This week, a group of concerned Southern Baptists released a statement explaining why they are nominating Founders Ministries President and Cape Coral, Florida’s Grace Baptist Church senior pastor Tom Ascol for President of the Southern Baptist Convention. They also announced they are nominating former SBC pastor and current SBC missionary Voddie Baucham, who serves as Dean of Theology at African Christian University in Lusaka, Zambia, for president of the SBC pastor’s conference.
Stating that the SBC plays an important role in “global Christianity” because it supports the world’s largest missionary force and educates one-third of the nation’s seminary students through its six seminaries, the statement says the SBC “badly needs a change of direction.”
Baptisms and evangelism within the SBC are in a “free fall” and there is a small group of SBC leaders who are steering SBC institutions closer to the culture, the statement says. They claim that SBC institutions are moving toward “radical feminism masked as ‘soft complementarianism’” and “the false gospel of Critical Theory and Intersectionality. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, we are all made one in Him. But this ‘Race Marxism’ divides everyone by their most superficial features, in a never-ending cycle of recrimination and hate.”
“We reject these worldly dogmas. We stand together on the Baptist Faith and Message. We proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And we know the vast majority of Southern Baptists do too,” the statement continues.
Those nominating Ascol believe he will use solely the gospel to answer the challenges the SBC is currently facing.
They also believe that Baucham will provide the kind of leadership the SBC Pastors’ Conference needs, which they refer to as “an event which in recent years has shifted radically from one of the high points of the entire year into what many have termed ‘Woke Fest.’ The importance of restoring that pivotal event cannot be overstated.”
God is watching the SBC and He alone, not the world, defines the SBC’s terms and sets the agenda, they say, “and God is not Woke.”
They encouraged fellow SBC messengers to come to this year’s Annual Meeting, which will take place on June 12-15 in Anaheim, California.
“Help us change the direction, and return the SBC to a firm commitment to the sufficiency of Scripture,” their statement concludes.
Of the 11 people who signed it, seven of them are steering counsel members for the Conservative Baptist Network (CBN), including last year’s runner up to current SBC President Ed Litton, Mike Stone, and First Vice President of the SBC Dr. Lee Brand.
Following Ed Litton’s announcement that he would not seek a second term, Ascol has become the second known nominee to enter the running for the President of the SBC. Earlier this month, Clearwater, Florida’s Calvary Church pastor Willy Rice was nominated by Clint Pressley.
