"As far as I'm concerned and the church is concerned, this case will be closed as of tomorrow," Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church pastor Stacy Stepp said Saturday, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. "We will ... get back on the right track and continue to win souls for the Lord." Stepp had approached the Sandy Valley Conference of Free Will Baptists, which consists of 13 Pike County churches, with a request for help after the church ignited a firestorm of criticism by voting 9-6 last Sunday to approve a statement saying it didn't condone interracial marriage. The conference met Saturday and released a statement saying it had reviewed the situation and concluded that the vote was of no effect because it "was not carried out in accordance with" Robert's Rules of Order, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader, and would therefore require a change in the church bylaws. Stella Harville is white; her fiancé is black. Harville is in graduate school in Indiana and Chikuni is working at Georgetown College, but when the couple visits Harville's parents in Pike County, Ky., they usually go to church with her parents. Dean Harville, a longtime member and church clerk, said a former pastor who attends the church, Melvin Thompson, proposed that the church make a statement against interracial marriage after Harville's daughter, Stella, brought her fiancé to a worship service last summer and the two performed a song. Thompson has since been replaced with a new pastor who said that everyone was welcome at the church and the Harville family said the issue was dropped, but at a recent meeting Thompson, who is still a member of the congregation, brought up the issue again and asked that it be discussed at a business meeting among the church's men. Parties of such marriages will not be received as members, nor will they be used in worship services and other church functions, with the exception being funerals."
– A Kentucky pastor has nullified a vote by his church to ban interracial couples, he says. “As far as I'm concerned and the church is concerned, this case will be closed as of tomorrow,” said Stacy Stepp on Saturday, after raising the issue with a council of local church leaders. The group ruled that the vote had no weight because parishioners hadn’t followed proper voting rules, ABC News reports. Stepp opposed the vote in the first place, he told the Lexington Herald-Leader.