Norman pastor gets ethics post
The Baptist Center for Ethics’ board has named the Rev. Mitch Randall, pastor of NorthHaven Church, as its executive director.
NORMAN — The Rev. Mitch Randall, pastor of NorthHaven Church, has been named executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics.
Randall, 47, has been leader at NorthHaven since 2006. He will succeed the Baptist Center for Ethics’ founding Executive Director Robert Parham, who died in March.
The ethics organization is an independently run ministry partner of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a network of moderate Baptist churches and organizations.
Baptist News Global reported that the organization’s directors began a search for Parham’s successor shortly after his death, culminating with a unanimous vote in midOctober to offer the job to Randall effective Jan. 1.
“BCE’s board believes our country and world need the organization now more than ever and is confident in Mitch’s ability to lead the organization into a bright future,” Kevin Heifner, board chairman told the news outlet.
Baptist News Global said Parham, at the time a young ethicist serving on staff of the Christian Life Commission (now Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) of the Southern Baptist Convention, announced formation of the Baptist Center for Ethics in 1991 for the purpose of uniting moderate Baptists around “a new way to do ethics” different from the Religious Right.
According to Baptist News Global, it was among the first of several new entities that cropped up alongside the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in the aftermath of a schism in the nation’s largest Protestant body that pushed progressive and moderate voices aside as conservatives and fundamentalists ascended into positions of SBC leadership.
Randall has pledged to continue the agency’s trajectory of upholding Baptist traditions while building ecumenical relationships with other Christians and other people of faith.
A native of Oklahoma, Randall served as pastor at churches in Kansas and Texas before joining NorthHaven, a congregation started as a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship church plant in 2003.
Randall is co-founder and a director of Pastors for Oklahoma Kids, a coalition that recently formed to vocalize support for public school teachers and to oppose attempts to redistribute tax dollars earmarked for education from public to private schools. He and his wife Missy have two sons.