Baptist church near washington dc that called gay pastors
A 155-year-old Baptist church in Washington DC recently named a married, gay couple to be its senior ministers with unanimous consent from its congregation.
Calvary Baptist Church announced the hiring of Sally Sarratt and Maria Swearingen as the new senior ministers during a service on Sunday. Sarratt and Swearingen, who were legally married in 2014 and ordained in 2015, will commence their new roles on Feb. 26.
“Calvary sits in a unique position to be both a gradual and multiracial congregation, Baptist in heritage and ecumenical in expression, offering vibrant space for people across racial and ethnic lines who hold theologically linear views to share in Christian community together,” Swearingen told The Huffington Send. “Imagining such a place excites us!”
Sandra Auman
Founded by abolitionists in 1862, Calvary broke ties with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2012, in part over its opposition to the ordination of women and discriminatory attitudes toward the LGBT community.
Sarratt and Swearingen will not be the first openly LGBT people to hold leadership positions in the church, said Calvary spokesperson Carol Blythe. The church previously installe
Former Baptist minister describes struggle of existence both called and gay in modern collection of stories told by LGBTQ Christians
A Cooperative Baptist Fellowship-trained pastor who switched to Mennonite says she is still getting over the inner turmoil of belonging to a moderate church that supported her call as a woman in ministry but did not know she was gay.
The Rev. Erica Lea-Simka, a 2014 graduate of CBF-aligned George W. Truett Theological Seminary and the first openly LGBTQ person called as a solo pastor in the Mennonite Church USA, shares her story in a modern book collecting testimonies of harm done by congregations to LGBT+ people sitting in their pews.
“A major way the church failed me is by creature silently hostile and explicitly hostile toward gender and sexual minorities before I even came out to myself, and even more so after I came out publicly,” she writes in Our Witness: The Unheard Stories of LGBT+ Christians, edited by Brandan Robertson.
Brandan Robertson
Robertson, lead pastor of Missiongathering Christian Church in San Diego, Calif., organized a national conference by the same title in Denver in April 2016 to counter another gathering promoting non-inclusiv
Southern Baptists Cut DC Convention Ties over Lesbian Co-Pastors
Disagreement over the hiring of two married lesbian co-pastors by a Washington, D.C. congregation has led to the severing of the relationship between the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and the District of Columbia Baptist Convention (DCBC).
The historic Calvary Baptist Church announced a unanimous vote calling Sally Sarratt and Maria Swearingen as co-pastors in January of 2017. A theologically progressive and activist congregation, Calvary officially severed its connection to the SBC in 2012, claiming that foundational distinctives of the larger body had been lost.
But Calvary, which affiliates with multiple regional and national Baptist organizations, remained connected to the local DCBC, which by extension was connected to the wider SBC. That led the SBC Executive Committee (EC) to offer the DCBC 90 days to dismiss from its fellowship churches that affirm homosexual behavior.
Baptist churches work with a congregational polity and cannot be directly compelled into compliance by a denomination hierarchy, but their relational fellowship with other churches can be jeopardized.
David Roach at Baptist Press A historic Baptist congregation in Washington, D.C. recently hired a same-sex married couple to serve as senior ministers for their church. Calvary Baptist Church, a congregation formed in the 19th century by abolitionists, voted unanimously to call Sally Sarratt and Maria Swearingen to the positions of co-pastors. Carol Blythe, spokesperson for Calvary Baptist, told The Christian Announce that this was the first time the linear congregation had an openly gay leadership. Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know. "Scripture is full of heroes of the faith who history, tradition, and religious authorities said could not be used, and yet these men and women were the very ones God chose to do God's work in the world," said Blythe. "Calvary's only criteria for hiring our recent senior ministers was to discern who God was leading us to for this time in our church's 150-year history and it is clear it was Maria and Sally." Blythe directed CP to a state He has told you, O Mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to perform justice, to cherish mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? At Calvary Baptist Church, we search to be a community of faith that does justice, loves mercy, and walks humbly with our God. As a church, we incorporate the operate of justice into everything that we do. Because our congregation is deeply invested in helping to create a more just nature, we have created this page for you to preserve up with all of the justice work that we are doing as a church. You will see here that we are committed to supporting those working for racial justice as we proudly express that BLACK LIVES MATTER. You will see our pastors and members advocating for a more just and merciful immigration system as we call for our undocumented and other immigrant neighbors to be protected. You will notice that we are a church who marches annually in the DC Queer Pride Parade and daily affirm the lives, relationships, identities of our LGBTQ neighbors. Our promise to justice begins with our reading of the bible and grows outward from there into the neighborhoods and communi
Historic Baptist Church Hires Gay Couple to Lead Congregation in Nation's Capital
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