Here’s a warning to reporters who are preparing for future national meetings of the Southern Baptist Convention: Never call these folks “delegates.”
They are not delegates at some kind of political event. They are “messengers” from their local autonomous churches. You see, this isn’t some kind of cocktail-hour mainline Protestant denominational whatever, and many Baptists don’t like the word “denomination,” either. This is a “convention” and it only meets for three days each year.
Use the wrong language and Southern Baptists will give you a steely gaze and then say something nasty, like “Well, bless your heart.”
Quite a few journalists attended this year’s SBC meeting because there were headline-worthy — from their editors’ point of view — topics on the agenda, like clergy sexual abuse, Critical Race Theory and an election to determine if some new-breed conservative “pirates” (that was their term from 2021) were going to wrest the wheel of the ship away from the allegedly “woke” establishment conservatives.
As you would imagine, host Todd Wilken and I dug into all of this during the “Crossroads” podcast this week (CLICK HERE to tune that in). One of the big themes was that the hard-news coverage of this convention — especially by “Location, location, location” pros from major SBC centers, like Houston and Nashville — was top-notch.
Veteran GetReligion scribe Bobby “Positive” Ross, Jr., will offer pages of URLs in his Plug-In feature this week, so I will not try to do that (I’ll post a link when it goes public). But this is what happens when major newsrooms send religion-beat professionals to cover a major event. Readers don’t have to agree with every single thing that they saw in the #SBC2022 coverage, but what we had here was a tsunami of serious coverage from professionals, backed by the skilled Baptist Press team running the on-site newsroom.
With that in mind, let me note a Big Ideas from this podcast.
* If you study attendance numbers at previous “hot” SBC meetings, you will notice a logical trend linked to a map of the Bible Belt. In this online list, note the 1985 Dallas convention drew 45,519 messengers and the 1986 Atlanta convention drew 40,987.
Yes, these were the pivotal years in the historic “conservative resurgence” in SBC life. But, truth is, those numbers also reflect how far ordinary messengers can drive in one day jammed into the buses or vans owned by “ordinary” SBC congregations. Once again, “Location, location, location.”
Did this help “establishment” SBC messengers — more than a few of them with travel funds since they work for SBC agencies, boards, seminaries, etc. — in the voting this year? Of course it did. It’s a long, long way from the Bible Belt to California, especially in a converted school bus.
Will numbers rise next year in New Orleans? I would think so. Reporters may also want to ask question about the degree to which messengers — on both sides of the current controversies — are receiving stipends to help with travel expenses.
* What happens next in the sexual abuse story? In this week’s “On Religion” column for the Universal syndicate, I focused on a “friendly” amendment to the recommendations for future actions on this complicated subject. The key word: “Polity.” Here is the top of that column:
Before the Southern Baptist Convention’s strong vote to approve what supporters called “bare minimum” sexual abuse reforms — with victims in the crowd weeping with relief — there was a strategic amendment to the recommendations.
Rather than stay with the independent Guidepost Solutions organization, the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force would seek to use “best practices in keeping with Southern Baptist church polity,” while a “Ministry Check” website tracking those “credibly accused” of abuse would be “established and maintained by an independent contractor.”
Before the vote, activist, attorney and #ChurchToo abuse survivor Rachael Denhollander pleaded: “Institutions must be held accountable. It doesn’t matter who they are. Justice and truth are always what we should pursue.”
As I have stressed in recent months, here at GetReligion, the key will be whether leaders at the SBC’s 47.000 autonomous congregations cooperate (a big word in SBC polity) with new programs to fight sexual abuse and spotlight abusers. Could the SBC punish churches that don’t cooperate? Hold that thought.
* If you know the history of the SBC sexual-abuse story, you know the pivotal role that investigative reporters at the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News played in digging out the details that forced action (click here for the “Abuse of Faith” online files).
The polity issue, and the location of this convention, played a major role in one of the wrap-up reports from the Chronicle: “‘The hunter is now the hunted’: Southern Baptists vow to do more to stop sexual abuse.” Here is a crucial block of that material, including a reference to the election of the Rev. Bart Barber, a Texas pastor, as president of the national convention — with the power to make the crucial appointments to nominating committees that “steer the ship.”
It quickly became clear that the conservative faction was fighting an uphill battle. On Monday, the SBC’s executive committee elected a new chair, Arlington pastor Jared Wellman, who has been an outspoken advocate for survivors. He called for stronger safeguards in the SBC’s 47,000 churches.
And on Tuesday, more than 8,000 Southern Baptists overwhelmingly approved a pair of reforms that include creating a database of credibly accused ministers, employees and volunteers that congregations can consult when hiring. Survivors had requested such a mechanism dating back to 2007, saying the SBC’s lack of consistent ordination standards or central records had allowed sexual predators to abuse, repent and find new victims at other churches.
Tuesday evening, Barber won the SBC presidency with 60 percent of votes, edging out the Conservative Baptist Network’s preferred candidate, Florida pastor Tom Ascol, in a runoff election.
* One big drama in Anaheim focused on questions about the future status of the massive Saddleback Church (the SBC’s largest) and its superstar leader, the Rev. Rick “Purpose Driven Life” Warren (who is poised to retire). The issue is that this megachurch recently ordained three women as “pastors” — violating the amended 2000 version of the “Baptist Faith and Message,” which states:
While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.
This raises a question linked to a number of other hot-button issues, including racism, sexual abuse, LGBTQ rights, etc. There are stories here that transcend the ordination of women as generic “pastors” and/or “senior pastors.”
To what degree is the SBC, with its freewheeling “priesthood of the believer” heritage, now a “confessional” body that can punish autonomous congregations for their violations of the “Baptist Faith and Message”? Oh, you may recall that both Bill Clinton and Pat Robertson are both Southern Baptists, to one degree or another.
Here is a high-altitude analysis, care of the left-of-center Baptist News Global: “Southern Baptists approve sexual abuse response and debate doctrinal parameters.” This is long, but essential:
Southern Baptists spent their annual meeting debating how tight the doctrinal boundaries should be around the denomination’s fellowship.
Sexual abusers are out. But so are members of the LGBTQ community and those who support them. Women pastors are out, although a study will be continued on use of the word “pastor” in churches. Abortion is definitely out. Doctrinal compromise of nearly any kind is out. Racism is out. Gun violence is frowned upon but without calling for any gun control.
What happened when Warren stepped to a microphone on the convention floor?
Warren likened himself to a man who was about to be executed and should be allowed to offer final words. His comments repeatedly indicated he did not anticipate being part of the SBC by next year.
Nevertheless, he read what he called a “love letter” to the SBC. He described himself as a fourth-generation Southern Baptist who was educated at an SBC seminary and enabled as a church planter by the SBC. Not only is Saddleback the largest church in the convention, it has planted 90 more SBC churches in Orange County alone, he said. He spoke of the tens of thousands of people who have been baptized at Saddleback, the vast number who have received theological education and church-planter training.
Already, the convention allows room for those who do not believe God wants to save all people on earth, he said, a slam against the SBC’s neo-Calvinists.
“We have to decide if we’re gonna treat each other as allies or adversaries,” Warren said. “Are we gonna keep bickering over secondary issues or are we gonna keep the main thing the main thing?”
In conclusion, I could note quite a few other themes and potential stories that popped up during this 45-minute (you have been warned) discussion.
Including this one: At what point will the SBC discuss whether many or most of its clergy are qualified to do “pastoral counseling,” an emotionally charged setting that — for decades — has frequently led to sexual intimacy between pastors and members of their flocks?
As the late, great professional counselor — Dr. Louis McBurney — once told me:
Ministers may spend up to half their office hours counseling, which can be risky since most ministers are men and most active church members are women. If a woman bares her soul, and her pastor responds by sharing his own personal pain, the result can be "as destructive and decisive as reaching for a zipper," McBurney said.
Should youth ministers be privately “counseling” young people, at all?
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FIRST IMAGE: Screen shot from WFAA-ABC news report (featured in this post) about the 2022 SBC gathering in Anaheim.