(RNS) — Ed Litton, the outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has a few words of advice for his successor.
Buckle up.
“The thing about the Southern Baptist Convention — and I’ve been doing this a long time — you never know what’s going to come up,” he said.
Starting on Tuesday (June 14), Litton, a longtime Alabama pastor, will preside over the annual two-day meeting of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. More than 8,200 local church delegates, known as messengers, will gather at California’s Anaheim Convention Center — about 10 minutes from Disneyland — to pray, worship and deliberate.
Likely there will be a few fights along the way.
The 13.7 million-member denomination has been rocked in recent weeks over a report that found SBC leaders had worked for decades to downplay the problem of sexual abuse and protect the denomination while demonizing abuse survivors, treating them as enemies of the church. Southern Baptists have also been divided by the polarization affecting the broader culture, with a group of self-styled conservative pirates hoping to change the direction of the SBC, claiming it has been invaded by liberals, critical race theory and female preachers who are steering the denomination away from the Bible.
In Anaheim, messengers will elect a new president and decide whether to enact a series of reforms aimed at addressing sexual abuse. A task force has recommended spending $3 million to set up a website to track abusive pastors and church workers, provide more training and hire staff to help survivors find help, along with other potential reforms. Messengers may decide to cut ties with one of the largest churches in the denomination, which recently announced plans to hire a female teaching pastor.
Those two days in Anaheim will likely have a profound effect on the future direction of the SBC.
A look at some of the key issues at stake:
Pastor Ed Litton, of Saraland, Alabama, answers questions after being elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention on June 15, 2021, in Nashville, Tennessee. On March 1, 2022, Litton announced he would break with tradition and not seek a second term in the top office. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)
Will messengers approve abuse reforms?
Last summer, angered at reports that SBC leaders had long mistreated abuse survivors, the messengers approved a task force to oversee an investigation into how leaders at the SBC’s Nashville-based Executive Committee had responded to the issue of abuse. Along with releasing a report from Guidepost Solutions, the investigating firm, the abuse task force has made a series of recommendations, including setting up a “Ministry Check” website to track abusers.
If approved, initial funding for the abuse reforms is already in place. On Wednesday, Send Relief, a partnership between the SBC’s International Mission Board and North American Mission Board that does compassion ministry, announced plans to provide $4 million in initial funding for abuse reforms. An earlier plan had called for reforms to be paid for out of SBC’s Cooperative Program, which pools money from local churches for national and international missions.
But complicating matters, Guidepost Solutions, the investigating firm, posted a note on social media in support of Pride Month, prompting claims that Guidepost is a liberal group that should not be trusted. This week, Baptist leaders in Tennessee and Alabama called for Southern Baptists to cut ties with Guidepost, while an abuse task force in Kentucky ceased working with the firm. Along with its work with the task force, Guidepost is overseeing a hotline where SBC abuse survivors can report allegations.
