Broadway Baptist Church Might Be Ousted ! ! !

My home church, Broadway Baptist, is in the news again. It's never going to end. My friend Gary alerted me to this jewel on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram website:

Resolution at Southern Baptist Convention seeks Fort Worth church's ouster

To my friend David M., Please make note of the word "ouster"....

By TERRY LEE GOODRICH

A North Carolina pastor has recommended that Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth be ousted from the Southern Baptist Convention, saying it encourages homosexuality.

Ousted. There it is again. Ousted. You start using a new word regularly for the first time, and it appears everywhere. (Inside joke....my friend David M. recently did an audio/video presentation about our former pastor, Dr. Brett Younger, and his appearances in newspaper headlines and internet posts. The word "ousted" was quite popular. Click here for recent details. )

Back to the bidness at hand. Broadway Baptist Church encourages homesexuality? Like, in experimental classes? During communion? Field trips to Pier One Imports? Let's read on.

The proposed resolution, made Tuesday at the SBC’s annual meeting in Indianapolis. was referred to an executive committee which will bring back a report at the 2009 meeting in Kentucky.

For those unfamiliar with the Southern Baptist Convention, it's the baptist group that split off from the northern baptists shortly before the Civil War, primarily because the yankees didn't want southern missionaries to carry their slaves with them on mission trips. This, of course, was intolerable interference from the yankees.

Punting awkward resolutions to a committee is a time-honored technique most often used when leadership determines that somebody is making resolutions just to get his name in the paper.

Wait a minute....??? I didn't even know Broadway was in the Southern Baptist Convention....I thought we left it years ago to join the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, or some grouping like that. Isn't this like closing the barn door after the horses have run off?

The action stemmed from a controversy at Broadway over whether gay and lesbian couples could be pictured together in the church directory. In February, to get beyond the divisive issue, the congregation voted to publish a book without individual or family portraits — and with candid snapshots instead. Several gay couples had asked earlier to have their portraits appear.

I thought it was a good compromise. Broadway is going for a very big tent. And speaking of big tents, that Southern Baptist tent? It has lots and lots and lots of gays and lesbians in it. Encouraged or not, they're in there.

The Reverend Bill Sanderson of Hephzibah Baptist Church in Wendell, N.C., declined to answer questions in a phone call from the Star-Telegram.

But Reverend Bill Sanderson of Hephzibah Baptist Church in Wendell, N.C. didn't hesitate to speak from inside the relatively small convention tent in Indianapolis.

If you want to know more about this guy, here's his website.

Here's a video of Rev. Bill. .

Officials with Broadway could not be reached immediately to comment.

Officials? Officials? Hey, we're the real baptists. We don't need no stinkin' officials. We're all about concepts like Autonomy Of The Local Church, and Priesthood Of The Believer. (Click here if you're unfamiliar with the concept. Read what the guy says, imagine strongly disagreeing with him, and you'll know where I'm coming from....)

So I'll make an un-official comment that might work until a more qualified commenter comes along:

(Ahem....) I am deeply, deeply saddened that a sister baptist church would try to gain attention and notoriety by making a resolution to remove my church from the Southern Baptist Convention, the organization that brought us The Disney Boycott, Subjugation of Women, Bailey Smith, and the Jimmy Carter presidency.