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Members of Soulforce, a gay Christian group, met with Bishop Eddie Long on June 1 to discuss his stance on homosexuality. (Photo by AP)
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HOME > NEWS > LOCAL
By: MATT SCHAFER
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Rev. Dennis Meredith still preaches to a full house twice each Sunday, but the faces largely don’t belong to the same people who filled the pews when he arrived in 1994.
Since 1917, Tabernacle Baptist Church had served a historically African-American population in the Old Fourth Ward, but shortly after the turn of the century the church began to change. Families who worshiped at the church for generations, veteran donors, left the church because it was becoming a “gay church.”
“I used to preach all over the country. I’d be gone once or twice a month preaching, that’s a lot. When I started preaching love and acceptance, people stopped calling because suddenly I’m the gay pastor, I’m the pastor of the gay church,” said Meredith, who is straight.
In 2001, after Meredith’s son told the pastor he was gay, Meredith changed the messages he preached every Sunday and Wednesday night.
“I just refuse to use the pulpit to condemn people, to hurt people, to speak in a way that is discriminating, that uses prejudices,” Meredith said. “I just refuse to do that. I see God in a loving context. For me, if there is an ideal God, he is a God of love… God is not against you.”
Meredith went beyond preaching and invited gays, lesbians and transgender people to take active roles in the church, telling one transgender woman, “Bring every friend you have, I’m not going to treat you any different, you have a home here.”
As the message changed so did the congregation. Close to 350 members left Tabernacle, many citing Meredith’s acceptance of homosexuality. Weekly giving dropped from $16,000 to $6,000 at one point, but the church struggled and made it through.
Meredith’s dedication to gay acceptance was rewarded when he was honored at the Atlanta Human Rights Campaign dinner with the Dan Bradley Humanitarian Award.
Over the past six years Tabernacle transitioned from being almost entirely heterosexual to 80 percent gay, lesbian and transgender.
As members left Tabernacle, many found churches with a more traditional theology that agreed with their own — a theology rooted in the social structure of the African-American community, said Dr. Kenneth L. Samuel of Victory for the World Church in Stone Mountain.
Samuel faced the same criticism and drop in church membership when he preached openly about accepting gay people.
Rev. Dennis Meredith of Tabernacle Baptist
Church said church membership dropped
dramatically when he began preaching
acceptance of gay people.
(Photo by Matt Schafer) |
“Initially, historically, traditionally, I would say that African-American churches have been even more homophobic than the churches from the European culture,” Samuel said. “I think the reason for that is that people still view homosexuality as a threat to the family. Since you have so many single parent families, particularly single mother families, there is going to be a reaction to anything that is perceived to be a threat to the family.”
Samuel said African-American men find themselves on the wrong end of several social issues.
“Black men have been systematically castrated by poverty, slavery, the influx on drugs into the community, the war on drugs… the criminal industrial complex, the three strikes you’re out, the inability of judges to discern an appropriate sentence, all these things really contribute to a systemic castration of black men,” he said.
A disproportionate number of black men in jail fuels communal fears of losing successful black men to homosexuality instead of what some stable, nuclear families believe heterosexuality provides, Samuel said.
“Then the issue becomes why are you so anti-gay? There becomes a real fear that there is a lack of employed, educated black men to go around, and so the homosexuals became a quick reason as to why,” he said.
The Bible does not condone divorce, or remarriage after divorce. Blending two fabrics together is considered an abomination. There are biblical mandates for women wearing hats in church while not leading service.
“If you address the biblical issues about homosexuality, I think it is very easy to see an inconsistency about holding people accountable about men sleeping with men, with eating pork, mixing fabric, women staying silent in the church,” Samuel said. “There are a whole lot of things that we reinterpret when it comes to biblical mandates, and to say that this is the ...
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