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Nobody in Charlotte's Myers Park Baptist Church or the N.C. Baptist State Convention was surprised when the convention kicked the church out. They're going different directions. Tuesday in Greensboro they made it official.
The immediate issue was gays and the church, but the larger issue was the Baptist belief in the authority of the local congregation to determine its own policies.
Unlike hierarchical denominations, among Baptists the local church is autonomous. Membership in state and national groups is voluntary. Sometimes Baptist groups restrict membership to churches that share certain beliefs. The N.C. convention did so in a 2006 statement saying it didn't welcome as members churches that "knowingly act to affirm, approve, endorse, promote, support or bless homosexual behavior."
The deacons at 1,900-member Myers Park, which welcomes homosexuals without trying to change them, responded by citing local autonomy and asserting that Myers Park "will not allow our conscience to be coerced" by the convention's "exclusionary conditions of membership."
Nobody in Charlotte's Myers Park Baptist Church or the N.C. Baptist State Convention was surprised when the convention kicked the church out. They're going different directions. Tuesday in Greensboro they made it official.
The immediate issue was gays and the church, but the larger issue was the Baptist belief in the authority of the local congregation to determine its own policies.
Unlike hierarchical denominations, among Baptists the local church is autonomous. Membership in state and national groups is voluntary. Sometimes Baptist groups restrict membership to churches that share certain beliefs. The N.C. convention did so in a 2006 statement saying it didn't welcome as members churches that "knowingly act to affirm, approve, endorse, promote, support or bless homosexual behavior."
The deacons at 1,900-member Myers Park, which welcomes homosexuals without trying to change them, responded by citing local autonomy and asserting that Myers Park "will not allow our conscience to be coerced" by the convention's "exclusionary conditions of membership."
With 1.2 million members and 4,000-plus churches, North Carolina's Baptist State Convention is the nation's second largest association of Baptist churches. Myers Park has been a member since 1943, when the church was founded.
When state convention officials said this week that Myers Park was seeking publicity, they were right. Some other churches that don't accept the convention's policy remained quiet. Myers Park sent delegates to the convention in Greensboro to witness for its beliefs in public.
Three other Charlotte churches, St. John's, Park Road and Sardis, also are among the dissenters. All object to what they regard as the state convention's intrusion into local church policies.
We're not about to dive into the theological tussle about gays and the church. But we will say this: Too much of the Christian community over the years has responded to persecution of homosexuals with silence, if not support. Baptists who say they "hate the sin but love the sinner" could add weight to that assertion by doing more to protect their fellow sinners from persecution and discrimination.
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