Led by William Wolfe, the Center for Baptist Leadership (CBL) was formed earlier this year with the mission to “revitalize” the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
According to the CBL’s website, it will focus on “cultivating courageous and uncompromising Baptist leadership for the 21st Century.” The CBL plans to provide resources to equip churches to “tackle issues of pressing concern in SBC life, theology, and polity.”
Wolfe, who serves as the CBL’s executive director, is joined by an advisory board that includes Pastor Tom Ascol, Pastor Mark Coppenger, pastor and Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers, Pastor Steve Gentry, Christian ethicist, economist, and engineer Craig Mitchell, Pastor Lewis Richerson, attorney Sam Webb, and attorney Jon Whitehead.
Sharing his passion for the SBC, Wolfe told ChurchLeaders that he came to know Jesus through a “faithful Southern Baptist pastor.” Wolfe grew up going to church, but he said that after the unexpected death of his 15-year-old brother, his life was in “total shambles.”
“Through that period of grief and personal disaster” at the age of 22, Wolfe said he met Capitol Hill Baptist Church Pastor Mark Dever. “He shared the gospel with me, [and] I became a Christian,” said Wolfe.
Wolfe moved to Washington D.C. to attend Capitol Hill Baptist, was baptized, and began to get plugged in to what he describes as an “epicenter of church reform, church revitalization work there with 9Marks.”
While living in Washington D.C., Wolfe began working in politics, including for the Trump administration. During that time, Wolfe said that he saw the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) fail to represent SBC interests.
“So that sort of planted, you can say, a rock in my shoe in terms of my interest in Christian political theology and what it looked like to be a faithful witness in an increasingly woke world,” Wolfe said.
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He added,
I thought that to do that, church leaders should embrace unapologetic Christian conservative and ethical commitments and represent the interests of your average American Christian in the pews to the institutions of power the publishing arms, the media, not try to bend the people in the pews to accept the coastal elite narrative of progressive social justice Christianity.
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