Resolution wants churches to investigate schools

Associated Baptist Press

May 27, 2005

Resolution wants churches to investigate schools

COLUMBIA, S.C. (ABP) -- A group that tried last year to get Southern Baptists to encourage parents to pull their children out of public schools is now asking the Southern Baptist Convention to urge churches to investigate whether their local school systems support homosexuality.

South Carolina-based Exodus Mandate, which promotes home schooling and Christian schools, is backing a resolution proposed by Voddie Baucham Jr., a Southern Baptist lecturer, preacher, and author; and Bruce Shortt, a lawyer, home-schooling father and author, according to a statement on the group's Web site.

The 2004 resolution asked Southern Baptists to remove their children from "godless" and "anti-Christian" public schools. The SBC Resolutions Committee did not endorse the resolution, which was proposed by Shortt and T.C. Pinckney of Virginia.

Instead, the committee brought to the SBC annual meeting a resolution calling on Baptists to "aggressively engage the culture by speaking the truth in love concerning every aspect of life, public and private."

Pinckney made a motion to add the anti-public school language, but it failed.

This year, Shortt and Baucham have submitted a resolution that encourages every SBC church to investigate whether its local school district has a homosexual club or any curriculum or program that attempts to influence children to accept homosexual behavior as a legitimate lifestyle. If so, the resolution urges churches to inform parents and encourage them to remove their children from the schools immediately.

The resolution also:

-- commends Christians working in government schools,

-- asks Baptists to make a greater effort to provide and support Christian educational alternatives to public schools, especially for children from low-income and single-parent families,

-- calls upon Baptists to pray for homosexuals, and

-- criticizes homosexual activists for slandering minorities by claiming that homosexual behavior has any authentic connection with the civil-rights movement.

The SBC Resolutions Committee will decide whether or not to present the resolution to messengers for a vote at the SBC annual meeting June 21-22 in Nashville, Tenn.