Among the giant vinyl banners at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Dallas this week (and there were so ... many ... banners) were several that read, “It’s all about the Gospel.” Based on a smattering of attendee interviews, that might have been more accurate than in many years past. If so, it’s a good thing.
In previous SBC annual meetings, it’s been all about female pastors, or all about sexual abuse, or all about race. But this year, according to a dozen attendees I stopped in the hallways at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, there was no banner issue — nothing making headlines and drawing messengers to cast their votes and “Hold Fast” to their views in keeping with the official theme of this year’s meeting.
Certainly, the convention addressed topics that would invite debate outside SBC circles. On Tuesday, delegates (called messengers) overwhelmingly ed resolutions opposing same-sex marriage and gender-affirming care for minors. They also called for a ban on pornography and limits on gambling. But it’s hardly news that most Southern Baptists hold those views. No one was coming to Dallas to vote against an LGBTQ insurgence in the denomination. Leave that to the Methodists.
The closest thing to a banner issue that Juan Sanchez, senior pastor at High Pointe Baptist Church in Austin, could come up with was the effort to defund the denomination’s public policy arm — the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which Jack Graham, former SBC president and senior pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, recently called, in a social media post, “the single most divisive entity of the SBC since the days of Russell Moore.”
Lesser evils
For the uninitiated, “Russell Moore” refers to the immediate past ERLC president who famously refused to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016. And “divisive” refers to anything that doesn’t Trump. At least that’s my interpretation. The prophets of old were divisive, too, and similarly defunded.
As the denomination’s political organ, the ERLC’s role is divisive almost by definition. “If we do our job right, we will make everybody mad sooner or later,” former ERLC President Richard Land once said.
Now almost 80, Land is something like a living patriarch in Southern Baptist circles. I stumbled into an interview with him on Monday — caught him reading his own work in a book about the history of the SBC’s Cooperative Program, which is celebrating a centennial this year.
“I never try to predict what a Southern Baptist Convention is going to do. I’ve been to too many of them,” Land said. But he opposed disbanding the ERLC and said he didn’t expect the convention to do so. “We’ve never defunded an entity, so this would be the first.”
There has been at least one previous attempt. The ERLC, which was formed in 1908 and has been known by five different names, got into trouble in the 1960s when it attempted to provide a forum in which diverse voices, including liberal ones, could be heard. A campaign to abolish it failed, but the next decade saw the birth of what ers called a “conservative resurgence” and detractors labeled a “fundamentalist takeover.” These days, you’re almost as likely to find an atheist at the SBC as a progressive.
Land said Moore fell out of favor with the SBC not because he opposed Trump but because he questioned the motives of SBC leaders who ed Trump, most of whom did so with great reservation. “He was the lesser of two evils,” Land said.
I will not make Moore’s mistake and pretend to know the motives of SBC leaders, but I’ll say that, through three election cycles, hundreds of hours of Fox News segments and millions of dollars in merch depicting Trump as the Chosen One, I don’t see a lot of reservation in evangelical of the president. As former religion reporter Peggy Wehmeyer has written in this newspaper, the danger of voting for the lesser of two evils is that it incentivizes the voter to diminish the evil she’s voted for.
In the end, Land’s prediction was right. The proposal to defund the ERLC came to naught.
Why they came
But none of that seemed to be on the minds of attendees, who mostly seemed focused on connecting with other Baptists or gathering up resources and training to offer to their congregations back home.
“The North American Mission Board luncheon is always a highlight for me,” said Celina Rice, wife of the lead pastor at Brookwood Baptist Church in Shreveport, who comes to the SBC regularly. The NAMB s church planters and other workers on this continent. Its counterpart, the International Mission Board, sends missionaries abroad. Both agencies commission emissaries at every annual meeting. As Christianity Today noted Monday, it’s often cited as the highlight of the event.
“It is just the most authentic and sweet fellowship. I think it’s the true heart of who we really are as a denomination and so that’s why I really love to come,” Rice said.
Zane Warren, the music director at First Baptist Church of Brandon, Miss., has only been in ministry five years and was attending his first SBC. He said he was focused on the music and pastor tracks. For him, the annual meeting is more about pastoring than politics.
In the absence of a controversial issue, Sanchez, the pastor from Austin, said the total number of attendees could be lower than expected. He may have been right. Before the event, Downtown Dallas Inc. projected as many as 20,000 visitors. But as of Tuesday afternoon, about the time messengers were electing Clint Pressley of North Carolina to a second term as president, the official attendee count was 14,446.
‘Fox News anger culture’
In the cheap seats, even those attendees most interested in contentious issues seemed less aligned with culture war messages, notwithstanding their newly re-elected president pounding the podium and shouting about masculinity.
The ERLC hosted a discussion Sunday at 9 p.m. (a scheduling decision which, itself, might have been an indication of the agency’s loss of favor). It featured Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., U.S. Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Tyler, and ambassador designate Mark Walker. The event started with a video detailing the ERLC’s efforts to combat “the predatory organization known as Planned Parenthood” and “radical gender madness in Congress and in the courts” which set the tone. Moran and Walker mostly followed suit.
But Lankford was pacific. One attendee, Robert Clark of Louisville, Ky., called him “prosaic and balancing.”
Lankford, who grew up in First Baptist Church of Dallas, encouraged listeners to ignore the outrage-industrial complex, though he didn’t use that term.
“I’m afraid the church is getting drawn into the Fox News anger culture and not into the Holy Spirit,” Lankford said. And in a room that felt very comfortable to Republicans, he told a story about chastising a pastor who had once bragged to him that a Democrat would be uncomfortable in his church.
“There’s a thread that runs through the church that says the angriest voice is the most effective,” Lankford said. “It’s counter to Scripture. ... That’s not how God changes a culture.”
Alex Britt and Steven Robertson, both from First Baptist Church of Fulton, Ky., said Lankford’s message stood out. When the event ended, they were part of a long line waiting to shake hands with the senator; the more strident ists were left to themselves.
A century of cooperation
Make no mistake, the SBC wasn’t all about the Gospel. A stroll among the vendor booths in the vast exhibit hall revealed it was also about software, coffee, Legos, seminaries, pinewood derby cars, camps, trips to Jerusalem, marriage, hymnals, furniture and other things.
It was also about music, which energized every session in the main lecture hall. During Monday’s noon hour, while attendees gathered around box lunches, Steven Curtis Chapman reprised his best tunes from the 1990s. I listened to Chapman in high school. I found it a little troubling that the rocker who once called people to a Great Adventure had been reduced to background Muzak.
Maybe that’s a metaphor for the denomination itself, which was once the largest religious cohort in America. “And that included the Catholics,” Land emphasized to me, though I haven’t been able to that claim.
In April, LifeWay Research reported that the SBC lost hip for the 18th consecutive year. At 12.7 million , the denomination is smaller than it has been since 1974, and will soon lose its place as the largest Protestant denomination in America, if it hasn’t already.
Its influence is declining and its political engagement is sketchy, in my view. But in one way that matters even more, this was indeed a banner year for the SBC. It marked the 100th anniversary of the Cooperative Program, the voluntary collective funding mechanism that s Baptist programs worldwide.
Since 1925, while the ERLC and the denomination’s most bombastic voices have been fluttering from banner issue to banner issue, the cooperative program has also ed things like children’s homes, disaster relief teams, food pantries and higher education. For the millions of lives those programs have touched, the SBC has indeed carried the “gospel” — good news. Just like the banners say.