The fact that this is even up for discussion, shows how much things have changed in this culture.
We are well on the way to normalizing homosexual marriage in our civil laws.
So now, pressures will be brought to bear to allow homosexual marriage in churches.
It’s predictable that splits within denominations will happen over this issue. As I understand it, in the Southern Baptist Convention, individual churches decided to join, or decide to leave. Unfortunately some congregations will try to prove how liberal they are, and leave the convention.
It puts more pressure on all of us as individuals as well, to make sure our local churches retain the traditional doctrines on marriage and family . We as individuals may find that we have to leave our long time church homes, if our churches decide to normalize homosexuality. We may all have to make such a choice.
Yes, I’ve thought about that, but the day my church stops adhering to biblical teaching, is the day I walk. I might end up in a basement with a handful of other believers, but I will NOT conform, I will stick with the word of God, at any cost.
Yes correct. As someone raised within the SBC I was taught that. Each church is a self governing commonwealth. It just has to endorse basic beliefs of Biblical Innerantcy to be SBC. SBC membership means being able to be part of a large retirement fund and other resource pooling arrangements. Churches join and leave the SBC all the time. The Jimmy Carter baptists have set up something called the ‘Cooperative baptists Convention’ which would not, i suspect be uncomfortable with a ‘gay friendly’ agenda. The Baptist church my parents were members of from its founding decided (its in the Va suburbs of DC) to leave the SBC and become a Carter Baptist church. This gay acceptance stuff has been around in the shadows in the SBC for decades. A recent grad of the seminary in Richmond and the son of prominent members of my folks church preached a sermon there about 1980 where he used Aeosopian language but clearly was endorsing queerdom as a ‘lifestyle’. Few caught the inference. My mother did and let his mother know what she thought of it. This guy dumped the ministry in a couple years and went to being an ‘investment adviser’.