By Bob Allen
A progressive Baptist organization committed to social and economic justice has launched a program to help churches begin conversations about LGBT inclusion and racial justice.
Last fall the Alliance of Baptists received a $104,400 Arcus Foundation grant to promote LGBT dialogue among Baptists in the South. At the Alliance’s recent annual gathering in Atlanta, leaders unveiled three separate but interrelated projects putting the money to use.
A few weeks ago 14 clergy from both the Alliance and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship received training to provide peer support for ministers thinking about beginning a discussion about how gays and lesbians should fit into the mission of their church. Their role is to coach and counsel fellow pastors in informal settings like phone calls or over coffee.
This fall 10 churches will be invited to send a pastor (preferably the senior pastor), one member over 30 and another member under 30 to a congregational gathering Nov. 8-10 in Cary, N.C. A similar meeting is planned for some time next spring in Dallas.
“The purpose of this is to engage people from churches beginning to think they might possibly have this conversation,” said Cody Sanders, co-chair the Alliance’s Racial Justice and Multiculturalism Community.
Sanders, recently called as pastor of Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Cambridge, Mass., said the intent is not to move the invited churches into a process of becoming welcoming and affirming of gays.
“AWAB (the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists) already does that very well, and they are our partners in this work in the world,” he said. “We are hoping to engage people in ways that just begin to prompt conversation.”
The third project is creation of a racial justice resource for congregations modeled after Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth: A Resource for Congregations on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity initially released in 2000 and updated in 2013.
Sanders said the resource will be “intentionally intersectional,” helping churches to talk about race while taking into account how that issue intersects with other Alliance commitments with regard to gender, sexual orientation and gender identity.
“We felt like if the Alliance produces a resource, to be congruent with our own commitments, we need to take into account the intersectional nature of our identities and multiple ways we participate in oppression, and Arcus really liked that idea,” Sanders said.
The Arcus Foundation, founded by billionaire Jon Stryker, heir to the Stryker Corporation medical supply company, supports two causes: LGBT justice and conservation issues related to the world’s great apes. Past grant recipients include an institute founded by primatologist Jane Goodall.
Sanders said the Alliance was selected because of its potential to create conversations about LGBT issues among Baptist churches in the South. Sanders said participating churches don’t have to belong to the Alliance, and the invitation extends to American Baptist, Cooperative Baptist or even Southern Baptist congregations seeking discernment about their church’s response to issues of racial and sexual justice.
The Alliance, a 123-church network that split from the Southern Baptist Convention in 1987, came out in support of same-sex marriage in 2004. As far back as 1994, Alliance leaders received a task force report on human sexuality encouraging churches “to welcome all persons without regard to sexual orientation or marital status into the life of the congregation and to recognize that there probably are persons of a same-sex orientation already present and involved within the life of most congregations.”
“Part of what I’ve come to believe in some of my experience when I was a pastor, is the congregation is the place to have difficult conversations,” said Mahan Siler, an Alliance founder and former pastor at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, N.C.
In 1992 Siler performed a “blessing” ceremony of a same-sex couple’s marriage-like promise to be caring and monogamous. That, along with a vote by Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, N.C., to license a gay man to the ministry, prompted the Southern Baptist Convention to amend its constitution denying membership to churches which “act to affirm, approve or endorse homosexual behavior.”
“I think as Baptists we have a great advantage over a task force appointed by some upper level of a denomination — a task force on this or that — that filters down and polarizes,” Siler said. “So I think we are taking advantage of congregational commitment and conversation, which is kind of difficult if placed in other ways.”
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