By Bob Allen
The Kentucky Baptist Convention voted Nov. 11 to sever ties with a historic Louisville church which describes itself as welcoming and affirming of homosexuality.
Messengers at the 2014 KBC annual meeting in Bowling Green voted overwhelmingly in favor of a credential committee recommendation to sever ties with Crescent Hill Baptist Church after the church posted on its website it would consider performing same-sex weddings.
Greg Faulls, vice chairman of the KBC’s committee on credentials who presented the motion to disfellowship, said Kentucky Baptists “are not picking on one sin over another,” but they “call sin ‘sin’ rather than choosing to affirm it.”
Crescent Hill Pastor Jason Crosby said the congregation made the decision after prayer, study and firsthand experience with individuals who profess Christianity while living in a committed same-sex relationship.
“We are Bible-led Kentucky Baptists to whom God has revealed a different perspective on LGBT individuals to us rather than to you, I suspect, yet we still want to be with you,” said Crosby, a third-generation Baptist preacher.
Faulls, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Owensboro, however, said Kentucky Baptists love homosexuals “too much to allow them live in danger of God’s judgment without preaching the truth as is detailed in Scripture.”
Faulls said Crescent Hill’s “affirmation of the sin of homosexuality” is inconsistent with the convention’s purpose of missions and evangelism.
For many years Crescent Hill, which dedicated its current sanctuary in 1926 to coincide with the opening of a new campus for neighboring Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, functioned as the “seminary church” because of its large percentage of members who were at the seminary as faculty, staff or students.
That all changed after the “conservative resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention shifted the tone of theological education from modern critical studies common in mainline Protestantism to an “inerrancy” position presuming that the Bible is literally true.
Today Crescent Hill is a smaller and much more diverse congregation with members from various races, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation and worldview. About one third of the congregation is comprised of refugees and immigrants.
Most of the foreign-born members are from Burma, also known as Myanmar, resettled from refugee camps in Thailand to the United States.
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