Southern Baptists voice their disagreement with the Boy Scouts' acceptance of gay scouts during an annual convention, according to reports.
The outrage sparks from the Boy Scouts of America voting to allow gay youths to join their programs.
The Southern Baptist Convention gathered for its annual, four-day meeting in Houston starting June 12. More than two-thirds of Boy Scout troops are reportedly sponsored by religious organizations, and Baptists are the nation's largest protestant denomination.
"There will be a mass exodus over time," Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, told the convention audience. "Churches are finally going to have to come to realize - there is a point when you say, 'sorry, no more.'"
Baptists taking away their funding would reportedly have detrimental effects on the organization.
The convention leaders did not ask churches to stop sponsoring troops, but rather urged goers to push for the Boy Scout vote to be reversed.
"We express our well-founded concern that the current executive leadership of the BSA, along with certain board members, may utilize this membership policy change as merely the first step toward future approval of homosexual leaders in the Scouts," Page said, according to Fox News.
Convention leaders believe the that the Boy Scouts have lost sight of what the organization means for youth.
"I am very sad to say that it seems as though [Boy Scouts] are moving away from the principles they were founded upon," Wes Taylor, pastor at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Newport News, Virginia, said during the debate at the annual convention. "It is an environment just fertile for young boys to be exposed to something that is ungodly and unacceptable."
Not all of the religious organizations that sponsor the organization agree with the Southern Baptists. Mormons, Methodists and Catholics have all reportedly insisted that their churches continue to sponsor Boy Scout troops despite their policy change.
