Louisville—Messengers to the Kentucky Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Louisville tasked their credentialing committee with monitoring potential policy changes by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship to allow the hiring of LGBT people.

Meeting at Highview Baptist Church’s east campus Nov. 14, they commissioned their Committee on Credentials to monitor actions by the CBT and bring a report to next year’s annual meeting in Pikeville.

Ed Amundson, pastor at High Street Baptist Church in Somerset, made the motion, calling for the KBC committee to study the moral and theological positions embraced by CBF, and to determine if churches affiliated with CBF should be allowed to also be affiliated with KBC. In effect, churches that currently are dually aligned would have to choose between being members of the CBF or the KBC.

The CBF’s six-member Illumination Project Committee, which has been charged with recommending how the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship can remain united despite diverse opinions on homosexuality, is expected to announce specific policy proposals in February.

Meanwhile, nearly 600 people, including several former CBF moderators, have signed a petition calling for the Fellowship to “remove its discriminatory hiring policy,” which, according to CBF governing documents, forbids “the purposeful hiring of a staff person or the sending of a missionary who is a practicing homosexual.”

The CBF was founded in 1991 as a fellowship of churches that objected to the ideology and methods of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Conservative Resurgence. The Fellowship claims about 1,800 churches are affiliated with the organization, including 56 churches in Kentucky. Of those, 45 are also affiliated with the KBC. (WR)