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Te comment seems like a natural segue to the next question: What does the hierar- chy at the powerful Southern Baptist Con- vention, of which Highland is no longer a member, think of all this? "Tey pray for us every day, I'm sure," Dinwiddie says with no small hint of sar- casm. "Tey disdain us." T "I grew up in a conservative Baptist home, and I had a conservative Baptist call- ing. From that context, I was a young con- servative who tried to toe the party line. But there were interpretations of parts of the Gospel that didn't ring true for me." One was the supposed clarity of the Bible in here are times during a conversation with Phelps when he puts away his easy smile and looks down so that you can't see his eyes, which appear far too gentle for someone with a public life. Tat's when he finally looks his age. You notice the gray streaking through his weatherman's hair. But it's the lines under his eyes that reveal, however briefly, the stress of a life he did not expect when he was, as he puts it, a "wannabe juvie delinquent" as a teenager in Dayton, Ohio. (He was arrested once for stealing a car and blowing out a store window with an M80. When his father picked him up from jail, he told his son, "I guess you know you just ruined your life." Te young Phelps returned to chasing girls and drinking beer.) It's not even a life he would have expected when he'd cleaned up his act, found God, and attended Louisville's Southern Baptist Teological Seminary just down the road from Highland Baptist. Tat was back in the 1970s, when Joseph Owen Phelps' path looked obvious and well trod. He would be a Baptist minister like all the rest, a true be- liever and not a contrarian. Even his spiri- tual awakening from his juvie-delinquent- wannabe self had been old-fashioned: Te summer of his 16th year, he was invited to play the drums at a Church youth group and, well, something happened. "To use that old language, I was born again," Phelps says. When Phelps looks down and his world weighs on his shoulders, you wonder if he's thinking about whether he should have hit the Send button that day in Austin, Texas, when he'd finally by-gawd had enough. Late in 1993, while he was serving as the pastor of Church of the Savior, Phelps condemning homosexuals. His piece in the American-Statesman attracted plenty of let- ters to the paper in response, including one from a minister who wrote that a Christian lifestyle and a homosexual lifestyle "are mu- tually exclusive." Phelps himself says he re- ceived hundreds of emails and letters, "even a veiled death threat." He seems embarrassed to have mentioned the threat, leaning back in a chair in his of- fice and re-crossing his legs. His office is a library of books and photographs, including one from his Texas days when he attended the Southern Baptist Convention. In the photo, he stands between two Presbyterian men holding similar signs, one of which reads, "Liberals Should Be Expelled From Southern Baptist Convention." A then-mustachioed Phelps is the only one of the three men smiling. "When he tells me about things he has said or done or written, it scares me a little bit," Terri Phelps says later on the phone. "People can be so mean, and to some ex- tent our livelihood depends on (people's perceptions). But when I read that piece in the Austin paper, I could see that he just so believed in it." Her husband says he was encouraged that his responses ran about "2-to-1 in appre- ciation" of what he wrote, which was that biblical scholars "find little support . . . for blanket condemnation of homosexuals." "From that moment on," Phelps says, "our church was identified with welcoming gay and lesbian people, that God loves you as you are. You are not an abomination." "Austin is liberal for Texas," says his wife, who met Phelps at church in Austin when she was a law student at the University of Texas. "But we were in the suburban part of town, which is actually quite conservative. It wasn't easy." Tree months after Phelps' letter ran in the paper, Church of the Savior split from the Southern Baptist Convention. At the time, only two other churches had quit the SBC, then some 16 million members strong. "It is pretty clear that the conservative fundamentalist group has taken over (the SBC), and, as a church on the opposite ex- treme, we felt shoved out the door," Phelps told the American-Statesman. "Probably the single issue that made some people in the church decide it was time to leave was the strong anti-homosexual stand the conven- tion took at its annual meeting." Phelps would remain at Church of the Savior for another three years. He contin- ued to write, publishing in the Statesman and regularly in a weekly in Cedar Park, Texas, an Austin suburb. He took on the is- sues of the day — and came down squarely on the left. Meanwhile, his church grew Membership at Highland Baptist Church has almost doubled since Phelps took over 15 years ago. Here, he visits with a parishioner after one of his two Sunday services, which typically fill the pews. knocked out a letter to the Austin American- Statesman that was headlined "Anti-gay reading of bible is flawed." Usually he would ask his wife Terri, a lawyer, to proofread letters for him, maybe smooth out some rough edges, cool some hot rhetoric. Tis time Phelps just hit Send. "Tey printed the letter and my life was forever changed," Phelps says. "You could say it was a . . . mi- nority point of view." At issue was a local tax break for Apple Computer Inc., which offered health benefits to same-sex partners. "For days there was an outcry that the city rescind the tax break," Phelps says. "I kept waiting for a pastor to step forward and say something, but nobody did. 2.12 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE [61]