A powerful Southern Baptist committee was looking to appoint a new leader Monday who could navigate controversies over its handling of sexual-abuse reforms and the ousting of churches with women serving as pastors.
A powerful Southern Baptist committee was looking to appoint a new leader Monday who could navigate controversies over its handling of sexual-abuse reforms and the ousting of churches with women serving as pastors.
Instead, the Executive Committee found itself tangled in yet another dispute, voting down a recommendation to make its own former chairman its president in what had become a racially fraught decision.
That 50-31 vote came after some of the denomination’s prominent Black clergy questioned the selection process, which they saw as bypassing an African American pastor who has led the committee as interim president for more than a year.
The selection process hit a nerve in a denomination that has lost some Black clergy in recent years over what they have seen as a failure of the mostly white-led denomination to make good on its pledges to reform after its history of supporting slavery and segregation. While the SBC elected its first Black president in 2012, no African Americans have led any of the denomination’s powerful agencies or seminaries.
The Executive Committee, meeting in Dallas on Monday, voted down a recommendation from its search committee to choose a white pastor, Jared Wellman of Arlington, Texas, to be its next president.
