I’ve compiled a list of Baptist-related stories in the news this past week.
Check ‘em out:
The town of Whitman, Massachusetts has made the news after it sent a local Baptist church its first quarterly property tax bill for nearly $2,500. The 188-year-old FBC Whitman closed last year and has been up for sale since then. City officials deemed the non-profit church to have become a taxable asset.
Ken Starr, president of Baylor University, talks immigration reform and discusses debates over the 14th Amendment and the controversial Arizona law with Greta VanSustren of Fox News. Starr gives a good plug for Baylor too.
Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, celebrates what he sees as a 50-year War for Inerrancy. Meanwhile evangelical theologian Roger Olson of Baylor University’s Truett Seminary has penned a post titled Why Inerrancy Doesn’t Matter.
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship has hired James Smith, president of the Missouri Baptist Foundation, as the new president of the CBF Foundation. And CBF Executive-Coordinator Daniel Vestal reflects on the 20-year history of the Baptist group he had led since 1996.
Pilgrim Baptist Church, a congregation located in the Southside of Chicago whose sanctuary was destroyed in a 2006 fire, is demanding 1 million bucks in grant money that disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich once promised. The church has filed a lawsuit asking a judge to order the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Development to pay up. Pilgrim Baptist is described as the church that birthed gospel music.
Talking Points Memo points out that in addition to speaking out against the right of Muslims to build a Cultural Center/Mosque near Ground Zero, SBC ethics guru Richard Land is serves as a member of the federally created United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. In that position, Land’s job is to press for a U.S. foreign policy that promotes religious freedom around the world.
Over 3,000 people attended the funeral of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens at Anchorage Baptist Temple. Anchorage Baptist Temple is an independent Baptist church. According to several websites, Senator Stevens was an Episcopalian.
A new play in Orange County, California explores life as a gay Southern Baptist teen. It is titled Southern Baptist Sissies.
Videos have surfaced of former Liberty Baptist Seminary Dean Ergun Caner lying to Marines about growing up as a jihadist.
The 7.5 million member National Baptist Convention U.S.A. is at the center of an insurance lawsuit filed recently in federal court.
A Canadian Baptist scholar talks about his opposition to contraception in an interesting Q&A.
Baptists and Methodists have been fighting one another in Memphis over a proposal to build a competing Methodist hospital in close proximity to an existing Baptist one. After a ruling in favor of the Methodists, the Baptists have conceded defeat!
Over at Blog from the Capital, Don Byrd of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty asks whether government officials should offer an opinion about the controversial proposed mosque in Manhattan.
A Connecticut newspaper has an interesting story about the ministries of a growing Hispanic Baptist congregation in New London.
Denny Burk, Dean of Boyce College at Southern Seminary, points to a fascinating new article in the online academic journal Themelios titled “Why Evangelicals Should Not Heed Brian McLaren: How the New Testament Requires Evangelicals to Render A Judgment on the Moral Status of Homosexuality.”
Baylor University history professor Barry Hankins has an interview with U.S. News & World Report about the ongoing culture wars and his new book Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars.
A contributor to the Florida news website Lakeland Local writes “it’s clear that the Southern Baptist Convention, as an institution, is incapable of shame.”
TIME magazine covers the controversy swirling around plans to build an Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The planned site is a 15-acre field located next to a Southern Baptist church.
An ordained American Baptist minister who serves First Baptist Church of Meriden, Connecticut argues that the influential Christian Right organization Family Research Council “uses the pro-life issue as a foil, harming itself and the cause in the process…tarnish[ing] the image of Christ.”
I am not here to state who is going to hell or who is righteous or not. I am here to ask this question: why are homosexuals so bent on calling what they want “marriage”? First, from its origin, marriage does not reflect the model that the homosexual community is presenting—-the same gender being joined as life partners. Second, the concept of “marriage” is a biblical endeavor whose standard is set with the first man and woman.
Marriage is meant to reflect the relationship between GOD and his creation; displaying the love, provision and interaction that He communicates along with man’s role as expected to show gratitude as well as reciprocating love and interaction is only part of what’s to be mirrored. Also, in a marriage, commonly, it is rightfully assumed that a couple will reproduce or “procreate” which furthers this reflection of the marriage mirroring GOD’s dealings with man whereas GOD “creates”. Even in a case where a man and a woman are joined and cannot (whether the problem lies in the man or the woman physically) procreate it at least has the appearance of the possibility of procreation.
The pretentious petition for “same sex marriage” is an attempt to make a mockery of faith and of its essence is to Edge God Out! Marriage holds for mankind a reminder that GOD is a Great Creator, in fact, the Creator of all things. Every time a child is born it is a reminder of the awesomeness of creation. Life is first in the man delivered to the woman for her to carry for a hopeful 9 months. This is why we call GOD a “He”, not because He has gender in His Spirit form but because He “is the first cause of a thing”. A homosexual couple cannot represent this possibility which is why it would be redefining “marriage” to ultimately become something that is not Marriage at all.
It is evident to me that the attempt of the homosexual community is indeed pretentious. I firmly believe that those for “same sex marriage” have set out to “DESTIGMATIZE” homosexuality and are on a quest to normalize its lifestyle. In doing this they are doing to others what they don’t appreciate having done to them; they are disregarding the faith, convictions and a wholesome societal paradigm for a selfish behavioral cause AS homosexuality is a BEHAVIOR and not an ETHNICITY. Though I am not for same sex unions at all, I ask, why not call it something else if these attempts to legalize such unions have no ulterior motives?
We must continue to argue from a faith perspective but we need to become more wise than “blunt”. Simply saying “Adam & Eve and not Adam & Steve” doesn’t cut it anymore.
We must take the position to meanings and definitions.
Marriage by definition means to take two separate and complimenting components and merging or blending them. Testosterone and testosterone don’t merge neither do they compliment one another. A lamp isn’t complimented by a lamp but by a bulb. A plug isn’t complimented by a plug but by a socket outlet. To compliment something is to bring something to the table that the first component does not possess of its own; this is illustrated when you try to connect “north and north” or “south and south” poles of a magnet-it doesn’t work!
If you were covered with necklaces and you added another necklace there would be no complimenting effect. But if you have on a plain black turtleneck sweater and you add something ornamental (something different) then you have complimented the sweater, right?
What the homosexual community is purposing is to change the very “generic” definition of marriage whether from a biblical or none biblical perspective. So then, it cannot [from a terminological standpoint] be consider marriage at all by reason of the noncomplimenting components that are attempted to be joined.
P.S. Let’s stop calling it “Gay” which means Happy and call it as it is “homosexuality”.
Find Article at this link: http://www.nwitimes.com/lifestyles/article_823bcc05-4d11-5377-8331-bc4246448c8b.html