In less than a week, about 12,000 messengers are expected to arrive in Orlando for the 168th annual session of the Southern Baptist Convention. Leading the concerns facing church representatives are the election of a new convention president and a proposed amendment to governing documents that would codify the convention’s decades-long stance against women serving in pastoral roles.
Benjamin Cole
The degree to which either vote will help reverse precipitous declines in church membership and cooperative funding mechanisms remains to be seen.
As for the presidential election, Southern Baptists haven’t witnessed in many years such an all-out campaign effort, both regionally and across large state conventions that traditionally deliver the lion’s share of registered messengers to the annual meeting. Both announced candidates — Joshua (Josh) Powell of Taylors, S.C., and William (Willy) Rice of Clearwater, Fla. — have maintained exhausting travel schedules as they participated in associational meet-and-greets, informational pastors’ gatherings and numerous online and teleconference events hosted by influencers and key convention leaders.
“Southern Baptists haven’t witnessed in many years such an all-out campaign effort.”
Because of this interest, BNG has taken the unusual step of asking me to interview both candidates for separate episodes of the “Stuck in the Middle with You” podcast. Normally, I co-host this podcast with BNG Executive Director Mark Wingfield. But for these two episodes, it’s just me in conversation with the candidates. (Hear the Rice interview here and hear the Powell interview here.)
I think you’ll find these interviews compelling, informative and eye-opening. I’m thankful for the candor both men exhibited and the grace with which they entered our conversations. Both demonstrate a fluency with Southern Baptist history, theology and polity. They are both winsome, experienced, passionate and principled.
As Mark and I agree on another upcoming episode of “Stuck in the Middle with You” to drop this Friday, it’s impossible to predict which candidate will prevail in the presidential election. It looks to be that close.
By the time the gavel falls in Orlando, Rice and Powell each will have met with groups of messengers hailing from Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida. They’ve each done numerous podcasts, attended entity trustee meetings, produced and published several campaign-style infomercials, and held private strategy calls with key supporters.
On the eve of next Tuesday’s election, the candidates will appear jointly at back-to-back candidate forums and meet separately with both formal and informal fellowships of Southern Baptist pastors, associational missionaries, church-planters and ethnic leaders.
While Powell and Rice are themselves almost perfectly aligned on the convention’s basic confessional commitments and have separately endorsed the proposed constitutional amendment on women, the factions supporting each man could not be more divided.
“The factions supporting each man could not be more divided.”
For many of Powell’s supporters, Rice has grown too cozy with a vocal, organized and social-media savvy group of convention dissidents who — despite their repeated efforts and significant financial backing from non-SBC sources — have failed to elect a convention officer or enact a single measure to address the perceived leftward drift among convention entities and denominational elites.
When it comes to Rice’s supporters, many fear Powell’s election would represent a continuation of theologically compromised leaders, including former SBC Presidents J.D. Greear, Ed Litton and Bart Barber, whom they believe have succumbed to a George Soros-style campaign of well-funded subversion designed to destroy the nation’s largest Christian witness through a false narrative of sex abuse and an unprincipled affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and unscriptural tolerance for women preachers.
The tribal confederacies and patchwork of theological priorities that are exposed by the strange bedfellows uniting to elect either Powell or Rice have proved confusing to many outside observers.
Many die-hard Calvinists — at one time thought to be closely aligned with Al Mohler and his Louisville-based seminary — have fallen in line behind Rice (who is not a Calvinist).
Powell, who is immediate past chairman of Southern Seminary’s trustees and closely associated with Mohler, has enjoyed the support of several prominent state executives, ordinarily a group suspicious of Louisville and Mohler’s outsized influence in the convention.
These are, of course, generalizations; and there are exceptions to be noted.
In the end, the presidential election comes down to this question: Do messengers believe the SBC is generally on the right track or is it time for a shake-up in convention leadership to reverse a liberal drift and stem an un-Baptistic centralization of control?
Some pastors and convention leaders I know who never would vote for a candidate associated with Al Mohler are headed to Orlando determined to elect Josh Powell. Meanwhile, some people whom I would ordinarily presume to support a steady, non-controversial candidate like Powell are bringing slates of messengers with them to vote for Willy Rice and enact critical reforms.
To their credit, both Powell and Rice have managed to engage the issues and rally their supporters without descending into personal acrimony. As I interviewed each man and had multiple off-the-record conversations with them, it was clear their shared determination to maintain a Christlike disposition has helped them remain focused.
Powell, for the moment, seems to have earned the support of the convention’s institutional preservationists and widespread backing from state convention leaders. Rice, on the other hand, has the strong winds of reform at his back. His willingness to challenge the status quo and his adopted role as “outsider” may prove decisive.
Over the years, Orlando has produced strong headwinds for those running in the inside lane, and in the past the local vote tipped things in favor of surprise candidates in both 1994 and 2010.
Whoever wins, one thing is certain: Southern Baptists may be experiencing a steady decline, but the stakes for convention control are not getting any smaller.
Benjamin Cole is a crisis communications consultant who also is a former Southern Baptist pastor. He writes online as The Baptist Blogger and is co-host with Mark Wingfield of BNG’s podcast “Stuck in the Middle with You.”