Suffering Exclusion for Including Others
Suffering Exclusion for Including Others
By Robert Baird
News Release under the byline of Ken Stamp, the Baptist Standard, February 21, 2017: In February of this year, the Baptist General Convention of Texas Executive Board declared three congregations, including Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, “outside of harmonious cooperation” with the state convention because of their views on same-sex relationships. Carrying out a policy adopted at the BGCT annual meeting last November, the board voted 63-6 to consider Lake Shore Baptist, Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas and First Baptist Church in Austin outside the bounds of harmonious cooperation.
We, the members of Lake Shore Baptist Church, knew it was coming, knew the Baptist General Convention of Texas was going to exclude us for including others. It was a price we were willing to pay for what we thought was the just and loving thing to do.
History is the story of the human struggle to be free. America was born from such a struggle. But freedom in America has always been an ideal in need of realization. So women pursued rights, as did blacks. In more recent years it has been gays and lesbians.
Responding positively to those who struggle for freedom is to enlarge the circle — to include the excluded. For years Lake Shore has welcomed gays into our community, including leadership roles. Our recent decision stamping this in our bylaws is our way of publicly affirming our gay members and welcoming them to every dimension of our communal life, including the sacrament of marriage.
In her book “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin describes Abraham Lincoln as “possessing extraordinary empathy, the gift or curse [because of the pain involved] of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.” This capacity to feel with the other is the foundation of movements for justice throughout time and place. In this time and place, it should give rise to justice for gays and lesbians.
Sexuality is a fundamental dimension of who we are. It is a given. I cannot imagine any heterosexual recalling the time and place when he or she decided to be attracted to the opposite sex. For heterosexuals, it is a discovery, not a decision. Surely the same is true for gays and lesbians.
We heterosexuals should try to put ourselves in their place. What would it be like to have the essence of our sexuality described as immoral? What would it be like to try to live our lives without sexual intimacy, as some would have us do?
To be sure, some sexual proclivities are immoral. There are sexual desires that if expressed violate the other — rape, for example. But as one leading Christian philosopher, Robert Adams, has noted: “Homosexual practice is not essentially violative of persons.” The fundamental question we should ask of any human activity is: Does it violate the dignity of the other? Look and see and think.
Another leading Christian philosopher, Nick Wolterstorff, whom many of us at Baylor have met with frequently, admired tremendously and been strongly influenced by, recently went public in support of gay marriage. It was, he says, “through relatives, students and former
students who were gay, as well as people in committed, same-sex relationships that caused me to reconsider the traditional views I had grown up with.” He adds, “I’ve listened to these people. To their agony. To their feelings of exclusion and oppression. To their longings. To their expressions of love. To their commitments. To their faith. So listening changed me.” Surely that is the key—listening to human stories.
Baptist minister and author Will Campbell, in a presentation at Baylor years ago, said a time would come when we Baptists would apologize for how we treated homosexuals as we now apologize for how we once treated blacks. But that time has not fully come and, till that day does come, churches such as Lake Shore in Waco, First Baptist in Austin and Wilshire Baptist in Dallas will bear the exclusion for what seems to us a matter of love and justice.
This first appeared as an opinion piece by Robert Baird, emeritus professor of philosophy at Baylor University, in the Waco Tribune Herald, February 26, 2017. It is reprinted here with permission of the author.
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