Battle within church hits the spotlight

See PEW, Extra 7PEW: It's not black and whiteFROM Extra 1 Waynesville, N.C., is an unlikely target for the national media spotlight.

Its residents - there are fewer than 10,000 of them - live about half a mile high on the eastern slope of the Appalachians not too far from Asheville.

United Methodists might be familiar with the name if they've visited their denominational conference center at Lake Junaluska, which is nearby. Otherwise you might have lived in blithe ignorance that such a place even existed - were it not for the funny goings-on at East Waynesville Baptist Church.

Nine church members say they were expelled from membership in the congregation because of their political leanings - in this case, that they weren't supportive of President Bush during his re-election campaign.

It is, in journalism lingo, a sexy story.

We all react viscerally to stories of basic unfairness - all the more so when it erupts in a Christian setting where we expect better.

The national media latched onto it quickly, spreading the tale of the 33-year-old pastor who reportedly told his congregants last fall that if they planned to vote for John Kerry they should leave the church.

Nine of them say they were finally kicked out a couple of weeks ago in what they contend was an improperly called congregational meeting.

Difficult story

Frankly, I cringed at the early national reporting on this story.

For one thing, the initial reports had the look of conservative bashing simply because they didn't include any response from the pastor. But that turned out to be the Rev. Chan Chandler's own fault because he refused to speak to the media after the first TV story ran.

He ended up not talking to reporters until last Sunday when he faced them sitting in his church's pews at the first service after the ousting.

Another problem was that the first stories referred to the "excommunication" of the members.

Technically, excommunication is a correct term for the exclusion of members from a church. But Protestants in general - and Baptists in particular - rarely use the word in referring to such an expulsion.

Excommunication is associated primarily with Catholicism, and it is a fairly complex doctrine with consequences that can range from exclusion from the sacraments to shunning outside the church. It's not tantamount to a sentence of damnation to hell but is believed to be binding in the afterlife if the sinner dies unrepentant.

Outside evaluators

I had a strong gut reaction when I first read the story that there was far more to it than we were reading. Church disputes are rarely simple black-and-white matters, and I doubt that this one was either.

On the other hand, it did have all the earmarks of an abuse of power and, potentially, of a violation of the principle of separation of church and state. (Nobody needs to write in to tell me that the Constitution does not contain that phrase. It does, however, contain the concept.)

In more than 15 years of covering religion for The Roanoke Times, I've listened to many pastors who obviously supported one political candidate or party over another, and who let their congregations know that.

But I have never heard of a pastor saying, "Vote my way or hit the highway."

Chandler, through his attorney, denies having said anything like that, and he insists the members were not expelled for their political views. He pretty much has to say that or risk losing his church's tax-exempt status, so many remain unconvinced.

Interestingly, however, he's the one who hit the highway, resigning last week.

Every religious congregation has a right, of course, to decide who its members will be and whether any of them have strayed so far from the tenets of their faith that they should be expelled.