LOUISVILLE, Ky. – When Stella Harville brought her black boyfriend to her family’s all-white church in rural Kentucky, she thought nothing of it. She and Ticha Chikuni worshipped there whenever they were in town, and he even sang before the congregation during one service.
Then in August, a member of Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church told Harville’s father that Chikuni couldn’t sing there anymore. And last Sunday, in a moment that seems from another time, church members voted 9-6 to bar mixed-race couples from joining the congregation.
The policy has drawn a firestorm of criticism in just a few days and sent church leaders scrambling to overturn it, perhaps as early as Sunday. The executive secretary of the church’s national organization said he has been inundated with angry phone calls, and had an inch-high stack of emails printed out on his desk.
“We are not a group of racist people,” said Keith Burden of the National Association of Free Will Baptists. “We have been labeled that obviously because of the actions of nine people.”
The resolution approved by the Gulnare church says it does not condone interracial marriage and “parties of such marriages will not be received as members, nor will they be used
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