From its towering white steeple and red-brick facade to its Sunday services filled with rousing gospel hymns and evangelistic sermons, First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Virginia, bears many of the classic hallmarks of a Southern Baptist church.
On a recent Sunday, its pastor for women and children, Kim Eskridge, urged members to invite friends and neighbors to an upcoming vacation Bible school — a perennial Baptist activity — to help “reach families in the community with the gospel.”
But because that pastor is a woman, First Baptist’s days in the Southern Baptist Convention may be numbered.
At the SBC’s annual meeting June 11-12 in Indianapolis, representatives will vote on whether to amend the denomination’s constitution to essentially ban churches with any women pastors — and not just in the top job. That measure received overwhelming approval in a preliminary vote last year.
“Baptists are poised to ba churches”
Thanks for the quote, it at least helps to understand your context.
To clear things up, however, atheists couldn’t care less about churches. Anti-theists perhaps do. Atheists I know just don’t want any religion or church to encroach on their rights and freedoms. The problem is that religionists are quite responsible for getting books banned in schools, trying to remove sex education in schools, are very anti-LGBTQ, have succeeded in the removal of women’s rights that have been precedent for decades, and are the most militant about their so-called beliefs in all of these matters, including believing in a fairy grandpa in the sky, that anyone who challenges them in any way, even simply intellectually, effectively constitutes a declaration of war.
So if you want to be concerned about a specific group or groups of people, take a long hard look at the Mormon Church, the Catholic Church, and Muslims and how they view women. And those are just a few examples. Atheists are the least of anyone’s problems in this world.