LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) — Evangelical scholar and seminary president Al Mohler will be nominated for the Southern Baptist Convention presidency next June, but he likely will face opposition for the prominent post.
Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., will be nominated by Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas. Jeffress announced his intention to nominate Mohler Jan. 2 through the SBC's news agency.
Prominent SBC blogger Wade Burleson, who earlier predicted Mohler would be nominated — and lose — said Jan. 4 that he expects a little-known pastor to be nominated and be elected over Mohler.
Burleson, an Oklahoma pastor, predicted the new president would be “a non-aligned pastor who has historically supported the Cooperative Program,” the SBC's centralized budget that funds the denomination's ministries and missions.
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Al Mohler
When pressed by an Associated Baptist Press reporter, Burleson added that he would not be the candidate. His name has often been mentioned for the post in the past two years.
The election, set for the convention's annual meeting in Indianapolis in June, is shaping up to echo the last contested SBC presidential contest. In 2005, Burleson played a significant role in rallying the Southern Baptist blogging community and other younger SBC supporters to elect a relatively unknown pastor over candidates backed by the denomination's establishment leaders.
That year, SBC messengers elected Taylors, S.C., pastor Frank Page in a first-ballot upset over two celebrity megachurch pastors. Page was re-elected without opposition to a traditional second term last year, but is ineligible for re-election.
“I will not be running for president of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Burleson said. “I do not desire to be the center of controversy, and for whatever reason I have become the flash point.”
“I think that person is out there,” he continued. “It's a matter of that person being convinced that the convention needs him.”
Mohler is expected to carry the support of the SBC's conservative establishment, which has tapped all but two of the men elected since 1979 to lead the nation's largest Protestant denomination.
Mohler is one of the best-known Southern Baptists, named by Time and Christianity Today among the nation's most influential evangelicals because of his scholarship and his frequent appearances in the mainstream media.
In announcing his intention to nominate Mohler, Jeffress said the seminary president is “the kind of visionary leader Southern Baptists need to communicate a missional conservatism and biblical clarity to the world.”
Mohler, a Calvinist and frequent critic of postmodernism and the emerging church, added: “Our greatest challenge is to recover our passion for the gospel in evangelism and missions and to renew our determination to defend the gospel in an age of postmodern confusion. I would hope to articulate a vision that would unite Southern Baptists and energize us together.”
Burleson said he does not oppose Mohler personally. “I appreciate what he has done for evangelicalism,” Burleson said. “I have nothing negative to say about Al Mohler.”
But, he said, he objects to Mohler's candidacy for three reasons. First, his role as seminary president would conflict with his presidential duties. Second, the president should model strong Cooperative Program giving. Finally, Burleson said, Mohler has positioned himself against an SBC-approved policy.
The SBC president also serves on the SBC Executive Committee, which sets the Cooperative Program allocation of Mohler's seminary and all other SBC entities. The Executive Committee is designed to “bring balance to the cooperation of our agencies,” Burleson said.
Mohler would not be the first seminary president to hold the position, however. Seven seminary heads have preceded him, including conservative activist Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, who preceded Page.
Like Page, the next SBC president needs to “exemplify” strong support for the Cooperative Program, Burleson said, and Mohler does not meet that standard.
Mohler is a member of Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, where he serves as a “teaching pastor” and a Sunday school teacher. The church contributes 3.3 percent of its $5 million in undesignated receipts to the Cooperative Program and nothing to the SBC's two mission offerings, according to Baptist Press.
Page's church gives approximately 12 percent of its $4.4 million in undesignated receipts to the SBC budget.
Finally, Burleson said, Mohler opposed the decision by the Southern Baptist Convention to declare the Baptist Faith and Message the “sufficient” doctrinal guide for its agencies and institutions.
After Southern Baptist messengers adopted that motion by Ohio pastor Rick Garner in June 2007, Mohler told messengers the Baptist Faith and Message does not go far enough in outlining acceptable doctrine for hiring seminary professors.
“I'm not sure about leadership that would tell the convention, ‘You don't know what you just did,' ” Burleson told ABP. “The convention is the final authority.”
The opposition by Mohler and other SBC leaders to the motion amounts to “an oligarchy standing up and saying, ‘We know better than you,' ” Burleson added.