Churches cutting ties with Boy Scouts after vote to allow gay youths

For the Rev. Ernest Easley, the decision to cut ties with the Boy Scouts was simple.

The Bible says homosexuality is a sin. The Boy Scouts do not.

“We are not willing to compromise God’s word,” said Easley, pastor of the 2,300-member Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga., which has sponsored Boy Scout Troop 204 since 1945.

Easley, chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee, said his church will shut down its troop at end of the year, over a recently adopted policy to allow openly gay scouts. He’s urging other Baptists to do the same.

Roswell Street is one of the first churches to cut ties with the Scouts over the new policy. Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Ky., a 23,000-member megachurch, has also announced plans to shut down its troop. Other critics of the new policy, which doesn’t take effect until January 2014, are taking a wait-and-see approach.

Deron Smith, a spokesman for the Boy Scouts, said the organization will help troops that have lost their church sponsors to find new homes. He said the new policy fits the beliefs of most religious groups that sponsor troops.

“This policy reaffirms that doing one’s ‘duty to God’ is absolutely explicit and one of the fundamental principles of Scouting and states that sexual conduct by any Scout — heterosexual or homosexual — is contrary to the virtues of Scouting,” he wrote in an email.

Kent Barnett, executive director of the Abilene, Texas-based Members of the Churches of Christ for Scouting, who became an Eagle Scout in 1973, says he wishes the Boy Scouts hadn’t changed its policy, but churches should “not take their ball and go home.”

He said his troop, which is sponsored by Abilene Christian School, will continue its programs.

“These Boy Scouts still need godly men and women,” he said.

At least one denomination hopes the new policy will lead to more Boy Scouts in its churches. The Rev. Mike Schuenemeyer is executive for health and wholeness advocacy for the United Church of Christ, which sponsors 1,191 scout troops. He said the church has downplayed that relationship in the past because of the ban on gay Scouts but now wants to expand.

Cutting ties with the Boy Scouts makes no sense, he said, because it tells gay Scouts they should be shunned.