Independent Baptist Pastor Charles Worley’s Sermon Draws Call for Repentance From Baptist Writer

The author of a personal essay published by BaptistNews, who says he was raised in Baptist churches in Texas and now lives in North Carolina, writes that he is ashamed of remarks he heard from Charles Worley, pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church, an Independent Baptist congregation in Maiden, N.C. The author says he watched excerpts from a sermon by Worley, which he believes was preached on May 13. He writes that he has listened to the remarks several times.

The essay sets the remarks against a 2012 North Carolina debate. Amendment One, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman, was added to the state constitution after passing with more than 60 percent of the vote on May 8, 2012. The author says Worley’s remarks went beyond the amendment, beyond a recent announcement by President Obama on such issues, and beyond questions of conscience and differences among Christians.

According to the author’s description, Worley suggested building a long fence and placing lesbians inside it, and said gay men should be confined the same way behind an electrified fence. He said they should be fed and would die out in a few years because they cannot reproduce. The author calls these words abhorrent and says they were aimed at people he says Worley wished dead. The essay presents these as the author’s account of the excerpts he watched; this report does not have independent verification of the sermon’s full text or context.

The author writes that anyone who values the Baptist tradition should demand repentance from Worley, and that anyone who stands with him in those words should also repent. He argues that the language of violence and death is a repudiation of the gospel, regardless of a person’s views on culture-war issues. Protecting people who are targeted by harsh speech, a stand the essay takes on behalf of those named in the sermon (Proverbs 31:8-9).

The essay also recalls a 1980 statement by a Baptist evangelist, whom the author does not name in this passage, that God does not hear the prayer of a Jew. The author cites E. Glenn Hinson, then a colleague at a Baptist seminary in Louisville, who said of that statement, “Such is the stuff of which holocausts are made.” The author writes that such language was shameful then and remains so now.

The author says he had long kept a personal commitment to address issues rather than individuals in public debate, and that he had kept it for at least two decades. He writes: “But not tonight.”

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