So That's What Christian Means

In Daytona Beach Florida Sunday a nine-member family from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas interrupts their vacation to protest outside Daytona’s largest Baptist church, proclaiming divine punishment in the death of American soldiers and in the Minnesota bridge tragedy. Why? Because sodomy—that is anal sex—has been decriminalized in the United States. Also Sunday, In Neosho Missouri a pastor and two church deacons are gunned down in cold blood. And over the weekend in Arlington Texas a large evangelical congregation calls off the funeral service of a navy war vet when they learn at the last minute that he was gay. God must be saying, “With friends like these, who needs enemies.”
The bizarre thing about Sunday’s protest in Daytona Beach is that this is no liberal vs. conservative showdown. The church these protectors of God’s values chose to picket is none other than First Baptist, pastored by Bobby Welch, who until a year ago served as national president of the Southern Baptist Convention. To the best of my knowledge, the SBC is no friend of sodomy, which to be clear, in this case means sex between men. No one has been promoting homosexuality from the pulpit at Daytona First Baptist—to say the least!
The motive for the murders in Missouri has not yet been revealed, but the public will remember it happened in church and that the pastor and two “deacons” were the ones killed. The gunman even took time to allow the children to escape. The small church, which was borrowing another congregation’s sanctuary, served a community of Micronesians--Pacific islanders. The killer was part of that community. This wasn’t a random act.
As for High Point Church in Arlington Texas, there’s only one word for what they did: pathetic. OK, two words: pathetic and despicable. And it’s no stretch to see the link between High Point’s judgment against a gay sailor and the no-class protesters in Daytona Beach. They agree in principle, the Texas church just has slightly better manners.
For those of us who practice the Christian faith, this all looks like a sad embarrassment. To those who have long ago given up on “the church” this confirms their view of what “being Christian” is all about. When we sing “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love,” they have good cause to laugh cynically and say, “Yeah right!”