By Bob Allen
The Kentucky Baptist Convention elected its first African-American president Nov. 10 at Severns Valley Baptist Church in Elizabethtown, Ky.
Kevin Smith, teaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville and an assistant professor of Christian preaching at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, defeated Jerry Tooley, director of missions in the Daviess-McLean Baptist Association in Owensboro, by a vote of 578-233.
Smith, previously the first African-American to be elected first vice president of the state convention in 2006, was nominated by Lincoln Bingham, pastor of St. Paul Baptist Church @ Shively Heights, who in 2010 retired after 35 years as Cooperative Ministries Consultant for the Kentucky Baptist Convention.
“Almost 40 years ago I was asked by the KBC executive director to help bring together black Kentucky Baptists and white Kentucky Baptists and to help African-American churches find a home within the fellowship of the convention,” Bingham said in his nomination speech.
“I’ve traveled thousands of miles across our state and preached in hundreds of churches,” Bingham said. “I’ve dreamed of the day when Baptists of color would not only be members of our convention but welcomed as leaders of the convention where they have the capability and the giftedness.”
“I think this day has come,” Bingham said. “I believe Kevin Smith is the leader that God has raised up who is sufficient for this assignment in this day.”
For nine years Smith was pastor of Watson Memorial Baptist Church in Louisville, before joining the staff of Highview Baptist Church in 2013. He serves on the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission’s Leadership Network Council advising ERLC head Russell Moore and was a member an African-American Advisory Council named in 2012 by SBC Executive Committee President Frank Page.
The Kentucky Baptist Convention, with 750,000 members the state’s largest religious organization, is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC, formed in 1845 by slaveholders, broke the color barrier in 2012 by electing Fred Luter of New Orleans as its first African-American president.
Bingham, appointed by the SBC Home Mission Board (now North American Mission Board) in 1978, capped his four decades of reconciliation ministries among Kentucky Baptists in 2009 by leading the predominantly black St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church to merge with the all-white Shively Heights Baptist Church into a newly named St. Paul Baptist Church @ Shively Heights.
“I was young, but now I am old,” Bingham concluded his nomination speech, “but I have never been happier to see what the Kentucky Baptist Convention is doing in reconciliation and reaching people together with the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
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