SBC expels churches, exposes fissures

The Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee voted Tuesday to expel four of its member churches, ousting two for policies that “affirm homosexual behavior” and the others for employing pastors who are convicted sex offenders.

“The last year has revealed areas of weakness in our beloved convention of churches,” J.D. Greear, the SBC president, said in a fiery opening address to the committee Monday night in Nashville, Tenn. “Fissures and failures and fleshly idolatries. COVID didn’t produce these crises. It only exposed them.”

The next day, the committee “disfellowshipped” Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Ga., and St. Matthews Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., for church policies deemed accepting of homosexuality, in violation of the denomination’s statement of faith.

Towne View’s conversations about becoming an “affirming” congregation, and its decision to accept two gay couples as members in 2019, cost the church at least 30 percent of its membership, Jim Conrad, the pastor, said Tuesday evening. He stands by the decision, and said he welcomes the opportunity to freely welcome LGBTQ people to his church. “I’ve been SBC all my life and have seen the convention for the last 30 years move further and further to the right,” he said. “This is just closing a chapter.”

Two other churches were removed for employing pastors known to have committed sexual crimes. Antioch Baptist Church in Sevierville, Tenn., is led by a pastor who pleaded guilty to two counts of statutory rape for oral sex with a 16-year-old congregant at a previous church in the

1990s. The pastor at West Side Baptist Church in Sharpsville, Pa., is on Florida’s sex offender registry for a 1993 conviction of aggravated sexual assault of a child.

Greear, whose final term as president is set to expire in June, has made a priority of improving the denomination’s response to sexual abuse in church settings. When a 2019 investigation by the San Antonio-Express-News and Houston Chronicle uncovered hundreds of cases of sexual abuse in SBC settings, the denomination made pastoral sexual abuse grounds for removing a church from the convention, and released its own report detailing its failures to care for victims.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and has been increasingly divided in recent years over a variety of cultural and political issues, including racism, sexuality and white evangelicals’ embrace of former President Donald Trump.

National leaders, including Greear and Russell Moore, its policy head, have attempted to hold the denomination together while expanding its reach. Moore, an outspoken critic of Trump, has spoken forcefully against the Confederate flag and hosted conferences on Martin Luther King Jr. and on racial reconciliation. Greear used the phrase “Black lives matter” in a speech last summer, and affirmed the most racially diverse roster of committee members in the denomination’s history.

“Do we want to be a Gospel people or a Southern culture people?” Greear asked in his speech Monday night. “Which is the more important part of our name, ‘Southern’ or ‘Baptist’?”

Jon Shapley / Staff photographer J.D. Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, says the organization is not a political activism group.