With the election of an outsider president who had strong support from reform-minded pastors, the Southern Baptist Convention may be changing in tone. But substantive changes are still a ways off, say denominational observers.
While there were surprises, messengers to the 2006 SBC meeting by and large supported the status quo, giving reformers one important victory but even more setbacks. And the convention gave almost no indication that it would become friendly once again to the moderates who previously supported it.
In what most saw as a defeat for the convention's conservative power structure, South Carolina pastor Frank Page was elected SBC president June 13. On the first ballot, he beat two candidates with the support from different representatives of the tight network of fundamentalists who have controlled SBC politics since forcing moderates out of the denomination in the 1980s.
Page, pastor of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., was elected on a first ballot by the narrowest of margins (50.48 percent) over two high-profile insiders — Arkansas pastor Ronnie Floyd and Tennessee pastor Jerry Sutto — who each received about a fourth of the 8,961 votes cast.
Page's candidacy got a boost from an upstart network of conservative Baptists. Their postings and the Internet communities created around them repeatedly warned that the ultraconservatives who have dominated the SBC for 27 years have become too insular and exclusivistic.
His election signaled a defeat for the SBC's power brokers, who have hand-picked all but one president since 1979. But the 53-year-old pastor made clear his differences with the SBC elite are not over the letter of the law, but the spirit.
“I'm not trying to undo a conservative movement that I have supported all these years,” he said in a post-election news conference. “I'm an inerrantist — I believe in the Word of God — I'm just not mad about it.”
While he said he would continue the conservative litmus test of appointing only inerrantists to denominational leadership, he promised to bring in fresh blood and conservatives with a “sweet spirit.”
To moderate and centrist Baptist pundits, that meant the denomination may reform, but it won't moderate.
“The 2006 SBC will not go down in history as a major course correction like that of the 1979 convention,” wrote Arkansas Baptist News Editor Charlie Warren, referring to the Houston SBC meeting where fundamentalists began their unbroken string of electing presidents over moderate candidates. “But perhaps historians will view it as a step toward inclusion of more grass-roots Baptists and a slight shift toward new leadership.”
“But fear not,” he continued, “the conservative resurgence of the past almost 30 years is in no danger of unraveling.”
Tony Cartledge, editor of North Carolina Baptists' Biblical Recorder, wrote that Page's election probably signaled a desire on messengers' part for a leader who seems to have a clear vision for the denomination they love and support, rather than doling out presidential slots as political spoils.
“What has changed is that messengers signaled a clear desire for a wider circle of leadership. They don't want convention presidents to be hand-picked from a small corps of party loyalists who feel entitled to the job when their turn comes around,” he said. “Rather, they want a president who is chosen because his vision for the convention matches that of the messengers.”
But that shift in methodology doesn't signal any corresponding shift in theology, Cartledge noted.
“Though the pool of prospects for leadership will be deeper, it won't be any wider,” he wrote. “Messengers didn't like the idea of narrowing the doctrinal parameters of cooperation any further, but they didn't indicate any desire to widen them, either.”
The surprise election also reflected grass-roots dissatisfaction with SBC officers who direct the denomination's work but offer little financial support to its central missions budget, the Cooperative Program. Page's church contributes 12.1 percent of its offerings to the Cooperative Program, while Floyd's and Sutton's churches give less than 1 percent.
The nomination speech for Page drew attention to those differences, calling for leaders who match their rhetoric with dollars. Most of the conservative movement's past presidents have been megachurch pastors giving nominal support to the SBC budget. Financial support was one of the bloggers' key issues in the run-up to the election and clearly was a factor in the outcome.
Dissatisfaction with the status quo on Cooperative Program support may have been the clearest message from messengers, Cartledge said.
Page's defeated opponents “represented a growing trend, particularly among large churches, of reducing Cooperative Program gifts to near-zero percent by contributing large amounts directly to the SBC and bypassing the state conventions,” he wrote.
But that model works for a very small handful of the SBC's 40,000-odd churches: “Megachurches may feel little need for state convention services, but smaller churches do, and most messengers come from small churches,” he said. “Likewise, members of mega-churches know they are involved in a broad variety of mission efforts sponsored directly by their church. Members of small churches can't point to as many efforts that bear their local church's logo, but they find joy in knowing they contribute to global mission efforts through the Cooperative Program.”
After the election, Page said the bloggers, though few in number, made a difference. “I think there are a large number of leaders who do read those blogs,” he said. “I think they played a role beyond their number.”
Most of the bloggers are younger ministers who grew up in awe of the historic “conservative resurgence” and its leaders, but they have grown increasingly frustrated with the leaders' abuses and tight hold on power. They used the Internet to bypass the SBC's communication network, which conservatives now largely control, and circulate allegations of nepotism, favoritism and corruption.
“The blogs gave them a tool to find each other, communicate their concerns and rally broad support,” said Marv Knox of the Baptist Standard, a moderate newspaper in Texas.
Page and the bloggers benefited from — or perhaps inspired — a populist mood among Southern Baptist messengers who attended the two-day convention in Greensboro, N.C.
“It's no longer kingmakers; it's the people,” said Wade Burleson, an Oklahoma pastor and blogger (wadeburleson.com) who was instrumental in Page's win. “Every Baptist counts.”
Bloggers may have contributed significantly to Page's election, but on several business items — resolutions, investigations of SBC agencies' internal conduct and other items — they received strong rebuffs from messengers.
In particular, Burleson's much publicized attempt to force an outside investigation of the International Mission Board stalled. Burleson alleged manipulation of the trustee-appointment process, secret trustee actions and caucuses, excessively narrow doctrine, suppression of dissent, and interference by other agency leader — ostensibly seminary president Paige Patterson of Texas.
The convention's order-of-business committee recommended that Burleson's motion be referred to the IMB, which will now — after the approval of messengers — investigate itself.
Burleson remained hopeful, despite the rebuff. “If my concerns are dealt with internally, where they should be dealt with — and that's key — then the report will simply say we have worked through the concerns,” he told Associated Baptist Press. “If I can sign off on that, then this issue is over.”
Meanwhile, two reform-minded recommendations from the powerful SBC Executive Committee were stymied by convention insiders — one to encourage more financial support from SBC officers and the other to limit nepotism in trustee appointments.
And a resolution on alcohol use — usually a settled issue for Southern Baptist — was the only one to spark extended debate. Messengers overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring their “total opposition to the … consuming of alcoholic beverages.” Messengers amended the resolution to make it even tougher, urging that no one be elected as a trustee of an SBC agency “who is a user of alcoholic beverages.”
Some interpreted the amendment — proposed by a prominent conservative insider — as a slap at Burleson, who has stated on his blog there is no biblical warrant for a view that the consumption of alcoholic beverages is inherently sinful.
The convention's resolutions committee rejected at least two proposals favored by reform-minded young conservatives. One would have affirmed the Baptist tradition of dissent, particularly on trustee boards. Another would have protested the narrowing of theological parameters beyond the SBC's doctrinal statement.
So the SBC's young reformers had to content themselves with the presidential election aloneand they had to share that victory with SBC rank-and-file who seemed ready for some fresh blood. Anything more will require more than one election.