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AMERICAN BAPTIST CHURCH ACCEPTS HOMOSEXUAL PASTORS

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright 2000. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites and cannot be sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our goal is not devotional but is TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. If you desire to receive this type of material on a regular basis, e-mail us, give us your name, address, and the name of the church you are a member of, and request to be placed on the list. Please note that this is not a free service. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and each subscriber is expected to participate. To unsubscribe or to submit a change of address, send your name and the request to fbns@wayoflife.org. This is not an automated list. Changes in the database often require two to four days to activate. Some of these articles are from O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 17th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr.  Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site -- http://www.wayoflife.org. The End Times Apostasy Online Database is also located at this site.]

June 27, 2000 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - At its convention in Salt Lake City in May, the Northwest region of the American Baptist Church voted against banishing two Seattle churches that accept homosexual pastors and welcome practicing homosexuals as members. The vote was 161 in favor and 92 against.

The churches are Seattle First Baptist and University Baptist. The latter is pastored by a woman, Anne Hall, and a homosexual male, Tim Phillips.

The American Baptist Churches in the Northwest also voted to start a two-year process to separate these churches from those which "believe homosexuality is incompatible with Christianity." This will be accomplished by joining the Seattle churches with homosexual congregations from other regions or by setting up a new regional alliance of homosexual churches within the American Baptist Church in the Northwest. Instead of disciplining and separating from those who are openly disobeying the Bible by accepting homosexuality, the American Baptist Church is playing politics to find a way to maintain harmony at all cost. This is apostasy.

"Rev." Daniel Weiss, general secretary of the American Baptist Church U.S.A., said in an interview that the homosexual issue is "not at the central core of the Christian faith." He said: "When you stop to think of the millions of people in the world who have things done to them, who are hungry or who are exploited by other people, why would you get all bent out of shape and worry about people who are doing what they want with each other?" ("Two Baptist churches that welcome gays escape expulsion," Seattle Times, May 21, 2000).

Weiss is very confused. The Bible certainly gets "bent out of shape" about people who do wicked things with each other, regardless of whether or not it is consensual.

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination" (Lev. 18:22).

"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient" (Romans 1:26-28).

"I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators: Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world. But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat. For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within? But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person" (1 Corinthians 5:9-13).