"We're Picking the Country's Chief Executive, Not its Senior Pastor."

Deseret News:

The Reverend Myke Crowder, pastor of Christian Life Center in Layton, one of the largest evangelical congregations in Utah, took issue with Dr. Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of the 10,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, for his remarks last week during the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., in which he said that the LDS Church is a non-Christian cult.

Republican presidential candidate former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney addresses an audience during a campaign stop at Robies Country Store, in Hooksett, N.H., Monday, Oct. 10, 2011. Rev. Crowder, a member of the executive council of the National Clergy Council, doesn't see it that way.

"As an evangelical, born again, Bible believing Christian, and a pastor with more than 25 years' experience living with and ministering among a majority Mormon population, I find the comments by Pastor Jeffress unhelpful, impolite, and out of place," Rev. Crowder indicated in a statement issued over the weekend. "I've been around long enough to remember when independent Baptists wouldn't pray with Southern Baptists, when fundamentalists called Southern Baptists compromisers and liberals, when Southern Baptists wouldn't keep company with Pentecostals, and when Pentecostals wouldn't keep company with Catholics. That wasn't helpful to anyone. Insulting Mitt Romney adds nothing to the conversation about who should be president. We're picking the country's chief executive, not its senior pastor."