FALLS CHURCH, Va. (ABP) — The organization sponsoring an upcoming historic pan-Baptist gathering has told two gay-friendly Baptist groups they cannot participate in an official capacity.
The North American Baptist Fellowship, under whose auspices next year's “Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant” is being held, has informed the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists and the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America that they cannot join NABF. Therefore, they cannot be official participants in the event.
“This is not a rejection of either organization or the people in those organization[s],” wrote Alan Stanford, general secretary of the NABF, in a July 18 e-mail alerting leaders of the two groups to NABF's decision. “[I]t is a recognition that we can not hold together the large coalition of Baptists needed to create a new Baptist voice in North America and address the issue of sexual orientation at the same time. We ask for your forbearance and understanding.”
The event is scheduled for early 2008 in Atlanta. It is designed to bring together as many different Baptist denominational bodies in North America as possible, including those of Southern Baptist, American Baptist and African-American Baptist heritage. Organizers — who include former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — have said they hope to unite an ideologically diverse array of Baptists around the common causes of promoting evangelism, fighting poverty and supporting religious freedom.
But Ken Pennings, executive director of the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, said organizers are ignoring one of the biggest social-justice issues by avoiding the controversial topic of sexuality and the church.
“This sort of thing ought not to go on in Christ's church,” he said in an e-mail responding to Stanford. “Here we are at a critical juncture when Baptists of all stripes are coming together to take a strong stand for justice for all of God's children, and the very people in American society being scapegoated and marginalized the most … are not going to be invited to participate.”
To become official sponsors of the celebration, the organizations would have had to become affiliates of the NABF, which is comprised of the denominational bodies in the United States and Canada that belong to the Baptist World Alliance, as well as those groups affiliated with them.
In a July 24 telephone interview, Stanford said inviting groups with explicitly pro-gay stances — AWAB is made up of gay-friendly congregations and BPFNA counts supporting gay rights as a justice issue — would imply changing the terms of the meeting. That could cause an already fragile coalition to unravel, he said.
“We agreed that we would focus on those things that there was broad agreement about, and there is not broad agreement on this subject,” Stanford said. “So, while everyone thinks that [sexuality] is a topic of grave concern — it is a topic that needs lots of discussion and prayer — it was not a part of the stated agenda from the beginning. And so I think a lot of the North American [Baptist] leaders thought that his would be changing the agreed-upon terms.”
But Pennings said such an attitude betrays the purpose and name of the celebration itself. “This really is more like the Old Covenant than the New Covenant,” he said July 23. “Why would we want to participate in this? There's nothing new about this; it's the same old exclusion.”
The criticism of the event from the left is new, but organizers of the celebration have already received extensive criticism from the right. Some leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention — also not invited to participate in an official capacity because it is no longer a member body of the NABF or the BWA — have characterized the event as excluding conservatives. Others have cited Carter and Clinton's involvement in the event as simply a way to drum up Baptist support for Democrats, even though organizers have also enlisted prominent Baptist Republicans as speakers.
Although BPFNA and AWAB will not be official participants in the celebration, individual members and participating churches of both groups will. Both Pennings and Evelyn Hanneman, the Peace Fellowship's interim director, noted that the vast majority of their partner congregations are affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA or the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Both groups are member bodies of NABF and BWA.
“In fact, three Baptist Peace Fellowship members are part of a planning committee” for the celebration, Hanneman said. “So, they're interested in keeping us off the table for our stance on LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] issues, and yet we're already at the table in some ways.”
Hanneman said BPFNA would likely try to hold an auxiliary event during the celebration to discuss gay rights and other peace and justice issues.
Pennings said he initially considered recommending that AWAB supporters protest the celebration but now thinks the organization will simply encourage its supporters to go to the event and call subtle attention to the issue of sexuality in Baptist life. AWAB leaders will likely “urge our constituency to show up in full strength … and we'll wear our rainbow stoles and our buttons, and we'll be a visible witness there,” he said.
Stanford said he hopes all interested in bringing Baptists together will support the covenant celebration, recognizing that “the most significant thing is that we have a vast diversity, especially the Anglo and the African-American groups that have never worked together in any significant way.”
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