WASHINGTON (ABP) — A neo-Calvinist may face an evangelist for first vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention this summer — in addition to the meeting's contested presidential race.
Mark Dever, pastor of the Washington's Capitol Hill Baptist Church and a popular leader among SBC Calvinists, acknowledged May 24 that he would allow himself to be nominated for the post. Several members of a group of leaders concerned over the denomination's direction have been mentioning Dever's name for several weeks as a potential nominee for SBC office.
Dever's acknowledgement came two days after the denomination's official news service reported that a Georgia evangelist would also be nominated for the post.
Keith Fordham, an evangelist from Fayetteville, Ga., will run for the slot, according to a May 22 Baptist Press report. Fordham is the immediate past president of the Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists. The organization's current president, Bill Britt, made the announcement and said he would nominate his colleague.
“Dr. Fordham is a dynamic and deeply spiritual evangelist who has been used mightily of God to impact our convention through his preaching and leadership,” Britt, a fellow evangelist who lives in Gallatin, Tenn., reportedly said.
According to the news release, Fordham said he would focus on evangelism as an SBC officer. “Of all the denominations on earth, none has a greater opportunity of fulfilling the Great Commission than Southern Baptists. It is in our grasp,” he said. “We must all work together in the 'unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace'. Let Southern Baptists join Jesus in an all-out effort to seek and save those who are lost.”
Dever said he has indicated to several inquirers his willingness to allow his name to be placed in nomination, although none of them has promised that they will, in fact, nominate him. “I'm quite happy to turn up at the convention in Greensboro [N.C., where the denomination will meet in June] and not be nominated; that's actually my preference,” Dever told an Associated Baptist Press reporter. “But if it's helpful and doesn't take a major time commitment,” he said, he will allow himself to be nominated.
Dever said “a number of people” had approached him about being nominated for the VP office — which is largely ceremonial in the SBC — as well as the presidential nomination. He said the time commitment associated with the SBC presidency would cause him to decline a nomination for that position, but that he would serve in the vice-presidential slot.
Dever said he could not characterize those who inquired about nominating him as coming from any particular ideological niche or constituency within Southern Baptist life, but that there were “a bunch of people” who asked him, and that “some of them were definitely not Calvinists.”
If he is nominated, Dever will be among a group of candidates for office in what will likely amount to the most contentious SBC annual meeting since fundamentalists solidified their control of the denomination in the early 1990s.
Already, two nominees for the presidential post have been announced. Ronnie Floyd, pastor of First Baptist Church in Springdale, Ark., is widely believed to be the favored candidate of the denomination's conservative power structure. His opponent, Frank Page, pastor of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., will likely be favored by a broad coalition of SBC conservatives who are concerned about the denomination's direction and its inclusiveness of supporters not in the inner circle of powerful conservative megachurch pastors.
Dever said that he is only responding to requests from other Southern Baptist leaders. “I don't really keep up with denominational politics; I want to see Capitol Hill evangelized,” he said. “We like the SBC, and we want to give them money…but I like to stay focused on the local church.”
Dever's historic congregation, which dates from the 1870s and is located just five blocks from the United States Capitol, currently has 533 members, according to Dever's assistant, Mike Law. However, unlike the vast majority of Southern Baptist churches, its average Sunday-morning attendance exceeds membership. The congregation requires members to attend regularly, contribute and meet certain doctrinal standards to remain in good standing, Law and Dever said. Because of its location, near the homes of many transient young congressional staffers, Capitol Hill Baptist also regularly gets hundreds of Sunday-morning visitors.
Dever said his church had about $1.9 million in undesignated receipts in 2005 and forwarded $150,500, or 7.5 percent of that total, to the Southern Baptist Convention. The church stopped contributing to the national denomination through the District of Columbia Baptist Convention after the SBC's North American Mission Board de-funded the convention in 2002. According to multiple DCBC sources, Capitol Hill was one of two member churches whose leaders raised concerns with SBC officials about alleged liberalism in the small regional convention.
Dever said Capitol Hill Baptist sends its SBC budget giving directly to the denomination's Executive Committee and doesn't pass it through any other state convention to the SBC's Cooperative Program unified budget.
Fordham, meanwhile, is a member of Harp's Crossing Baptist Church in Fayetteville. The congregation, which listed an average Sunday-morning attendance of 870 in 2005, reported $1.57 million in undesignated receipts that year and forwarded $157,813, or 10 percent, to the Cooperative Program. It also gave $48,265 for the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions and $26,994 for the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions.
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