NBC: 5 Southern Baptist churches in Alabama set afire. More to come...

MSNBC ^ | February 3, 2006

[precedence]

More to come....

[Celtic Conservative]

Per FoxNews radio: One black church, 4 white churches.

A weird thought , but that's pretty proportional to population in the US. (sorry, midnight shift insomnia doing the talking)

CC

[Coldwater Creek]

I have been a So. Baptist for 64 years and we have always been taught that we did not break off of the Catholics.

[jw777]

Where's the ACLU?

[epow]

Allow me to correct NBC's misuse of the word "church" in the title of the thread.

"5 SBC Church BUILDINGS in AL set afire."

Buildings are not the Church, the Church is the body of Christ on earth. Members of the Church usually meet to corporately worship in buildings, but members of the Church can also worship the head of the Church Jesus Christ wherever they happen to be at any time. The people who used those 5 buildings as places of worship are still as alive today as they were before the Church's 5 buildings were burned.

I realize that most readers will say that I'm being picky when I correct the misuse of the word "Church". But words have meaning, and the word "Church" as used in holy scripture means a specific group of people who comprise the body of Jesus Christ on earth, not buildings.

[Lead Moderator]

Apologies. This thread was the FIRST thread, and belonged in Breaking News. My bad.

[Hildy]

It's unclear if the church fires are connected.

Yea.

[CajunConservative]

Are you referring to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship? I know that a few liberal SBC churches went their own way but most of those churches were dead anyway. They really aren't criminally minded just liberally minded.

I imagine this is the work of either meth heads or kids. The church I belonged to in high school was torched by a meth head after a robbery. They were dumb enough to also torch the sheriff's office.

[commish]

I think all of those Baptist churches which are located in close proximity to one another - all accidentally caught fire at the same time.

All 6 churches were within a corrider along US HWY 82 that stretches from Centreville, AL into Chilton County.

[Wallace T.]

News no longer on MSN or CNN.

No surprise here. As soon as these liberal media types figured out that most of the churches vandalized were white congregations, and were thus not "hate crimes," these crimes dropped off their radar screen. Even if some Satanic Goth types or another anti-Christian committed the crimes, they are not "hate crimes" because by the MSM and Justice Department definitions, no Christians or whites can be victims of such crimes, just non-Christians and nonwhites.

Since they are therefore not "hate crimes", they must be "love crimes." Remember that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and you will do well in the liberal world.

[mnehring]

I've always thought that what we consider the modern Baptists actually broke off of the Church of England in the 1600s and were influenced by the Anabaptists. Basically, they didn't directly break off of the Roman Catholic Church, but they indirectly did in that they broke from the COE who broke from the RC. (so everyone is right..)

[penelopesire]

guess we have moved over here now..Is this the final resting place for this thread now....lol?

[Heartofsong83]

I hope not!

Anyway, about the race issue, it doesn't matter if they were black or white congregations, it is an EXTREME sin...and the crooks involved should get enormous jail time. Like 10-15 years for each offense.

[penelopesire]

Not likely they will be able to ignore it if this is true:

http://www.earnedmedia.org/cdc0203.htm

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 /Christian Wire Service/ -- Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition, and the Rev. Rob Schenck President of Faith and Action plan to travel to Alabama this weekend to meet with local Alabama Christian leaders and tour some of the burned churches.

Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition, states, "Although it is still very early in this investigation, we think it is critical that the Departments of Justice investigate the possibility of federal laws being violated. At this point in time, we do not know if religious bigotry or hatred was involved in these crimes. However, when any place of worship is subjected to these kinds of acts of violence, it is an attack not only against a building but an attack against the core principles of religious expression and freedom. We plan to travel to Alabama this weekend to tour some of the burned churches, meet with local pastors and also ask the Department of Justice and the Bush Administration to get involved."

For more information or interviews contact: Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney 202.547.1735 Cell: 540.538.4741

[commish]

Latest damage reports per WSFA TV here in Montgomery

Antioch Church, Antioch - Damaged
Ashby Baptist Church, Brierfield - Damaged
Old New Harmony Church, Fairview - Damaged
Old Union Baptist Church, Brierfield - Burned to the Ground
Pleasant Sabine Antioch, Southeast of Centreville off Highway 20 - Damaged
Rehobeth Baptist Church, Lawley - Complete Loss

[wideawake]

The English anabaptist movement "broke off" from the Reformed Church of England and the SBC is a descendant of those original English Anabaptists.

However, the first Anabaptists were German speakers and they were former Catholics who joined the Protestant movement and became more radical than even Ulrich Zwingli in their theology.

After the German Anabaptists were politically broken in Eastern Germany many went to Holland and due to the close proximity to England (William Tyndale, the Protestant Bible translator, translated much of his English Bible in Germany and Holland) Anabaptist theological ideas spread from the Continent to England.

Many Englishmen were unhappy because they felt the Church of England was not reformed enough and these dissidents became the first English Anabaptists.

This all occurred in the timeframe of roughly 1517-1537, so many of the first generation of English Anabaptists were raised Catholic, converted to Anglicanism and then diverged from mainstream Anglicanism into Anabaptism by the time they were of middle age.

So the SBC did not break off directly from the Catholic Church - the Anglicans broke off from the Catholic Church when they declared that the King and not the bishops had direct authority over the church and the Anabaptists broke from the Anglicans by declaring that the King had no more authority over the church than the bishops did.

The SBC is a breakoff of a breakoff.

[wideawake]

You make my point more perspicuously than I could.

[penelopesire]

"Anyway, about the race issue, it doesn't matter if they were black or white congregations, it is an EXTREME sin...and the crooks involved should get enormous jail time. Like 10-15 years for each offense."

I agree that the race issue doesn't matter to most of us, but the media will want to play that angle and now that they can't, the story will likely drop off the radar.

[The Old Hoosier]

Baptists are not protestant. The heritage comes from the churches who did not join the ROman Catholic church at its founding.

??? What, they didn't join the apostles in 30 AD? They split off when Peter went to Rome?

I thought the Baptists began in the 1500s in Europe -- Catholics who didn't believe in infant baptism and started their own sect.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

Those danged Lutherans up to trouble again?