[mrsmel]

I must give credit where credit is due, to the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention (I am a fundamentalist independent Baptist). They recently came out with a strong and unequivocal stance against the sodomite agenda, including a call for civil disobedience if the SC rulings in any way interfere with religious freedom and the liberty of conscience. After the swing of the SBC in 70s and 80s towards the left, the pendulum appears to be swinging back-at any rate, it's the strongest stance I've heard put forward by a Christian denomination or large Christian group. (Independent Baptist churches are, well, independent as far as formal organisation, hierarchy, that kind of thing, plus being fundamentalists, we've never put much stock in the political process as far as getting involved as a group. Falwell was a fundamentalist-turned-evangelical by the time he got involved with the Moral Majority. The fundamentalists steered clear, because we really mean that “separatism” thing, as far as the church getting publicly politically involved as a church-plus, as I said, we are a more-or-less loose coalition of churches who share doctrine, and practice for the most part, and would be difficult to organise for political purposes, if we did believe in it. But it has never even been needed to be said, by fundamentalists, that we'll practice civil disobedience under those circumstances, it is taken for granted).

[epow]

I must give credit where credit is due, to the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention

My wife and I gave up on the SBC in the early 1960's when the liberal faction was taking over, and we joined a relatively small independent Baptist church whose pastor was a graduate of Columbia Bible College in Columbia, SC, a 4-year private college that has sent literally thousands of missionaries to every corner of the globe. But when my wife and I retired we moved away from my over-run homeland in Florida and we now live in the cool and uncrowded north GA mountains.

I said all that to preface this. The first couple of years up here we attended several Southern Baptist churches in and around this small town simply because there was no independent Baptist church within practical driving distance. However, we eventually settled on and joined one very fundamentalist Southern Baptist Church only a few miles away from our house, and we couldn't be happier than we are now with our decision.

No, I don't agree 100% with the SBC on some issues even though it has pulled itself out of the clutches of the liberal revisionists who took over the denomination all those decades ago. But it's still much closer to what we believe is the proper mission of today's bible- believing churches. We chose this church at a time when most of the other major protestant denominations range from a slight leaning toward modernistic interpretation of scripture all the way down to outright apostasy and rejection of biblical doctrines, including divine inspiration of holy scripture and the virgin birth of Christ.

All that's probably a lot more than you wanted to know about our quest through some of north GA's Baptist churches. But I began this overlong post intending to take up for the SBC as it is today, and how it has returned back to the doctrines and practices of the old timey Baptist Churches that my great and great-great grandfathers founded all over south FLorida when they came home after the civil war.