Baptists pass measures on race and sex abuse

Alabama pastor elected as new leader

Race and sexual abuse were among the top issues that Southern Baptists voted on Tuesday during the opening day of their annual meeting in Nashville.

The nation's largest Protestant denomination's gathering drew more than 15,000 delegates to the city's Music City Center, the most people to gather for the occasion in the past 25 years.

Members of the faith are gathering on the heels of newly released data from Lifeway Christian Resources showing that the number of Southern Baptists has dropped to slightly more than 14 million members, the 14th consecutive decrease for the denomination.

The meeting was the faith's first since 2019; the June 2020 meeting scheduled for Orlando, Fla., was canceled because of the covid-19 pandemic, and J.D. Greear, lead pastor of the Durham, N.C.-based Summit Church, remained the convention's president for an additional year.

The delegates Tuesday chose as their new leader Ed Litton, a candidate with moderate views known for working toward racial reconciliation. That decision has come the year after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer resulted in nationwide protests and renewed conversations about race, and after at least two years of contention concerning the handling of race within the faith group.

Greear in his farewell address emphasized the ideology of critical race theory -- an academic study of race on an institutional level -- as being one that "arises out of a world view at odds with the Gospel," but validated the need to address racism within the denomination.

"It is clear that as a convention we need to clarify and strengthen our position on it," Greear said. "And we must make certain ... to clarify [that] what we think about [critical race theory] is accompanied by a pledge to fight with [non-white faith members] against all forms of discrimination.

In tandem with Greear's words, delegates voted down a measure taking a stance against critical race theory, although the academic term was not used in the proposal.

Delegates also voted a second time to allow the denomination to cast out congregations that allow race discrimination to continue, achieving the two consecutive annual votes to finalize the decision.

A similar measure on sex abuse passed, making the mishandling of sex abuse cases also criteria for expulsion from the convention. Both measures give the denomination a measure of control over churches in a faith in which each congregation is viewed as independent and self-governing.

Litton, senior pastor of Redemption Church in Saraland, Ala., was elected the convention's next president by a vote of 6,834 to 6,278 in a runoff election against Mike Stone, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Blackshear, Ga.

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