What is Highland Baptist Church?

On Good Friday Highland Baptist Church was represented at the Ecumenical Walk for Justice by the following:

• a gay man named Bojangles with a Cajun lilt to his voice
• a widow who oozes charm, dignity, and liberality
• a child-like man with a minimal education and a deep faith
• a brand new member
• an absent member, present in her beautifully-written reflection for the 11th Station of the Cross
• and me.

At first glance the group appears rag-tag, an odd array of people who call Highland home.

And yet it’s completely representative of the diverse and disparate community that God is forming around Highland each day.  

We don’t choose who joins.  They come at Christ’s invitation to bring who they are, and what they have, to join in the company of people who have discovered that any church that says “Welcome!” better mean it.  It’s God way.

As Paul told the church in Corinth, 

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

True dat.