Huffington Post –
PRYOR CREEK, Okla. (RNS) Pryor
Creek, Okla., is gun country.
Located midway between Tulsa and
Siloam Springs, Ark., the town of approximately 8,500 sits in the heart of
Oklahoma’s greenbelt. Hunting and fishing are simply part of everyday life in
Pryor, as it is known to locals.
Derek Melton is the assistant
chief of police in Pryor, as well as senior pastor at Pryor Creek Community
Church, a congregation he describes as Baptist, but not Southern Baptist.
“We follow the 1833 Baptist
Confession,” Melton said. “We are an historically evangelical church.”
The confession is better known as
the New Hampshire Baptist Confession of 1833, and there are very few churches
around the country that subscribe to it. They answer to no denominational
headquarters, no bishop, no overarching authority, except the Holy Spirit as
mediated through the congregation.
Pryor Creek Community Church is
also one of a few dozen churches around the country that are offering concealed
carry certification classes as a way to reach out to non-Christians and attract
new members. Melton sees no conflict between being a Christian and possessing
weapons.
“The disciples carried weapons,” Melton said. “Peter cut a man’s ear off. I
believe if more honest citizens were armed, the safer our communities would
be.”
Melton’s position is shared by
pastors in churches all over the country, including congregations in North
Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.
But in the wake of the massacre at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman killed 20
first-graders and six adults, such sentiments are coming under sharp criticism
from fellow Christians.
“I understand where the people who
disagree with me are coming from,” said Richard Cizik of the New Evangelical
Partnership for the Common Good. ”But what these churches are proposing
compromises the essential message of the gospel, that Jesus was first of all a
peacemaker.”
Ryan Bennett is the senior pastor
of Faith Baptist Church in Lexington, N.C. His Southern Baptist congregation
has offered concealed carry training classes in the past, and he said they will
offer them again.
Bennett is frank in describing the
classes as outreach. “Outreach is the only reason we do it,” he said. “We’ve
had two classes of 80 people each, and we have a waiting list and calls coming
in all the time.”
Both churches have been the
subject of local criticism, but both pastors shrug it off.
“The church can’t really do anything
without being criticized,” Bennett said. “Our local paper ran letters to the
editor with negative reactions. Our people knew it wasn’t about bringing
pistols to church, though; it was about outreach.”
Cizik, who was a top official at
the National Association of Evangelicals before leaving it and helping form his
new group, said he is concerned about churches using weapons training as a
means to reach non-Christians.
“I grew up in gun country,” Cizik
said. “I am not intrinsically anti-Second Amendment; however, this seems to be
an ethically suspect message. The gospel should be ‘Put your faith in Christ.’
This seems to be ‘Put your faith in Glock.’”
Cizik said he believes it’s
difficult to make a hard and fast judgment about the method, though. He
believes gun ownership and even concealed carry permits are matters of personal
judgment.
“The church has always used a
variety of methods for drawing people in,” he said. “However, I do think that
there are plenty of organizations more suitable that could be doing the
training.”
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