Home Christian News Can a Tender-Hearted President Solve the Southern Baptists’ Trust Problem?

Can a Tender-Hearted President Solve the Southern Baptists’ Trust Problem?

“There are some people who fly at a 40,000-foot level — they see everything,” he said. “I’m a crop duster.”

He said he has faith in the people of the SBC, who he said love Jesus and want to love their neighbors. Just after he was elected, he said that outgoing President J.D. Greear, a North Carolina megachurch pastor, told him he would be “blown away” by how kind people would be to him, especially ordinary church members.

Still, he said, he knows there will be troubles in trying to help Southern Baptists continue to work together. It’s not an easy task.

Despite being the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., with about 14 million members, the SBC is a remarkably flat organization: Southern Baptists often say that the headquarters of the denomination is the local church.

While they cooperate on missions, evangelism, disaster relief, education and other ministries — all that cooperation and is voluntary, and often up for debate.

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Nathan Finn, a Baptist historian who serves as provost of North Greenville University in South Carolina, said the recent annual meeting was an example of the SBC’s long history of insider versus outsider battles. And for the most part the insiders lost in Nashville, he said.

Messengers from local churches overruled SBC leaders at several points, most notably over an investigation into how the denomination’s Executive Committee has treated sexual abuse survivors and handled allegations of abuse. The Executive Committee wanted to oversee the investigations. Messengers were having none of that.

“I think the Southern Baptists have said loud and clear that our leaders are denominational servants and we intend to hold our denominational servants accountable,” said Finn.

Despite Litton’s victory over Stone, Finn does not see the Conservative Baptist Network or other critics of current SBC leaders going away. “There is this perennial tension over, why are we cooperating and who do we trust to navigate the ship,” he said.

Pittman, the pastor at New Hope Church, left Nashville unsure of whether his congregation could remain in the SBC.

“I don’t see a path forward with the convention,” he said, adding that he and other New Hope leaders would meet soon to decide what to do next.

New Hope, founded in the 1950s as the First Baptist Church of Palatine, has been part of the SBC for nearly seven decades. When Pittman arrived in 2014, the church had a handful of older members and was on the brink of closing.