NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) — Jerry Sutton, the pastor of Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn., may accept a nomination for president of the Southern Baptist Convention, according to his assistant.
“Some people have asked him to, and he has been considering it and thinking about it,” the staff member said. She declined to say who might nominate Sutton.
If nominated during the SBC annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C., later this month, Sutton will join Ronnie Floyd and Frank Page in the campaign for the top position of the nation's largest Protestant group. Currently the SBC's first vice president, Sutton will come as a latecomer to the election, which promises to be the most strongly contested race since the early 1990s.
Floyd, a favorite of the convention's leadership, has come under attack for his church's lackluster giving to the Cooperative Program, the convention's mission organization. Page is the darling of a young group of moderate SBC members, who have most notably used blogs to voice their concern over the convention's current leadership.
Now, experts think Sutton will split Floyd's votes and be the primary competition against Page.
Wade Burleson, the pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Okla., said he welcomes Sutton to the campaign. Burleson, once threatened with removal from the board of the SBC's International Mission Board, has galvanized a group of younger conservatives with his blogging about the IMB board of trustees. IMB trustees had threatened to remove him because of his perceived criticism of board decisions. Burleson has publicly supported a move to change leadership within the convention.
“I am grateful that we have finally arrived to the day that we have multiple candidates for the SBC,” Burleson said. “It's a new day.”
Often aligned with the convention's more conservative voters, Sutton made headlines in an August 2005 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews when he denied Pat Robertson's push for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He said Robertson did not use the word “assassinate,” for which Robertson later apologized. Although Sutton continued to deny Robertson's use of the term, even after Matthews corrected him, Sutton said Robertson's comments were “off-the-cuff” and “political commentary.”
Sutton was unavailable for comment June 5.
In other news, Jimmy Jackson, pastor of Whitesburg Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala., will also be nominated for first vice-president position in the SBC.
According to a June 2 Baptist Press story, former Alabama pastor Fred Wolfe will nominate Jackson. In the story, Wolfe said Jackson was “a Christian gentleman, a real denominational statesman.”
Jackson is a trustee of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and a former member of the SBC Executive Committee. He will run for the position against Keith Fordham of Fayetteville, Ga., and Mark Dever of Washington, D.C.
Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and a popular leader among SBC Calvinists, acknowledged to an ABP reporter that he had been approached about being nominated for the office and that he would accept such a nomination. Fordham is the immediate past president of the Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists.
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