Southern Baptists are gathered in Nashville this week for an annual meeting that could prove a turning point, as the faithful square off on an array of divisive issues that some fear could drive a wedge into the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.
Tuesday marks the first full day for the event in which the voting members of the Southern Baptist Convention could tackle high-profile issues including racial discrimination, gender inequality, and sexual abuse.
The organization is one of the U.S.’s most politically influential. It has long aligned itself with conservative causes and top evangelicals in the convention enthusiastically backed former President Donald Trump.
This week, the Southern Baptist Convention’s voting members will choose a new leader for the group — a decision that could either signal a continuation of the status quo or set the stage for a more conservative ideological shift.
The spotlight was already on SBC leaders as they entered this week’s convention. Last week, Russell Moore, a former president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, or ERLC, posted letters and secret recordings of internal SBC meetings that critics have said shows the denomination’s top leaders were slow-walking reforms that would address sexual abuse. Moore has parted ways with the church.
In 2018, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the denomination’s flagship institution, issued a report on the role that racism has played in the leadership and how support for slavery helped shape the denomination in its earliest days.
The SBC announced last week that it hired Guidepost Solutions, an independent investigation and risk-management firm, to review the group’s handling of internal abuse issues.
However, during the SBC executive committee meeting on Monday, leaders rejected a request by Texas pastor Jared Wellman to amend its agenda to consider expanding the third-party investigation of the leadership’s handling of sexual abuse claims.
Wellman’s amendment would have required the SBC to appoint an independent task force to receive the full report from Guidepost and relay its findings to the entire convention.
Executive Committee Secretary Joe Knott argued that such a step would violate Baptist policy by handing “essentially unlimited power” to an outside party, according to Baptist Press. Knott also said the proposal wouldn’t stop sexual abuse.
The issue is reportedly not dead and critics of the move have expressed outrage over the executive committee’s inaction. On social media, a group of people who say they faced sexual abuse within the denomination shared an open letter to the leadership demanding change.
