mission accomplished
Well, I will say this for Two Rivers Baptist Church–they successfully shifted the focus from motherhood this past weekend.
The church achieved this by voting out 71 members who had questioned senior minister Jerry Sutton about the church’s spending and sued for financial records. The first vote on the issue, held May 4 at the request of Sutton and other church leaders, included the 71 and therefore barely missed the 2/3 majority required by the church’s by-laws.
The Tennessean reports that on Sunday “David Mills, a former church trustee and deacon chairman, challenged the legitimacy of counting the votes of the dissident members.” Members in the service then voted by a show of hands to remove those 71 votes from the count and the 71 people from church membership.
One of the 71, Dennis Shipp, taught a Sunday school lesson earlier that morning on the story of Joseph returning to relationship with his brothers and said the plaintiffs were “ready to reconcile.” The paper reports “Shipp learned of his ouster upon entering the sanctuary after the vote had been taken.”
When I suggested a less mother-centric approach to Sunday’s worship, I was thinking of something like my own church’s lovely services in which every hymn, chorus, reading and piece of visual art was written or painted by a woman. Maybe Two Rivers could try that next year.
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Jennifer Taylor
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I usually don’t preach mother’s day sermons on mother’s day (same w/other holidays that aren’t specifically Church holidays). However, this year, we’ve been working through Mk. and the passage lent itself to talking about women. So, I did. In the end, we prayed for godly mothers, mothers in prison, barren women, single women, women touched or affected by abortion and a host of other women.
Afterwards, a number of ladies thanked me and said how moving and touching the message was. Two men, however, Church leaders, were furious. They said things like, “It’s mother’s day, if you want to have another day for all those other women, then do it, but don’t talk about them on mother’s day.” I was kind of shocked. I will be leaving this congregation soon but I sure hope they are more sensitive to people in the future, like the woman’s email I got telling me she hated coming to Church on mother’s day because it killed her to see all these ladies being honored as mothers when she was barren and all she wanted to be was a mother.
Anyway, I agree w/your other post wholeheartedly and I share your view but some people have blinders on and they will never see this perspective I’m afraid. Too sad for the Christian Churches, just another thing they’ve got going against them.
The older I get, the more I appreciate how UN-political the Christian Churches (not the we believe in Jesus kind- the we go to the NACC kind) culture is. I never really paid much attention to it until I started seeing how political some church bodies become…
wouldn’t it have been nice to see “Church forgives dissident members” as the headline instead of “Church Ousts Dissident Members” (and I do mean heaadline, it made the papers and evening news here in Nashville.