Posted on 09/13/2003 11:57:37 PM PDT by Schnucki
(AgapePress) - A recent bomb threat targeted an Ohio church school because of its strong opposition to homosexuality.
Last week, St. Paul Lutheran Church and School in Westlake received a call from an individual who ordered its pastor to go on local television and change his position on homosexual marriage. The caller said if his demands were not met in one hour, the church and school would be blown up.
After all 280 students in the school were evacuated, Westlake police searched for a bomb but came up empty.
St. Paul principal Jim Krupski says the caller disagreed with the Lutheran Missouri Synod's conservative stance on homosexuality. "That's as much as we know," he says, "and we leave it in the hands of God to hopefully turn this person's heart so that they repent of what they've done and come to forgiveness in Jesus Christ."
St. Paul is not the only Christian facility in the area that has had to deal with challenges to a traditional biblical stance lately. Just a few weeks earlier, a janitor at a non-denominational church in Westlake was beaten by a group of homosexual men in apparent retaliation for the church pastor's sermon against the sin of homosexuality.
But apart from the bomb scare, St. Paul suffered no ill effects from the threat of violence. Krupski says parents were obviously concerned during the evacuation and afterward, because the school's staff were mainly occupied with taking care of the students rather than getting in touch with parents.
"We stressed very much with our students that God was there to protect and comfort and take care of them," he says. The school's leader says the faculty and staff spent time in the classrooms conducting small-group discussions and helping students deal with what had happened. "The kids were fine, and the parents for the most part were very happy with how things went," he says.
According to Krupski, things have returned to normal on St. Paul's campus. The Ohio principal says the school has not had to take extra security precautions since the bomb threat because the facility is locked up daily.
It's not just homosexuals, though. There seems to be an intensifying, concerted effort by anti-Christians in general to ridicule and harrass Christians regardless of particular topic of the moment.
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