Southern Baptist leaders promote strength as top committee faces increased instability
The Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative committee is dealing with a moment of heightened instability, yet its leaders sought to project strength this week.
The SBC Executive Committee recently laid off staff to balance its operating budget and is having trouble securing an interim chief executive amid a search for a permanent one. Meanwhile, the SBC is wrestling with major debates about abuse reform and the terms by which churches affiliate with the nation's largest Protestant denomination.
“The mission abroad is hindered when we have serious problems at home," Jonathan Howe, the executive committee’s interim president and CEO, said in an address on Monday night. "And that is where we are.”
Howe, who has served as the committee’s vice president of communications since 2019, stepped into the interim role following the recent resignation of former interim president and CEO Willie McLaurin due to revelations that McLaurin falsified academic credentials.
The executive committee manages the business for the Nashville-based denomination outside the two-day SBC annual meeting. The committee — comprised of an 86-member board of elected representatives and about 20 staff — met in Nashville on Monday and Tuesday.
“At the SBC executive committee, we are facing significant challenges,” Howe said in his address on Monday. “Over the past few years, we have repeatedly learned of distressing actions that could not be ignored and the cost of addressing them have been very high.”
Howe’s assessment would prove even truer a day later when a candidate to replace Howe as interim president and CEO — Dan Summerlin, a retired Kentucky pastor — withdrew his name for consideration in a last-minute decision.
Due to Summerlin’s withdrawal, Howe agreed to continue serving on an interim basis in the committee’s highest-ranking staff position. Meanwhile, a presidential search team comprised of executive committee members is recruiting and evaluating candidates for the permanent post.
The same presidential search team discovered McLaurin’s falsified academic credentials when it was considering McLaurin for the top job. At its meeting Tuesday, the executive committee addressed the findings of a more comprehensive investigation into McLaurin.
It's been nearly two years since the executive committee has had a permanent top leader. It’s a product of broader division in the SBC between mainstream conservatives versus opposition conservatives, who want to pull the denomination further to the right.
The factionalism in the denomination is present at the SBC annual meetings and during SBC Executive Committee meetings. Divisions over abuse reform and an abuse investigation, which caused a series of resignations among executive committee staff and some of its members in 2021, persist today.
SBC president addresses turmoil
SBC President Bart Barber, whose emphasis on compromise has appealed to many Southern Baptists and helped ensure his recent reelection, spoke to the present strife during an address to the executive committee on Monday.
“What I am describing to you are the circumstances the executive committee of the SBC faced in the earliest days of its existence,” said Barber in his address Monday. “It commenced its work in a milieu of monetary shortfalls, leadership scandals, doctrinal conflict and political humiliation.”
Barber, a Texas pastor who has a Ph.D. in Baptist history, compared the present tumultuousness in the SBC with that of 100 years ago.
The SBC didn’t establish key institutions until the early-to-mid 20th-century. Those included the executive committee, the Cooperative Program budget, and the first iteration of the Baptist Faith & Message, which is the denomination’s doctrinal statement.
“Amidst all these controversies, instead of allowing themselves to become embattled and distracted, Southern Baptists chose to be bold and courageous at the very moment people would be tempted to hunker down and ride out the storm,” Barber said in his address on Monday.
Barber encouraged Southern Baptists today to mirror their forebearers.
“If we’re able to bring our churches back to the table and finding a working agreement to cooperate,” Barber said on Monday, “that is something that will still be touching people a century from now.”
Barber mentioned a new SBC Cooperation Group, the members of which he appointed, as a means of promoting unity. The cooperation group will study what it means for a church to be in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC and is a response to a debate about SBC churches with women pastors.
SBC President Bart Barber in-depth: Bart Barber defied the Conservative Resurgence. How it is now shaping his SBC leadership.
Other executive committee news: Oklahoma church ousted from SBC for racism after pastor wears blackface
Abuse reform efforts continue
Meanwhile, the SBC Abuse Reform Task Force updated the executive committee on the task force’s progress in its second year of work. Messengers, the convention's voting delegates, overwhelmingly voted to renew the abuse reform task force at this year’s annual meeting in New Orleans.
Mike Keahbone, vice chair of the abuse reform task force and an executive committee member, said in an address on Monday the task force anticipates publishing “very soon” an initial set of names on a new database of ministers credibly accused of abuse.
The abuse reform task force has focused most of its energy on the database, called Ministry Safe, and had hoped to launch it sooner. It’s faced unanticipated challenges with vetting names that it will publish on the database.
In another key update, he said the abuse reform task force is actively working on a proposal for a long-term home for abuse reform in the SBC. The task force is only temporary, so it’s exploring whether an existing SBC agency continues the work or if it's better for the convention to establish something new.
“As a convention of churches of the SBC, we will not retreat from this fight,” Keahbone said. "God has given us a mission by our messengers, and we will fulfill it to its end."
Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on Twitter @liamsadams.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: SBC leaders promote strength amid instability at top committee meeting
