Southern Baptist Convention grappling with critical issues
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Southern Baptist Convention held its largest gathering in decades Tuesday amid debates over race and sexual abuse, a concerted effort to push the conservative denomination even further to the right and a bellwether election to pick its next president.
Nearly 15,000 church representatives were on hand as the meeting began with prayers for unity.
Immediately after, debate began on the hot-button controversies that have roiled the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Members heard an impassioned plea for survivors of sexual abuse and were asked to consider competing resolutions on critical race theory, an academic theory on structural racism that has been a target of religious and political conservatives.
Tennessee pastor Grant Gaines, speaking with an abuse survivor at his side, proposed a task force that would oversee a sweeping review of the denomination’s response to sexual abuse — a broader investigation than the one announced last week by the SBC’s Executive Committee.
“I stand with SBC church abuse survivors, and right now I’m standing beside one such SBC church abuse survivor,” Gaines said.
Others proposed actions that would repudiate critical race theory, including one to rescind a 2019 resolution that said the theory could be a useful tool.
The SBC’s resolutions committee floated a resolution that didn’t name critical race theory but rejected any view that sees racism as rooted in “anything other than sin.”
The committee also reaffirmed a 1995 resolution apologizing for the history of racism in a denomination founded in 1845 in support of slavery and apologized for “condoning and/ or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”
Separately the committee proposed a resolution declaring that “any person who has committed sexual abuse is permanently disqualified from holding the office of pastor.”
SBC churches are self-governing, and critics have said the denomination hasn’t done enough to exclude congregations that mishandle abuse.
The representatives, known as messengers, gave final approvals to constitutional amendments excluding churches that affirm ethnic discrimination or act against the convention’s “beliefs regarding sexual abuse.” Still to be debated was how those standards apply in practice.
In an enthusiastically applauded address, outgoing president J.D. Greear, himself a target of criticism from the Conservative Baptist Network, lamented “the slander, the distortion, the character assassination and baseless accusations” some SBC leaders have endured.