Southern Baptist summit has frank talk on sex

The nation's culture war is over when it comes to homosexuality and same-sex marriage, Southern Baptist leaders said Monday, but now it's up to the church to stand firm on its principles despite what the majority believes.

That goes for fighting off pastoral adultery and the urge to look at porn, counseling folks who live together without marriage and speaking out against divorce, too.

There weren't doctrinal surprises, but it was frank talk for a group of about 200 pastors from across the U.S. gathering in Nashville for the denomination's first Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission Leadership Summit in more than a decade. It continues through Wednesday.

The topic was sex, the group's executive vice president said, because it's a ground-level, pervasive topic affecting congregations. And even though everyone in the audience may agree on the doctrine, Phillip Bethancourt said, they need to be able to explain their beliefs to others.

"The Bible's guidelines for sex are sustainable regardless of the time in which we live," he said.

At the same time, other speakers said, nobody wants to come off as "angry Bible guy."

Southern Baptists are the nation's largest Protestant denomination, with 16 million members, and the commission is its public policy and pastoral education arm. The commission and its president, Russell Moore, frequently find themselves on the front lines in America's culture wars.

Speakers included Heath Lambert, head of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, who called pornography the "greatest moral crisis in the history of the church." They also included University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus, whose 2012 survey purporting to show children of gay parents don't fare as well was denounced by other scholars.

A five-person panel led by Bethancourt offered a number of suggestions to help pastors stay sexually pure, including some predictable — like leaning on Jesus — and putting a glass door on the office so others can see in.

"In the business world, people are having lunches and private dinners with the opposite sex," said Kie Bowman, senior pastor of Hyde Park Baptist in Austin, Texas. "I just would say, forget it. Don't go to lunch with another woman besides your wife or your daughter unless there's another dozen people there."

Some watching the conference online criticized the idea that women were sexually misleading their pastors and that few women were represented in the audience or on the panels.

Bethancourt said the low ratio of women makes sense because the event is for Southern Baptist pastors, and women are not permitted to be those.