National Baptists Hear Their Outgoing President and Ketanji Brown Jackson as Meeting Ends

Ketanji Brown Jackson National Baptists
The Rev. Jerry Young preached his final annual address as president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, on Sept. 5, 2024 in Baltimore. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

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BALTIMORE (RNS) — The Rev. Jerry Young, the two-term president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, preached his final annual address as leader of the historically Black denomination as members attending the NBCUSA annual session prepared to vote in what promises to be a fraught election.

On Thursday (Sept. 5), the last day of the annual session at the Baltimore Convention Center, the Baptists were offered just a single candidate for president after it was determined that four others did not meet the qualifications to be considered.

“I know that it’s an unusual election,” Young said in his address to thousands of Baptists. “Whoever heard of having just one candidate on the ballot?”

RELATED: National Baptists Hold Annual Meeting as Leadership Questions Continue

But he defended the “unusual situation,” saying it did not mean church leadership was at fault. Baptist polity, he explained, calls for a “yes” or “no” vote even when one person is running for a first-term presidency.

“Because it’s unusual and because it’s strange does not mean that somebody did something wrong,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that the board did something wrong.”

Nonetheless, the four men who failed to be qualified have mounted a joint campaign urging a “no” vote for the remaining candidate, the Rev. Boise Kimber, a New Haven, Connecticut, pastor who was found to have received the necessary 100 endorsements from member churches and other NBCUSA entities to qualify to run for president.

Over the course of the three days of the annual session, as dignitaries — most prominently, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — spoke from the main stage, discussions in private settings turned to the pending election.

In an interview Wednesday, the Rev. Breonus Mitchell Sr., NBCUSA board chair, said he empathizes with the four who are not on the ballot.

“I think their concerns are legit,” he said in an interview with RNS. “This is not against Boise. I think it’s the process that people are upset about and whatever happens, at the end of the day, the process has got to be fixed.”

While Mitchell couldn’t predict the outcome of the vote, he suggested that if the result, expected late Thursday, leaves the denomination without a president, Young could become an interim president. The role may also fall to Vice President-at-Large Fred Campbell or Mitchell himself, he said.

Mitchell said the bylaws are in need of revision because they contain “so much ambiguity.”

Pastor Thomas Morris Sr., chairman of the NBCUSA’s Election Supervisory Commission, said in an earlier interview that many of the other candidates’ endorsements were voided because they came from churches that have been unable to afford their required annual registration with the denomination due to lack of funds, consolidation or closure.

Former NBCUSA President William J. Shaw, who succeeded the Rev. Henry J. Lyons in 1999 after Lyons was imprisoned for misappropriation of funds, chose not to compare that controversy to the current wrangling over the election. “I wouldn’t want to compare them, but it is a critical time,” he said in an interview. “And this convention represents, I think, what is a strong potential of influence in the religious and political climate.”

Jackson, who appeared to be singing along with the hymn playing as she took the stage (with the lyrics “I love to praise him. I love to praise his name”), answered questions from NBCUSA social justice committee chair Bruce Datcher.

Discussing her memoir “Lovely One,” Jackson explained her dissent in the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision that granted former presidents broad immunity from prosecution, saying, “I didn’t think that there should be a separate immunity for presidents.”

Jackson also described how faith, instilled by her late grandmother, had undergirded her personal and professional life. “One of my fondest memories as a kid was the point in the service in her church where people could get up and say whatever they wanted,” said Jackson.

Her grandmother, she recalled, “would stand up when it was her turn and she would say ‘When I think of the goodness of Jesus and all he’s done for me, my soul cries out Hallelujah. I thank God for saving me.’”

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AdelleMBanks@churchleaders.com'
Adelle M Bankshttp://religionnews.com
Adelle M. Banks, production editor and a national reporter, joined RNS in 1995. An award-winning journalist, she previously was the religion reporter at the Orlando Sentinel and a reporter at The Providence Journal and newspapers in the upstate New York communities of Syracuse and Binghamton.

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