By Bob Allen
A lead planner of an upcoming Baptist sexuality conference says the event has nothing to do with disagreement among Cooperative Baptist Fellowship leadership about the CBF’s policy against hiring gays.
David Gushee
|
David Gushee, director of Mercer University’s Center for Theology and Public Life, said in a statement March 21 that CBF leaders approached him more than a year ago about helping to facilitate a conference on sexual ethics.
Gushee said he said yes for two reasons. First, he believed it fit within the confines of the center’s mission to promote “public dialogue, research and constructive solutions related to important public issues to which theology and ethical reflection can make a significant contribution.”
The second reason, Gushee said, is that he is an active member and Sunday school teacher at First Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga., a CBF-affiliated congregation that is host for the [Baptist] Conference on Sexuality and Covenant scheduled April 19-21 and co-sponsored by Mercer and the CBF Resource Center in Atlanta.
The idea for the conference began with a workshop at the 2010 CBF General Assembly titled “A Family Conversation about Same-Sex Orientation.” An overwhelming response convinced CBF leaders there was sufficient interest for a broader conversation, not just about homosexuality but other issues of sexual ethics as well.
Not everyone in CBF welcomes the conversation, however. Some pastors have said that many of the people promoting the conference are academicians or seminary students out of touch with the local church.
Gushee called that criticism unfair. “For me at least, it is precisely because I care about the local congregation of which I am a part that I said yes to what I knew would be a difficult and controversial endeavor to organize a Baptist family conversation about sexuality and covenant,” he said.
“The issues that we are addressing in this conference are issues that exist in our own congregation and in every congregation that is willing to face honestly the struggles that real Christian people and real Christian ministers face today,” Gushee said.
Interest in the sexuality conference intensified after CBF Moderator Colleen Burroughs told the Coordinating Council Feb. 24 that one regret she has as she prepares to leave office is that other more pressing matters kept her from beginning “a conversation” about a CBF hiring policy she criticized as “divisive, unenforceable and probably not Baptist.”
An Associated Baptist Press report of those comments prompted even outsiders like Southern Baptist seminary president Albert Mohler and the Institute on Religion & Democracy to question whether CBF is poised for a shift on homosexuality.
On March 8, CBF Executive Coordinator Daniel Vestal — who was in office 12 years ago when the Coordinating Council adopted a policy not to “allow for the purposeful hiring of a staff person or the sending of a missionary who is a practicing homosexual” — released a statement defending the policy, which was an attempt to keep the issue a matter of discussion for local churches instead of on the floor at national meetings.
“The conference has never been about the CBF hiring policy on homosexuality and will not address that hiring policy, just as it will not address any public policy issue of any type,” Gushee said. “It was planned long before that hiring policy was mentioned recently in the media.”
Gushee said the conference is “for that part of the Baptist family that wants to talk honestly” about realities like the growing populations of Christians who are living together outside of marriage, divorced or widowed and the challenges of reaching out to gays and lesbians who are taught to believe that Christians hate them.
That includes “those who want to bring the sex-only-within-lifetime-heterosexual-marriage ethic into real conversation with these pressing realities of our time,” Gushee said.
“My word to the worried and the critical is this: If you don’t want to participate in this kind of conversation, don’t come,” Gushee said. “But I invite you to instead come and see.”