The fundamentalist church I grew up in once led the charge in kicking a church out of the local association because that church ordained a woman deacon. I had moved away by then, but if I’d been around I would have fought on the side of that church. I would have fought for the church because I don’t disagree with the ordination of women. Yet I would not have claimed Baptist bodies have no right to say to local churches, “You’ve moved beyond the parameters that define who we are.”
Travis Collins
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Ginter Park Baptist Church in Richmond recently decided to ordain an openly gay man. Now some good folks are invoking the autonomy of the local church and the priesthood of believers in opposition to the request by the Virginia Baptist Mission Board’s executive committee that Ginter Park withdraw its membership in the Baptist General Association of Virginia. In my opinion, that invocation of autonomy and priesthood is a misapplication of those two Baptist basics.
Mission Board member Keith Williams (as quoted recently in the Herald) was right: We all draw a line somewhere. Some would draw the line at the ordination of women deacons, or women pastors, or supporting the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, or modes of baptism, or the ordination of a practicing homosexual — or something else. I don’t agree, by the way, with Rev. Williams’s quote that a plea for church autonomy is “absurd.” I simply believe he’s right in saying we all draw our lines, and that we just draw them in different places.
When one church contradicts the values of the larger family, that larger family is probably going to act. BGAV president Mark Croston was correct: The executive committee’s decision “keeps us in line with previous BGAV resolutions on homosexuality.” The executive committee had the right, even the responsibility, to do that.
I’m disappointed that the BGAV was placed in the position of having to deal with this. Yet it is issues like this one, I guess, that shape us. So I encourage us to respect the majority convictions of our Virginia Baptist family, and remain family in doing so.
Travis Collins (tcollins@bonairbaptist.org) is pastor of Bon Air Baptist Church in Richmond.