerns many of you,” said Floyd. “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 across the country.
“In this feverish peak environment, each of us needs to be very careful about 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 SBC, an age-old problem that has been revived recently. Some black pastors have left SBC and others are expressing dismay at the statements by the six SBC seminar presidents – all of them white – restricting how the issue of systemic racism can be taught in their schools.
In the future, Greear said, Southern Black Baptists should be included in discussions on this topic, including SBC’s position on the concept of Critical Race Theory, which the seminar presidents repudiated.
“The reality is that if we, at SBC, had shown as much sadness over the painful legacy that racism and discrimination have left in our country as we are passionate about condemning the CRT, we probably would not be in this mess,” said Greear
“Do we want to be a people of the Gospel or a people of the culture of the South? What is the most important part of our name – Southern or Baptist? ”
After the two speeches, the executive committee unanimously approved an expansion plan called Vision 2025. It would increase Southern full-time Baptist missionaries from 3,700 to 4,200, increase the number of congregations by 5,000, and seek to reverse the decline in baptism 12- for 17 years.
Floyd said that SBC churches are baptizing 38% fewer teenagers 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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