c. 2003 Religion News Service
Tennessee Baptist Convention Ends Ties to Church With Lesbian Minister
(RNS) Officials of the Tennessee Baptist Convention have ended its relationship with a Nashville church after the congregation called a lesbian minister to be its associate pastor.
The convention’s executive board held a special meeting May 30 during which it voted unanimously on the recommendation, reported the Baptist & Reflector, the official news journal of the state convention of Southern Baptists.
“In light of our different visions of faith and practice, and after much prayer and dialogue with the leadership of Glendale Baptist Church, the Executive Board of the Tennessee Baptist Convention acts to dissolve its relationship with Glendale Baptist Church,” the recommendation read.
April Baker, the lesbian minister, was appointed in May 2002.
In January, convention Executive Director James Porch said, “A church’s decision … to employ a staff member whose sexual orientation is contrary to biblical teaching would not be in harmony with the principles of the Tennessee Baptist Convention.”
Board members shared their statement of recommendation with the church before their vote and the congregation approved it.
In a Wednesday (June 4) statement responding to the action, the 52-year-old congregation said, “We at Glendale Baptist Church appreciate the prayer and dialogue with representatives of the Executive Board of the Tennessee Baptist Convention and accept the decision of the Executive Board to dissolve our relationship.”
The church described itself as one that seeks to be a “caring community of equality and grace” and welcomes “all persons to worship with us, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation.”
_ Adelle M. Banks
Faith-Based Groups Charter More Than a Third of New Credit Unions
(RNS) Faith-based organizations have chartered almost 40 percent of new credit unions in the last three years, the National Credit Union Administration Board reports.
Dennis Dollar, chairman of the board, said 13, or 39 percent, of the 33 new federally chartered or federal-insured credit unions formed since January 2000 have been chartered by faith-based organizations.
“The number of newly chartered credit unions with a faith-based field of membership is a tangible example of the response we are receiving from our efforts to encourage more new charters and greater use of the credit union model by faith-based organizations who consider financial empowerment to be a part of their mission,” said Dollar in an address in Memphis, Tenn., on Wednesday (June 4).
He spoke to the National Faith-Based Credit Union Conference, a fifth annual event sponsored by the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions.
In 2001, the board announced it was cooperating on an initiative with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to encourage expansion of faith-based credit union services.
There are currently 443 federally chartered faith-based credit unions in the country. They have assets of $2.69 billion nationwide.
The National Credit Union Administration Board is the independent federal agency that supervises and charters federal credit unions.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Newspaper Says New Bishop Lived Openly With Gay Partner
LONDON (RNS) A British newspaper reported Friday (June 6) that a newly appointed bishop in the Church of England has been living with his gay partner for more than 25 years, with the knowledge and support of church leaders.
The Daily Telegraph reprinted portions of a 1998 speech by Bishop Jeffrey John, a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Oxford. John made the remarks to an Affirming Catholicism conference in York.
“From the time I was a teenager most (Anglo-)Catholic clergy would say privately that, if you were not celibate, you should avoid promiscuity, find a partner, and live as discreetly as you could,” the paper quotes John as having said.
“By the time I was at theological college in the mid-1970s the staff took a very supportive line. When I began the relationship I am in, I went along to the principal to own up and asked if I should leave. To my astonishment and joy he congratulated me.”
The revelation also involves one of the church’s most senior leaders, Archbishop of York David Hope, who was the principal of the Oxford seminary where John was ordained in 1979.
“When I informed my diocesan bishop, the response was equally kind and supportive,” the Telegraph continued. “He thanked me for being honest with him and certainly saw no bar to my being ordained.”
John said his relationship was openly acknowledged within the “clerical club” and that gay relationships “were entirely normal, and still are.”
Hope, in a statement, said the conversation was private and should remain private. “This account refers to a conversation dating back some three decades, and my own recollection of it is certainly rather different from that reported,” he said in a statement.
Evangelicals in the Diocese of Oxford protested to Bishop Richard Harries over the John appointment because of his public advocacy of gay rights. In a confidential letter, Harries defended the appointment and said John would be loyal to current teaching and was practicing sexual abstinence.
The revelation is likely to increase pressure on the church’s top leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who has voiced support for gay relationships but has also vowed to uphold church teaching against homosexual acts.
_ Robert Nowell
Theologians Ask Orthodox to Return to the World Council of Churches
(RNS) A group of Orthodox and Protestant theologians and church leaders has appealed to the Orthodox churches in Bulgaria and Georgia to return to membership in the World Council of Churches.
The two Orthodox denominations left the WCC in 1998, climaxing several decades of growing tensions between Orthodox and Protestant churches in the international ecumenical body. The Orthodox churches felt they were treated unfairly in the Protestant-dominated body and objected to the liberal theology they saw being imposed on the WCC by North American and European Protestants.
A special WCC commission has been studying the issues raised by Orthodox churches.
The new appeal grew out of a symposium organized by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
The theologians and religious leaders said that as a result of the WCC study, there are “new possibilities for taking seriously and dealing responsibly with Orthodox.”
It said that while “the path of inter-Christian dialogue is difficult … there is no alternative to dialogue.”
Archbishop Christodoulos, archbishop of Athens and all Greece, told the symposium that “in spite of the negative experience we (Orthodox) have acquired all these years, we view the future of the theological dialogues, and generally our collaboration with our non-Orthodox brothers and sisters, with optimism.”
Christodoulos said the special WCC commission studying Orthodox participation in the council “created hopes that as Orthodox we can have an equal voice with the Protestants.”
The WCC has 342 member churches in more than 100 countries.
_ David E. Anderson
Prelate Calls for Europe’s Constitution to Recognize Christianity
LONDON (RNS) The failure of the preamble to the draft constitution for the European Union to mention Europe’s Christian heritage has been described as “an act of cultural vandalism” by Roman Catholic Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow, Scotland.
Writing in The Herald, the Glasgow daily newspaper, Friday (June 6), the archbishop noted that the preamble referred to “the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe” nourished “first by the civilizations of Greece and Rome” and “later by philosophical currents of the Enlightenment.”
It was what was missing that concerned Conti _ “the yawning historical and philosophical vacuum between the end of the Greco-Roman influence and the beginning of the Enlightenment.”
Conti joined a debate that has been raging fiercely across Europe as politicians seek to create a constitution for the European Union, at times dividing erstwhile allies on other issues.
“This is no minor omission,” Conti wrote. “It is an extraordinary attempt to write the name of Christ and the Christian church out of the consciousness of the new Europe. As such it is a profoundly dishonest reworking of history.”
_ Robert Nowell
Quote of the Day: The Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
(RNS) “It is very clear that without President Bush’s leadership and the leadership of the United States, the road map could not be the way to peace.”
_ The Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in comments after a May 27 meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. He was quoted by the ELCA News Service.
DEA END RNS
