Last week at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly meeting in Memphis, Chuck Poole (Northmister Baptist, Jackson, Miss.) gave several short interpretations of the theme. In one, he spoke of his own journey in faith and understanding. He expressed the value of women in ministry in this way (paraphrasing, but only very slightly): “If Baptists are not going to ordain women, they need to stop baptizing girls.”

I wonder what SBC would do with a transgendered ordained person? Perhaps along with “once saved, always saved” there would be “once male, always male” or “once female, always female.”

I will be interested to see how discussions proceed as Calvary tries to communally discern what denominational affiliations say about us as an individual church - and what they *ought* to say.

Holleyanne

Hi Every body

Yes it is. Wish it cound be like the American Baptist. But what I hear that if there any change is only thing is… All the women teacher, staff and more stop do the help in the church. Let see what changes will be made in the SBC.

Well I don’t beleave there statment about women. But I got to go to a Southern Baptist Church like FBC of Richmond. Alot of people. Mouth openning moment. WoW! I gone to Captial Hill Baptist Church DC alot of people on there evening service. Alot of people but not my cup of tea. Podcasting with Tabernacle Baptist Church‎ Richmond every Sunday afternoon.

Sometime it like a tag team at my past church and now church. I wish we as a fellowship be more fellowship. Take some of the time pass and bring it in today. Or are we a church on ower own. Sometime it just… can what something it can never happen. Round ?? let do it again and play the old tune that hear so well but not hear so well.

Have a good week everyone.
Will Short

Tim

During my graduate school years at the University of Missouri, I recall writing a paper entitled “Jesus Christ as a Community Organizer.” Much more recently, I’ve been known to write that if Jesus Christ was alive in these times, acting and speaking as he allegedly did in his young adulthood, he would be labelled by many in the United States of America as a left wing zealot, a communist. He would have been condemned for those socialist beliefs by the very church and its various conservative denominations and sects which tout their christianity (small “c” intentional) in strident, intrusive and blatantly biased terms.

Having been raised as a Methodist, I am very much aware as to why I attended any event in that church during my adolescance: The MYF group was where most of the girls I liked attended, and our basketball team (YMCA league) was excellent.

I was a boy scout in two troops - one sponsored by a Baptist Church and the other by the Unitarian Church. My grandfather was a Unitarian and my grandmother (guardian) was a Methodist-neither was particularly active in churches, and religion was only one aspect of the scouting movement back in the 1950s.

I minored in history in undergraduate school, and took several courses in religion for the minor. My view of contemporary, conservative Christianity is that the religion denies its roots which did not originate with the Old Testament but predate those stories. More, today’s conservative Christianity ignores the
origin(s) of the fundamental beliefs which emerged from several different cultures and societies long before Christ was born and lived.

Finally, I am appalled by the warring by humans in the name of religions, which leads me to believe merely that God was a great idea, but we humans have so bastardized the beliefs as to render the idea unrealistic and hypicritical. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has stated, it is the fundamentalists in the world who pose the greatest threat to humankind. Today’s expressions of fundamentalism both in the United States and in the Middle East are testament to Kennedy’s comment, in my opinion.

I write this not knowing if anyone will read it, and whoever reads this is invited to visit my blog and share thoughts there.
Respectfully,
Samcvt

Pruning is indeed hard and I am reminded again of the words of Charles Spurgeon: “The precept to avoid anxious care is earnestly inculcated by our Saviour … and it is one which cannot be neglected without involving transgression: for the very essence of anxious care is the imagining that we are wiser than God …”