LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: EXCLUDING WOMEN IS LOSS FOR BAPTISTS AND ALL CHRISTIANS

To the editor:

I have been reading with interest about the ongoing situation with the Baptists banning women from becoming deacons.

The Baptist church is going to lose one of the finest couples who have ever served in a church. When I say served, I mean deacon, pianist, choir director, Sunday school teachers and ardent donors to their church, both of their time and money. My parents have purchased appliances for their church and many other items as the need arose. But they will be leaving their beloved church soon because of the Baptists' unrelenting refusal to ordain women as deacons.

My mother and both of my sisters are such devout Christians that they have spent their entire adult lives spreading the Gospel and bringing many others to the Lord through their examples of Christian living and their witnessing about Jesus.

My sister and her husband founded several churches in Germany, having gone there in the late 1970s as missionaries. They led street rallies that brought many unsaved souls into a life with the Lord. The current church is the second largest Spirit-filled church in Europe -- second only to Dr. Chou's church in Korea. Lisa witnessed daily to anyone she came in contact with from the streets to their in-church ministry to feed the homeless. She was even working on a homeless shelter for women and children at the time of her untimely death.

My other sister is extremely active in her church, witnessing to those she meets and home schooling her children so that they may have Christian schooling without all the outside secular influences so prevalent in the schools today.

How a church as a whole could exclude these three women from becoming deacons is beyond me. What a loss for the church and the Christian family as a whole.

JODI THOMPSON

Jackson