Ecclesiastical Conflict

So? So Obama left his Church. So what? I found that I had to do that at one time myself. I left the Highlawn Baptist Church of Huntington, WV. A Church of which my parents were charter members and in which I was baptized and grew up in. A Dhurch which contained many friends and spiritual mentors. A Church in which I had learned my Baptist freedom roots well. Unfortunately after both mother and father had died; I had graduated from high school; ,served a brief tour with the Army Air Corps (that should tell you how long ago this history was); and was very active in State Baptist Youth Fellowship work the Church hired a young man as Pastor who had lost his sense of Baptist History. He was the son of a pastor with whom I had worked one summer in Logan County coal mine communities. This guy came into the Church out of a very conservative southern Baptist seminary in Texas. He immediately got the Board of Deacons to enact some of his conservative theology and required that anyone who was active in the Church to subscribe to a creed he had written based on his fundamentalist beliefs. In the first place I could not subscribe to many of the statements contained therein, and secondly I felt that having to accept a creedal statement was outside the scope of being a Baptist. I believed that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, . . ." and that was all the "creed" I needed. BUT, after all, this was my famly's Church. The "Mother Church" was one in which my Grandfather Taylor was a patriarch. Fortunatly at this time I was graduating with a Master's degree and going to Connecticut so I was able to transfer my membership to a Church in Hartford, and then back to a more Baptist congregation when I returned to Huntington to teach at Marshall College. It did not become a University until long after I had moved on.

There are many reasons for leaving one's Church, even after a long time membership. I, for one, think that Senator Obama has done both himself and the Trinity Church a good.