A Baptist Minister with Guts

People often think I belong to a radically fanatical group of Presbyterians who are just too over the top on things like worship issues, church discipline, and following God's Law as a standard of righteousness (not as a means of salvation). However, one of the things that I truly appreciate about our group is the fact that they are standing firmly and staunchly against so many of today's cultural trends that much of the rest of Christianity has succumbed to.

I found this shocking, but did you know that according to an article in Time magazine, 59% of evangelical Christians approved of starving and dehydrating to death Terri Shiavo? How did the culture of death come to infect so much of the Christian church? I think a large part of where it started was with the idea that children were no longer blessings to be welcomed freely and with joy but rather inconveniences to be limited by whatever means have been deemed acceptable. Most Christians either don't know or else ignore the fact that one of the ways that the birth control pill functions is to abort babies by creating a hostile environment within the uterus. Ditto with the IUD. Worse yet are the statistics that show that the rate of surgical abortion for church goers isn't much different than that of the rest of society.

Anyhow, my hat goes off to Pastor William Rice, the minister at Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater, Florida. He was pastor to Judge George Greer, a man who on many occasions had the opportunity to demonstrate that God's Law was higher than man's but who opted for pragmatism over principle. Pastor Rice had the intestinal fortitude to ask Judge Greer to resign his membership from the church for his murderous role in Terri Shiavo's death.

If there were more pastors like Mr. Rice, perhaps the Church wouldn't be in such an almighty, backslidden mess.