Letters to the editor: 11/07/02

In recognition of Animal Shelter Appreciation Week

To the Editor:

I realize in these hard times that the shelter is low on most priority lists, but as Matthew Scully points out in his book "Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy":

"...There will always be enough injustice and human suffering in the world to make the wrongs done to animals seem small and secondary. The answer is that justice is not a finite commodity, nor are kindness and love... A wrong is a wrong, and often the little ones, when they are shrugged off as nothing, spread and do the gravest harm to ourselves and others."

The Jackson County Animal Shelter is there because we are not. Every animal there is there because a human being let it down by leaving it to roam, not spay/neutering or abandoning it, a quality rarely seen in animal.

For example, on Sept. 11 a man on the 70th floor of the World Trade Center took the harness off his seeing eye dog so it could run and save itself. The dog did not run; instead it led the man down 70 flights of stairs and chaos without its halter. Loyalty to the end! If we could only do as well by our dogs.

This week let the staff at the animal shelter know you appreciate all they do. Better yet, ask them what you can do to help.

Jane Finneran

Sylva

Withdrawing churches perfer freedom

To the Editor:

Although I do not speak for the withdrawing churches, or even my own church, I believe these churches have withdrawn for an entirely different reason. The TBA has seen fit to dictate what beliefs the member churches should hold as a condition of membership, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with membership requirements, it is entirely alien to traditional Baptist beliefs and unacceptable to the withdrawing churches.

If you were to examine the beliefs of the various churches that have withdrawn from the TBA, you would find great variety and differences of opinion in matters of faith, belief and practices. Where the withdrawing churches are united is on this one point: When Baptist #1 tells Baptist #2 what he should think or believe, #2 should withdraw and #1 should quit calling himself a Baptist because the very essence of Baptist belief is that # 2 (and #1) are free to follow wherever the Spirit of God leads.

Paul said, "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." Galatians 5:1.

The concepts of freedom and democracy are cherished principles Baptists have advocated since the Reformation. Baptists believe every individual has an equal right to direct access to God. Each individual has the right to worship God, or not to worship God, as his conscience dictates.

The great Baptist scholar E.Y. Mullens said, "The right of private judgment in religion is a right which lies at the core of Christian truth." This principle has been loosely described as "soul competency" or "soul freedom," and Baptists have diligently promoted it for hundreds of years.

It follows that all free souls have equal privileges in the church. Over the years Baptists have described this concept as "the priesthood of believers." What the phrase means is that a free individual may come to know God without the requirement of any human, priestly intermediary. In practice it means that congregations make decisions in an open, democratic process. The pastor's authority is no greater than any member's in a Baptist church. The pastor has simply been called by the congregation to minister and to preach, not to rule.

Baptists also believe in local church autonomy, free from any mandates or interference from a larger ecclesiastical body, which the Southern Baptist Convention now seeks to become. These two ideas run a parallel track.

In 1988, as fundamentalists began the takeover of the convention, a resolution was passed that stated "the priesthood of believer can be used to justify the undermining of pastoral authority in the local church." We see the convention officially limiting whole types and classes of people who may be Southern Baptists.

Sadly, as the convention marches away from its Baptist heritage and seeks to organize itself on a more creedal and catholic model, we see a trend locally where the TBA, in a similar way, seeks to define a certain standard of belief and enforce it with membership rules. Coincidentally, the pulpit now seems to be a few feet higher off the ground (and closer to Heaven) than it used to be.

The civil freedoms we enjoy today are in large measure based on the freedoms established by the churches early in our American history. In the early 1600s courageous Christians familiar with Galatians 5:1 decided that the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church wrongly dictated the beliefs of European citizens. Baptists, Methodists, Puritans, Quakers and others left their mother countries and established their own churches in the New World, free from the coerced faith of the State and of the Church. When the struggling new federal government proposed a United States Constitution, a group of Baptist ministers challenged the framers that if a Bill or Rights, including the core freedoms of religion, speech and press, were not included in the document, their congregations would oppose its ratification.

The churches that have withdrawn from the TBA simply recognize and adhere to these essential freedoms that established colonies on North American soil 400 years ago and led to the adoption of the American Constitution and its guarantees of the rights of all citizens, freedoms which continue to be a light unto the nations today.

Just as each individual is free to worship alone and to associate with others within a church, a church is free to associate itself with other churches for common goals, as the churches have done in the TBA. But, as Mullens also said, "an enforced continuance of an individual [church] with the larger group after radical and hopeless divergence of belief has arisen is a tyranny equal with the enforcement of the beliefs of the group upon the individual."

It was enriching to be a part of an organization whose members had differing practices and traditions, but it was inevitable that when the leadership of the TBA began to dictate terms of beliefs some of us just had to go if we were going to still call ourselves Baptists. I leave in sorrow but with best wishes to the TBA and the churches that remain in it.

In the debate I have witnessed over the years, I have rarely heard a mean-spirited word said about the other churches that remain in the TBA, or even much of a debate about the superficial issues that non-Baptists may think has driven this controversy. Rather, the debate - nationally and locally - centered around the yoke of coerced belief and whether we would continue to submit.

We prefer freedom. I hope someday when all have forgotten and forgiven the bickering, and there is new leadership in the convention and the TBA, we can sit at the table again, together, as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Jay Coward

Member - Sylva First Baptist Church

Club members work to assure a beautiful future for Sylva

To the Editor:

United, the group "[starts] by doing what's necessary, then what's possible, and suddenly [they] are doing the impossible," as St. Francis of Assisi said.

Impossible is made possible by creating and maintaining a stunning show in the cement pots and cooking through North Carolina summers on the cement steps of the old Jackson County Courthouse.

Impossible is made possible by building a working coalition with the county, city and private citizens to improve and maintain the parks and plantings in and around Sylva.

Impossible is made possible by developing resource gardeners through the schools, Scouts and the N.C. Extension Service.

Impossible is made possible by exceeding club fund-raising goals by at least a four digit increment.

Impossible is made possible by expanding membership from 18 to 33 and receiving a grant of 100 azaleas from North Carolina Beautiful.

Impossible is made possible by building a Land Steward Program to protect the waterways, native plants and biodiversity of Jackson County.

These stalwart citizens pledge fidelity for the future. And the future will be more beautiful because of the dedication and drive of the Sylva Garden Club.

Ruth Balch

President - Sylva Garden Club

Back to Archive: 11/07/02.