---

Pastor, 35 more leave church
The pastor of a Waynesville Baptist church who tried to force his political views on his members resigned Tuesday night, taking a few dozen members with him.

The Rev. Chan Chandler, pastor of East Waynesville Baptist Church in the Blue Ridge Mountains, did not apologize for the division he caused and said only that his underlying concern was to save unborn babies from abortion....

...But others said the church battle was another example of the Southern Baptist Convention's conservative shift in recent years and its emphasis on a literal interpretation of Scripture.

"When you believe in an inerrant Bible, then the next step is to have an inerrant interpreter and then an inerrant morality," said Bill Leonard, the dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem....