NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) — A Tennessee pastor will join what already promises to be a contentious election for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention when the denomination holds its annual meeting June 13-14 in Greensboro, N.C.
Jerry Sutton, the pastor of Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn., will be nominated for the denomination's top spot, according to a June 6 Baptist Press report.
Three conservative state Baptist leaders have announced their backing for Sutton: Bill Streich, of the Texas Baptist Laymen's Association, Roger Moran, of the Missouri Baptist Laymen's Association, and Larry Reagan, the vice president of Concerned Tennessee Baptists. Moran is a member of the SBC Executive Committee.
“For the last month I have been receiving calls from people throughout the convention who say they are not completely at peace over the upcoming presidential election,” Sutton said, according to the SBC's official news agency. “I kept putting them off. I prayed all night Sunday night into Monday, asking the Lord for guidance and He told me I'm supposed to run.”
The latest in a string of nominations, Sutton joins 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 is a latecomer to the election, which promises to be the first seriously contested SBC presidential race in more than 10 years.
Floyd, a favorite of the convention's leadership elite, has come under attack for his church's lackluster giving to the Cooperative Program, the convention's unified budget. Page is the darling of a group of young conservatives, 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 as a trustee of the SBC's International Mission Board because of his Internet critiques of board decisions, has galvanized the group of younger conservatives. His arguments in support of opening up SBC leadership to a wider group of people and making the denomination's power structure more transparent to its constituents have found a receptive audience among many reform-minded conservatives.
“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.”
Sutton, who has long-running connections to the denomination's conservative leadership, 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 did not return phone calls for this story.
Other candidates for the presidency have come under scrutiny because of a former SBC Executive Committee request that all officers come from churches that donate at least 10 percent of their annual receipts to the Cooperative Program. The committee has since rescinded that suggestion.
William Maxwell, administrative director for the Tennessee Baptist Convention, told ABP that in the 2005 fiscal year, Two Rivers gave $73,627.87 of a total $4,104,377 in undesignated receipts — roughly 1.7 percent — to the Tennessee Cooperative Program. Baptist Press reported the church designated a combined $183,482 — almost 4.5 percent — of undesignated receipts to state and national Cooperative Program missions.
In other news, Jimmy Jackson, pastor of Whitesburg Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala., and Kelly Burris, pastor of Kempsville Baptist Church in Virginia Beach, Va., will also be nominated for first vice president in the SBC.
According to a June 2 Baptist Press story, former Alabama pastor Fred Wolfe will nominate Jackson. Terry Fox plans to nominate Burris.
Jackson is a trustee of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and a former member of the SBC Executive Committee. Burris is a former president of the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia and a trustee of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary.
Jackson and Burris 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 in late May 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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