Holmeswood Church in Kansas City Drops “Baptist” to Welcome LGBT Community

Holmeswood Baptist Church in South Kansas City has rebranded itself as simply Holmeswood Church to be inclusive regardless of gender or sexual identity.

The church’s new tagline is “Baptist Roots, Inclusive Branches,” Baptist News Global reports.

“We lost some folks along the way; about 10 percent that did not support this and didn’t come back,” Senior Pastor David McDaniel said. “But this is the healthiest Holmeswood has been in the 15 years I have been here, and we are all rowing in the same direction.”

The new culture began with a 2016 strategic plan that included dropping its previous tagline, “A Different Kind of Baptist.” The project was inspired in part by the widespread legalization of same-sex marriage, and some LGBTQ people raised in the church asking if they could be married there.

“It broke my heart to have to say, ‘I don’t know; this is part of the conversation we as a church were going to have to have,’” McDaniel said. “In 2016, we were not yet open and affirming. That didn’t happen until the end of 2020.”

The church also had to figure out what to do with the word “Baptist” and whether it should be included at all.

“Because of that, we decided as a congregation to move ‘Baptist’ from our main church name and move it to our tagline so we can more distinctly and thankfully and positively describe who we are,” he said. “We firmly believe each individual has full access to God and to the divine, that individuals can read and interpret the scriptures for themselves, that they don’t have to go through some intermediary (for salvation) and that decisions are made by the local church.”

Holmeswood continues to choose which associations and partnerships it deems appropriate and lets new members know upfront that the polity and structure of the congregation is Baptist, he said.

“We don’t want there to be a bait-and-switch about who we are,” McDaniel said. “We are not running from the fact that we are Baptist. But we are also trying to provocatively and paradoxically connect that word to the welcoming aspect. That’s where we came up with the ‘Inclusive Branches’ part of our tagline.”

The church was founded in 1955 to serve the growing neighborhoods of South Kansas City. It would go on to leave the Southern Baptist Convention in the last decade.

–Alan Goforth