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Date Submitted June 28, 2023

Submitted by Kimball Shinkoskey

Dear Editor,

The Southern Baptist Convention recently excluded two female-led congregations from affiliation with the Convention.

This decision reflects a deep misunderstanding of the Bible message and results in part from the very fact that Baptists are a church. The original Christian movement was not a private church movement, it was a public civic movement devoted to inclusion and equal responsibility, embodied by the civil law “Honor thy father and thy mother.”
Christian churches today have positioned themselves as private charitable and teaching agencies based on highly stylized theological doctrines that have developed over millennia the way politicized church people wanted those doctrines to develop.

Leadership in a Christian organization was not to be based on ability to impose private administrative order but rather on ability to enlighten public minds and be a fair administrator of the common good. That sort of skill is not gender-based, but rather individual-based.

Women are just as capable as men of screwing-up the proper interpretation of the original Christian movement. They are also just as capable as men of deciphering the true nature and principles of that ancient society. The question is, can anyone be found today, male or female, capable of doing the latter?

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