During the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Houston this week, messengers approved a resolution expressing their “opposition and disappointment” in the decision by the Boy Scouts of America to allow homosexual members. According to The Baptist Press, the resolution affirmed individual churches’ ability to determine whether or not they will maintain a relationship with the BSA.
The resolution says the BSA’s stance puts them “at odds with a consistent biblical worldview on matters of human sexuality” and “has the potential to complicate basic understandings of male friendships, needlessly politicize human sexuality and heighten sexual tensions within the Boy Scouts.” The resolution also voiced gratitude to those who expressed opposition to the BSA policy change and called on the BSA to remove leadership who sought to implement the change.
The resolution concluded: “… we declare our love in Christ for all young people regardless of their perceived sexual orientation, praying that God will bring all youth into a saving knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said the Boy Scouts made a decision they believed to be “some sort of compromise that has really pleased no one in any place in American culture.”
“I don’t think it’s going to stay there,” Moore said about the policy decision. “I think instead what you are going to see is a further evolution into another step, and congregations are going to have to be ready to address that. … Once you take sexuality and the expression of sexuality and politicize it in the way the Boy Scouts have done, you change the nature of that moral education in a way that Southern Baptists, most of us, have grave concerns about.”
To read the full text of the resolution, click here and scroll to the bottom of the article.
