Racism and health reform opposition: Protesters scream ‘n****r’ at black congressman

William Douglas of McClatchy Newspapers reports:

Demonstrators outside the U.S. Capitol, angry over the proposed health care bill, shouted “nigger” Saturday at U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia congressman and civil rights icon who was nearly beaten to death during an Alabama march in the 1960s.

Chad Pergram of FOXNews.com reports:

Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Andre Carson, D-Ind., both members of the Congressional Black Caucus, allege that a group of protesters hollered at them and called them the N-word.

Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports:

Tea partiers and other anti-health care activists are known to get rowdy, but today’s protest on Capitol Hill–the day before the House is set to vote on historic health care legislation–went beyond the usual chanting and controversial signs, and veered into ugly bigotry and intimidation.

Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Andre Carson (D-IN) related a particularly jarring encounter with a large crowd of protesters screaming “kill the bill”… and punctuating their chants with the word “nigger.”

Standing next to Lewis, emerging from a Democratic caucus meeting with President Obama, Carson said people in the crowd yelled, “kill the bill and then the N-word” several times, while he and Lewis were exiting the Canon House office building.

“People have been just downright mean,” Lewis added.

Underlying tensions, unmasked.

Addendum

Caught!

Disfellowship churches which through silence foster and compound sex abuse by clergy

Christa Brown points to the applicable passage in the Baptist Faith and Message:

We should work to provide for the orphaned, the needy, the abused, the aged, the helpless, and the sick.

There can be denominational consequences, after all? That does not mean it is acceptable to fail to support the victims of abuse in your own church, or silently send abusive pastors along to other churches, does it? Or is the passage merely advisory so that continued negligence is acceptable?

Health reform looks optimistic

Pro-life may win and health reform pass, thanks in no small part to the Women Religious (Catholic nuns), the Catholic Health Association and others who broke with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Perhaps their faith should have been prediction enough. Looking back, though, Nate Silver was very optimistic at midweek.

In the first minutes of this day, the Washington Post and others reported House member shifts into the “yes” column. Similarly, Talking Points Memo, which does this sort of thing very well, found a late change in momentum toward passage as votes changed, one after another, to “yes.”

Statements like this by Rep. Dale E. Kildee, an anti-abortion Democrat from Michigan after he decided to support the Senate bill, presaged it all:

I will be 81 years old in September. Certainly at this point in my life, I’m not going to change my mind and support abortion, and I’m not going to risk my eternal salvation.

The nature and strategies of the opposition matter too. Like the Southern Baptist Convention’s chief political operative, Richard Land, who again weighed in against health reform. He sent a variation on his earlier error-ridden proclamation in a letter to Republican leaders, and given his gift for sowing confusion about what he means, gave them nothing like a counterbalance for the emergent support.

Who once believed the clerical sexual abuse crisis was an anti-Catholic media campaign?

Before he became Pope Benedict XVI, there was a time when Ratzinger saw the sexual abuse crisis as an anti-Catholic media campaign. John L. Allen Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter wrote this week:

Ratzinger’s attitude toward the crisis at the time can perhaps best be gauged from comments he made on November 30, 2002, during an appearance in Murcia, Spain, at a conference organized by the Catholic University of St. Anthony. During a Q&A session after his talk, Ratzinger was asked: “This past year has been difficult for Catholics, given the space dedicated by the media to scandals attributed to priests. There is talk of a campaign against the church. What do you think?

“This was Ratzinger’s reply:

In the church, priests are also sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower. In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than one percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type. The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information or to the statistical objectivity of the facts. Therefore, one comes to the conclusion that it is intentional, manipulated, that there is a desire to discredit the church.

Making Ratzinger’s defensive tone all the more striking, his comments came after a summit between Vatican officials and American cardinals, as well as officers of the bishops’ conference, in April 2002 to discuss the American crisis, a meeting in which Ratzinger participated.

For the record, in claiming “less than one percent” of priests were guilty, Ratzinger was relying on an analysis by writer Philip Jenkins, published in the mid-1990s, of the Chicago archdiocese. In the end, the U.S. bishops’ own study concluded that accusations have been lodged against 4.3 percent of diocesan priests over the last 50 years, and some critics regard even that total as under-reported.

Of course he changed his mind, Allen explains. Read the entire piece here.

Southern Baptist autonomy (not for women in the pulpit: for predators)

Put a woman in the pulpit and the ax of Southern Baptist discipline falls. The Georgia Baptist Convention is preparing to disfellowship Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta because the Reverend Mimi Walker is a co-pastor there. While critics write the South Carolina Baptist Courier to abjure Eau Claire Baptist Church for calling Kelly Dickerson Strum to be co-pastor, one suggesting that church discipline is in order.

Yet amid the recurrent revelations of Southern Baptist pastoral sexual abuse, again documented by Christa Brown, no equivalent scripture-laced outpourings about applying the force of denominational discipline to the protection of the young from sexual wolves in Baptist clerical cloth. Or disfellowship of churches which ship predators of the cloth along to other congregations without a word of warning.

Oh no. Policy is clear: Women in the pulpit are a danger to the entire denomination. As are homosexuals welcomed into the pews. For the proliferation of predators, however, Southern Baptist Churches are autonomous. No denominational consequence for negligence.

Another Southern Baptist church calls a woman pastor & debate ensues

Debated has erupted in the South Carolina Baptist Courier, over the decision of Columbia’s Eau Claire Baptist Church to call Kelly Dickerson Strum to be co-pastor.

Unlike Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., with which the Georgia Baptist Convention is set to cut ties over Mimi Walker’s role as pastor, this appointment has apparently not invoked formal exception.

The debate in the letters section of the South Carolina’s Southern Baptist state newspaper has taken what has become an almost classical form, however, beginning with an objection to the announced calling.

Mark R. Krieger of Easley, citing the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M) and 1 Timothy 2:12; 3:1, writes:

After my study, I found there is no biblical support for women to be ordained as a pastor of a New Testament church. As our Baptist Faith and Message puts it, men and women have gifts for service in the church, but pastor is not one of those women are gifted for.

Richard E. Moore of Columbia, a member of Eau Claire Baptist, responds with both an appeal to church autonomy and a personal example:

In addition to the Scripture referenced by Mr. Krieger, I would like to share some other verses: Proverbs 3:6, Philippians 4:13, 2 Corinthians 3:3, Matthew 28:19-20 and, probably most on point, Galatians 3:28 and Acts 2:17. Having two small granddaughters of my own, it saddens me to think of young women being taught that these verses might apply only to males. Throughout the history of Christianity there are examples of how the Bible has been used to justify discrimination of one kind or another against our fellow human beings. We all know that all human beings are made in God’s image and that, as Christians, we all become children of God, but maybe Fred Craddock was correct when he wrote that “learning what we already know is painfully difficult.”

Ray Elder of Ridgeland then comes with an ax:

The autonomy of the local church has become a “trump card,” allowing any given congregation to do as it pleases with little or no accountability to the Scripture. The New Testament concept of autonomy is summed up in The Baptist Faith and Message as it states:

“A New Testament church of the Lord Jesus Christ is an autonomous local congregation of baptized believers ‘governed by His laws ‘” (Article VI).

Autonomy in the local church never trumps accountability to the Scriptures!

Although associations had no official authority over the church in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, local churches were held accountable to the Scriptures by the associations through censorship from participation. (See Mark Dever, “Polity,” Nine Marks Ministries, 2001). Where there is a clear violation of Scripture, associations and conventions are responsible to hold churches accountable to the Scriptures to protect the integrity of the body, which was the New Testament pattern. The head of the church, the Lord Jesus Christ, might well have an ax to grind with the church today concerning the autonomy of the local church versus accountability to the Scriptures.

The Prince of Peace with an ax? The scripture doesn’t lead Southern Baptists like Wade Burleson to that conclusion.

Yet it is the ax of inquisitional disfellowshipping that typically falls next, with enforcement of the BF&M 2000 as a creed.

After much Batholicism, some local Southern Baptist association, state convention and/or the SBC is one vigorously innovative church less than it was before.

Is that Savonarola burning I smell, or merely the Southern Baptist Convention, smoldering?

Addendum

Cody Sanders, a doctoral student at Texas Christian University’s Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, writes:

Our ever-narrowing confessions of faith, enforcement of theological homogeneity and proliferation of churches expelled from denominational and associational bodies seem to suggest that the commitments that have historically set us apart as Baptists don’t really matter to us anyway.

Why are the abused angry with Pope Benedict XVI?

Andrew Sullivan gives an example in plain English.

CHA president’s pro-life view of health reform

Sr. Carol Keehan, DC, Catholic Health Association president, addresses health reform concerns, not just for Catholics but also for anyone who is pro-life:

Yawn … Most church Web sites ineffective (sky falls, stars go dark, church sites unchanged)

In the world of uh huh, a company called Endis has, the Associated Baptist Press tells us, conducted a survey which found that most church Web sites are uninteractive brochureware which do little or nothing in the way of outreach.

Add opaque and puzzling to their critique. Frustration as a form of digital evangelism, you might say. Whereas others are sleeping pill evangelism. If putting site visitors to sleep wins converts, those church sites are da bomb.

As we warned you, however, no revelations here.

Deja vu: BGCT takes a step back from Royal Lane Baptist Church

Officials of the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) on Wednesday asked 500-member Royal Lane Baptist Church of North Dallas “to remove the partnership with the BGCT from any of its church’s publications” until questions regarding the church’s apparent tolerance for homosexual members are resolved. BGCT officials also said they would hold in escrow any funds received from the church while the issue is being resolved.

As of this writing, the church Web site does not link to BGCT as a ministry partner.

Their About Us section does still conclude:

Royal Lane is an ecumenical Baptist congregation affiliated with The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and The Baptist General Convention of Texas.

Royal Lane’s membership “includes BGCT employees and a BGCT executive board member. BGCT employees must belong to an affiliated church, so a split with Royal Lane could force some to choose between workplace and worship place,” the Dallas Morning News reported.

The issue was raised recently when the church’s diaconate voted to rewrite the About Us section of its Web site to include:

Royal Lane Baptist Church is an inclusive, multi-generational congregation joined in Christian community. We are a vibrant mosaic of varied racial identities, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and denominational backgrounds.

The church is considering its response.

University Baptist Church in Austin was disfellowshipped by the BGCT in 1994 “for ordaining a gay man as deacon and for failing to regard homosexuality as sinful.” The church was expelled by the Austin Baptist Association in 1943 for accepting black members, and later readmitted. In the 1970s, University was the first in the Southern Baptist Convention to ordain women as deacons, the church history shows. It left the Southern Baptist Convention in 1997 “because of ramifications of the fundamentalist takeover of that organization.”

Broadway Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, postponed a similar confrontation last year when it chose not to send messengers to the BGCT annual convention. Broadway was nonetheless found not to be in friendly cooperation by the Southern Baptist Convention last year because it was deemed to “approve and endorse homosexual behavior” as a result of a confrontation provoked when it published photographs of same-sex couples in the church directory.

Broadway’s expulsion by the SBC was an assertion of the kind of Cathist inflexibility that independent demographic analysis predicts will frustrate achievement of expansive evangelism goals like those pursued by the SBC’s Great Commission Resurgence Task Force.