Re: “Executive Committee postpones determination whether Texas church is in ‘friendly cooperation’ ” (March 5): The article states that the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee is currently involved in a study to determine if the convention should remain affiliated with Broadway Baptist Church (Ft. Worth, Tex.) because of the controversy over whether homosexual couples should be pictured in a church directory.
The Bible tells us in John 15:1-4 that God cuts off the branches that are not fruitful and prunes/cleanses the branches that are fruitful. Can we truly say that Broadway has not been fruitful in all its many years? Isn’t Broadway doing what we challenged ourselves to do, i.e., go out into the community and bring Christ to these people?
As the churches face this new challenge of bringing Christ into the community we will be running into new situations. We are going to need to establish training on how to receive these people lovingly, warmly and as our equals and, yet, stand firm and maintain the standards set forth by God. We may need to spend some time anticipating how a newcomer will feel coming into our church environment, how we may respond to them when we are confronted by something we’re not used to dealing with. This will be a new level of maturity for all of us to develop. There will surely be many gray areas that will have to be prayerfully dealt with so that newcomers are not injured and turned away, but also in a way that does not compromise the truth. All of this will need to be carefully considered as we endeavor not to be friends of the world, but brothers in Christ.
It would be better for us to enlist Broadway into our focus on training development for the value of their experiences and the insights that they have gained on the frontlines of this new challenge. There may be a better way to do things than they have chosen so far, but we need to spend time with them to understand what they were faced with and why they made their decisions. We need to recognize that by changing the entire structure of their church pictorial directory they were showing a firm reminder that gay marriages are not sanctioned by God, but that God does love all of us, individually, and there is room in the church for all of us.
The convention needs to set directives and its focus on that should include these people who are already struggling with these relatively new issues.
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