By David Roach
Baptist Press

Charlie Fuller, chairman of the CBF’s Illumination Project Committee, presents a report to the CBF General Assembly June 29. -Screen capture from CBFblog.com
DECATUR, Ga. — The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Governing Board has voted to lift the Fellowship’s “absolute prohibition” of hiring homosexual and transgender employees.
But CBF “leadership positions in ministry” and missionary roles still will be limited to individuals “who practice a traditional Christian sexual ethic of celibacy in singleness or faithfulness in marriage between a woman and man,” according to a hiring “implementation procedure” also adopted by the Governing Board. Other positions will be open to “Christians who identify as LGBT.”
The new hiring policy and implementation procedure — adopted Feb. 9 at a CBF Governing Board meeting in Decatur, Ga. — replace the previous CBF hiring policy, which prohibited “the purposeful hiring of a staff person or the sending of a missionary who is a practicing homosexual.” [Read more…]


