Word: baptists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...kids are listening. After the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Fla., opened its kid-friendly facilities last summer, Sunday-school attendance jumped 50%, to 900 students, in just four months. Churches of every denomination and size are trying these new approaches and experiencing similar surges in attendance. "The more [kids] touch and they hear and they feel, the more likely the content becomes not only interesting, but they comprehend and understand," says Charlotte Echols, executive director for the child-development program at Highland Park Methodist United Church in Dallas. "That transforms into the good feeling that brings them back next...
...Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola, Fla., is willing to follow the signs wherever they lead. For an hour every Sunday morning, teens in torn jeans and worn sneakers carry their Good Books and skateboards to the New Breed class. A boy with tattoos asked for the courage to stay in school. A girl requested help with her alcoholic father. "This is what Jesus did. He reached people at all levels, not just those who were dressed well," says Buck Waters, the pastor, who also runs a surfing ministry. "We are calling our entire membership to a new level of faith...
This June, Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is coming to Cambridge to supplement your education with a fact you are not likely to learn in your classes: God hates fags. Westboro Baptist—the Topeka, Kans. church infamous for its anti-gay demonstration at the funeral of hate crime victim Matthew Shepherd and for maintaining the website www.godhatesfags.com—announced last month that it will be picketing the commencement ceremony of Harvard Law School to protest the school’s proposed ban on offensive speech...
...churches such as the United Church of Christ, which allows its congregations to adopt “open and affirming” positions, whereby all people, regardless of sexuality, are allowed “full membership” including leadership; or the route of conservative churches, like the Southern Baptist Convention, which is unambiguous in its distaste for homosexuality and its practitioners...
Continued contradiction on the issue makes it clear that homophobia is making its voice heard within the Christian establishment in more places than Westboro Baptist. Christianity has been on the wrong side of too many issues in the past—from slavery to civil rights to women’s suffrage—for progressive Christians to remain quiet on this issue. It is time to draw the line...