SBC Life - Summer 2022 (Vol. 30, No. 3)

Southern Baptist Distinctives LO C A L C H U R C H AU TO N O M Y BELIEVER’S BAPTISM RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

SUMMER 2022

Table of Contents 6

SBC Life is published by the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee.

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Jesus—The Center of It All

F E AT U R E D A R T I C L E S

Willie McLaurin Interim President and CEO

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Local Church Autonomy Makes Cooperation Stronger, Say Southern Baptist Leaders

Jonathan Howe Executive Editor Andy Beachum Creative Director Allison Young Publication and Project Coordinator

14 Southern Baptist College, Seminary Professors Reiterate Church’s Role in Baptism

20 Southern Baptists Champion Religious Liberty

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28 California Southern Baptists Begin Search for New Executive Director

52 Disaster Relief Volunteers Comfort Traumatized Refugees; Southern Baptists Raise $8M So Far

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SBC Life (ISSN 1081-8189) Volume 30, Number 3

35 Lifeway Trustees Elect First African American Woman Trustee Chair 38 Crawford Named Executive Director of BCM/D

58 Triple-Stroke Survivor Leaves Hospice, Joins Hundreds Baptized on Baptism Sunday

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44 Bigger Crowds Lead to Tough, Necessary Decision for the SBC

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31 Voice of the Martyrs

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FROM THE SBC PRESIDENT

Jesus—The Center of It All

BY ED LITTON

I

had walked with God for many years before I truly learned what it means to place Jesus at the center of it all. As a young pastor and church planter, I experienced God’s abundant blessings on my life and ministry. God had blessed me with a growing family. I was shepherding a thriving church. And I was being given many opportunities to use the gifts God had given me.

But success was not the greatest teacher in my life. Like a lot of people, I learned more from pain and loss than I did from joy and triumph. In 2007, my life was changed forever when my wife, Tammy, was tragically killed in an automobile accident. Losing Tammy brought the most devastating pain I’ve ever experienced. Each day was an immense struggle, not only to care for myself but also for my children and my church family.

It was in those dark days that I learned to place Jesus at the center. Every day was difficult.

But each morning when I opened my eyes I did the only thing I knew how to do: get alone with God and seek His face. I had long since developed the habit of a daily quiet time to start my day. But something changed in that season. Even in the middle of the deepest pain, my heart was warmed by the love of Jesus. He met me there in that season, drew me close, and ministered to me in a way that changed my life forever. And from that time forward, I resolved to keep Jesus at the center of my life and ministry.

Placing Jesus at the center of it all is more than a tagline. It is the call of God upon each of our lives. Colossians 1:15–20 testifies about the preeminence of Jesus. He is before all things. He is the

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Placing Jesus at the center of it all is more than a tagline. It is the call of God upon each of our lives. Colossians 1:15–20 testifies about the preeminence of Jesus. He is before all things.

He is the center of God’s plan of redemption. And He is to be at the center of all that we are and all that we do. center of God’s plan of redemption. And He is to be at the center of all that we are and all that we do. For many months I’ve prayed that this reality would mark this year’s gathering of our Great Commission Baptist family in Anaheim. May we—individuals, churches, and our entire convention—strive like never before to place Jesus at the center of it all.

PURSUING GOD’S MISSION

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Together, we send and sustain missionaries to be steadfastly present around the globe to share that message and plant healthy churches.

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Mayhill Baptist Church in Mayhill, New Mexico Image Courtesy of Mayhill Baptist Church

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Local Church Autonomy Makes Cooperation Stronger, Say Southern Baptist Leaders

BY TOBIN PERRY

T

here is an old, not-so-funny joke Southern Baptist preachers like to tell. It starts with this question: Where is the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention?

The unsuspecting joke recipient responds with Nashville, the home of the SBC Executive Committee. No, the old preacher says with a laugh, and he then gives his church’s address.

While the joke may not be all that funny, it does shine a light on a key distinctive of Southern Baptists, one that extends back to the early days of Baptists – and echoed by Southern Baptist pastors, seminary professors and denominational leaders today.

“As Baptists, in the very beginning, we’ve always held to this idea of church autonomy, or another term for it is independency,” said Geoff Chang, an assistant professor of church history and historical theology at Midwestern Baptist

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. . . [Southern Baptist] churches are at the end of the day, congregationally ruled under the lordship of Christ, meaning that there is no kind of bishop, there’s no presbytery, there are not even secular governments outside of the local church that can exercise authority over the church, in the most important things that the church believes, its membership, discipline, worship, and so forth.

Geoff Chang, assistant professor of church history and historical theology Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

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Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. “Meaning that churches are at the end of the day, congregationally ruled under the lordship of Christ, meaning that there is no kind of bishop, there’s no presbytery, there are not even secular governments outside of the local church that can exercise authority over the church, in the most important things that the church believes, its membership, discipline, worship, and so forth.”

Chang notes that local church autonomy has its roots in the New Testament period but got diverted as the state church developed following Constantine’s conversion in the fourth century.

Autonomous churches don’t re-emerge until the English Reformation. Baptists come from the separatist wing of that reformation, which emphasized the independence of local churches.

The Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the official doctrinal statement of the Southern Baptist Convention, describes the church as “an autonomous local congregation of baptized believers, associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel.”

For Southern Baptists, this view of the local church has meant that neither the national convention, the state convention, local associations, nor the government can speak for churches or direct their actions in any way.

This goes back, Chang says, to ekklesia, the Greek term for church in the New Testament.

“I think one presumption I have here is every time I see the word church, especially in the book of Acts and in the epistles, I understand the word church not to be referring to some abstract institution,” Chang said. “As I understand the New Testament writers and their mindset, they’re thinking of that assembly of believers, those who have professed Christ, had been baptized, and are regularly assembling and gathering.”

Chang says the Southern Baptist belief in the autonomy of the local church is directly tied to the congregational form of government to which most Baptists subscribe.

Quail Springs Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Screen capture from CP promotional video at sbc.net/cp

“We have this congregational understanding of what the church is, and therefore the ministry of the church,” Chang said “This is sort of ownership by that congregation, so every time we call a pastor, every time we send out missionaries, every time we get to the ministry of the church, every time we get together to pray, every time we engage in discipleship and evangelism in the church, there’s a sense in which the church is not looking to outsource these things, but understand that this ministry belongs to us as a people, as a congregation. I think that’s really the heartbeat behind congregationalism. It’s an understanding that the church is the people.”

Gregory Wills, the dean of the school of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, says Southern Baptists have historically understood the authority of the local church in connection to its responsibilities to fulfill the commands of Christ given to the church.

“It’s not that we have the right to do these things,” Wills said. “It’s rather that we are responsible to these things. Each church is a steward of Christ commands, and each church will bear responsibility for how faithfully we obey Christ’s commands to the churches.”

Bart Barber, pastor of First Baptist Church of Farmersville, Texas, believes not only is church autonomy biblical, but it has aided the Southern Baptist Convention as it has grown.

“In rapidly changing circumstances, like the American Frontier, local church autonomy proved to make churches very nimble to adapt to their circumstances without having to get permission from someone else,” said Barber, who holds a Ph.D. in church history from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“I agree with the historian W.W. Sweet who said this is why Baptists and Methodists dominated the frontier, because a church could spring out of nothing without anybody else’s permission.”

As a local church pastor, Barber says he has friends in other denominations that must devote a significant amount of time staying in the “good graces” of their denominational hierarchy.

“Frankly, the interests of the congregation, the interests of the kingdom of God, do not always align with the interests of a denominational hierarchy,” Barber said. “I think that there’s something freeing and healthy about avoiding those kinds of ties.”

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For most of Southern Baptist history, church autonomy and a commitment to cooperation have run parallel with one another. While Southern Baptists have embraced a belief in the authority of every local church, they’ve also understood they can more effectively engage in their ministry and mission objectives when they work together with other like-minded churches. A church’s gifts to the Cooperative Program and annual missions offerings are voluntary. Churches pay no dues to a national, state, or local body. Every church sets its giving commitments, based upon its priorities and missions strategies.

Some might suggest autonomy weakens the cooperative ministry of Southern Baptists, but Ryan Strother, executive director of the State Convention of Baptists in Indiana, sees it differently. He points to the diversity of the Convention, fueled in part by church autonomy, as a benefit.

“Where it makes our cooperative missions stronger is that when you think of Indiana, we have about 450 churches in our state convention,” Strother said. “Those are fully autonomous churches, and because they’re autonomous, their function, their structure, and their unique DNA is able to come in and help strengthen other churches because they’re able to serve out of their giftedness as a church.”

Noting that the state convention can’t hire enough people to serve every need in Indiana churches, Strother says they are trying to leverage this diversity to connect local churches with specific strengths with other churches in the state that are struggling in that area. As they do this, they are seeing the value of autonomous churches working together to support a common mission.

Some have argued that the Southern Baptist Convention, state conventions, and local Baptist associations have overridden the autonomy of the local church when they have dis-fellowshipped churches that act outside of the Baptist Faith and Message.

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Barber believes this is a misunderstanding of autonomy. Autonomous churches can choose what churches they affiliate with. To not allow a Southern Baptist body to choose its affiliations is to disrespect the autonomy of the churches in that body.

Wills believes for nearly all Southern Baptist churches, there is no tension between the autonomy of the local church and the commonly held Baptist confessions that specific Baptist bodies have adopted.

“There’s no conflict, because each body is responsible for what its body’s mission and character is,” Wills said. “The church is responsible for its confession, the association responsible for its confession and membership. So if an association or a convention holds that our beliefs and what the Bible teaches are fundamental to our cooperation, our membership, our union. If they cannot then exclude churches, who disagree fundamentally with that understanding of the Bible, that then takes away the freedom of that group to determine its own membership.”

Strother believes the issue of church autonomy will become increasingly important in the future because of society’s distrust of authority and institutions.

“People want to know, who’s really in charge?

Who calls the shots?” Strother said. “When they know that it’s in our church, we’re autonomous, so there’s nobody above our pastors or whoever, who’s saying, ‘You have to do these things,’ they feel like they’re not going to be pinned in necessarily to be forced to believe everything that some book of rules passed down from a denominational office says we have to believe.”

For more information about what Southern Baptists believe, read the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.

TOBIN PERRY is a writer and member of Center of Hope Church in Evansville, Indiana.

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Siani Null is baptized by Pastor Rob Maine.

Image Courtesy of Renaissance Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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Southern Baptist College, Seminary Professors Reiterate Church’s Role in Baptism

BY TOBIN PERRY

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iani Null thought she could earn God’s favor. If she got the right grades, spent time with the right people, and gave her best as a competitive swimmer, the young college student would be the right version of herself. Not only would other people be pleased with her, but God would be pleased, too.

But when her world stopped being perfect, Null’s life became dismantled and broken.

That’s when she turned her life over to Jesus.

So last month, Null got up in front of her church family at Renaissance Church, a sevenyear-old Southern Baptist church plant in Pittsburgh, to tell the world about that decision.

“Siani, what is your sacred confession?” Pastor Rob Maine asked.

“Jesus is Lord,” Null responded.

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“By your sacred confession and evidence of a changed life, we baptize you . . . ” At those words, hands flew up throughout the audience. Church members then said: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Then Maine immersed her in the baptismal pool, saying “You’ve been buried with Christ and raised to walk in newness of life.”

With that confession, the church erupted in applause.

“At that point we clap, we cry, and we shout,” Maine said as he described the church’s baptismal practices. “Because it is symbolizing a family member has come home. It doesn’t save them.

But it’s a symbol of their salvation.”

For Renaissance Church, the local church is at the heart of the baptism.

“It purposely goes against the westernized idea of Christianity where I get to choose when I’m baptized without the accountability of a local church community,” Maine said. “It’s a communal identity in Christ. When you’re baptized, you are not only baptized in Christ, but you are also welcomed into this new family that you didn’t choose.

We love the communal aspect, the member responsibility aspect, affirming that the Spirit is alive and well within this brand-new brother or sister.”

If someone outside of the fold knows nothing else about Baptists, they likely know this: Baptism is central to Baptist identity. In Barry Hankins and Thomas Kidd’s book Baptists in America: A History, they include baptism among the three features that mark Baptists throughout history. “[Baptism] is really central [to the Baptist identity],” said Kidd, a professor of history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “It’s one of the few things that united all Baptist groups. I can’t imagine why anyone would consider themselves Baptist and not practice believer’s baptism. People naming themselves Baptists disagree on all kinds of theological and ecclesiastical issues, but one ritual that has always been there for Baptists and distinguished them from other Protestants is the ritual of believer’s baptism.”

THE ROLE OF THE LOC AL CHURCH IN BAPTISMS

Recent news has brought baptism back to the forefront of the national conversation. Earlier this month, Andres Arango, a longtime Roman Catholic priest in Phoenix, resigned after it came to light that he had used the wrong wording when performing baptisms. Instead of saying, “I baptize you” as Roman Catholic church law

People naming themselves Baptists disagree on all kinds of theological and ecclesiastical issues, but one ritual that has always been there for Baptists and distinguished them from other Protestants is the ritual of believer’s baptism.”

Thomas Kidd, professor of history Baylor University

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prescribes during a baptism, Arango would say, “We baptize you.” Soon after this was discovered, the local bishop announced that all the baptisms from the priest’s twenty-five-year ministry were invalid, potentially throwing out decades of marriages and ordinations that were based upon these baptisms.

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, the Phoenix bishop who issued the ruling in collaboration with the Vatican, noted that the Catholic church believes that “it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes.”

Southern Baptists have historically seen the ordinance of baptism differently. Malcolm Yarnell, a research professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, notes the command to baptize in the Great Commission wasn’t just given to the apostles or to ministers, it was given to the church.

“We understand that we, as a church, are baptizing because of the commandment of Jesus Christ,” Yarnell said. “For Roman Catholics, they believe the priest stands in the place of Christ.

The priest acts as Christ. So they don’t want to speak of the local church being engaged in baptism. Baptists are just so different from that. We do believe that baptism is done by the church, as an act of obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ in the Great Commission.”

BAPTISM FOR EARLY BAPTISTS

The distinctiveness of baptisms in the Baptist tradition goes all the way back to the decades after the Reformation and the first Baptists. Kidd notes that the name Baptist itself comes from Anabaptist, which means “re-baptize.” Early Baptists taught that those who were baptized as infants needed to be re-baptized as believing adults.

Kidd says this focus on believer’s baptism made Baptists unique among Christians of their era. The overwhelming practice of Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox was infant baptism, Kidd

Baptism at Rolling Hills Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee.

Image Courtesy of Rolling Hills Community Church

says. Other Protestants, he adds, largely saw baptism in the same way as circumcision in the Old Testament, bringing children into the covenant community of the church.

“The Baptists, starting in the late 1500s and early 1600s in England in particular, believe that kind of use of baptism as a sign of the covenant is confusing what baptism is in New Testament times,” Kidd said. “In Acts, it’s a sign of the internal transformation of regeneration and faith that only people who can understand what’s happening could possibly go through.”

Nathan Finn, a Baptist historian and the dean of faculty at North Greenville University in Tigerville, South Carolina, says this focus on believer’s baptism often made early Baptists take more time than we do to assess a baptismal candidate’s conversion. He calls that the most significant change in how Baptists have done baptisms throughout history.

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Mode of baptism has been a consistent Baptist distinctive throughout history, although Finn notes that the first generation of Baptists struggled to settle on immersion. While every generation of Baptists has consistently practiced believer’s baptism, many early Baptists still poured water over candidates instead of dipping new believers into the water. But for most of Baptist history, immersion has been the settled mode of baptism.

“We’re not going to baptize someone unless we think they’re a Christian,” Finn said. “We might be wrong about that, but we won’t baptize them if we don’t think they’re a Christian. And when we baptize them, it’s going to be in the water and we’re going to get all of them wet.”

WHAT MAKES A BAPTISM LEGITIMATE

Yarnell says the issue of the legitimacy of baptisms is different for Baptists who don’t hold to anything like canonical law.

“We don’t have any legal format we follow,” Yarnell said. “We follow more Christian principles that we find in Scripture. I wouldn’t want to present it in the same terms as Catholic or Lutheran or Anglican or even Reformed church law.

We just don’t think in those terms.”

But, Yarnell says, without the Gospel—and both an internal and an external representation of it—a baptism isn’t proper.

“We believe that the baptism in water ought to happen alongside or after the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” Yarnell said. “To have the baptism of the Holy Spirit means to be born again, faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We want a real confession of faith. That’s the external. What’s the external?

It’s that external confession of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and that God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. If you don’t have the external and the internal saying the same thing, you’ve got a problem.”

Finn notes that historically there have been disagreements by Baptists about baptism, they’ve generally been united around three issues regarding legitimacy—the right mode (immersion), the right meaning (a symbol of the Gospel in a

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person’s life), and the right subject of baptism (a fully converted believer).

The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 addresses all three topics, calling baptism “the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus.”

Because Southern Baptists have historically tied baptism to both conversions and church membership, it has often been used as an important metric in the evangelistic health of local churches, state Baptist conventions, and the Southern Baptist Convention. A decline in baptisms across the Convention has been a common concern expressed in recent decades.

“We have to go preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ for us to see people baptized,” Yarnell said.

“Baptism is something that happens after evangelism, after mission. So let’s put the priority on mission and on evangelism. Then let’s watch and see what God does through the number of baptisms.”

Kidd urges Southern Baptists to reflect upon the historic significance of baptism for Baptists— and to remember the price paid by those early Baptists for practicing it in what was a unique manner.

“I think that Baptists and Southern Baptists have probably lost some of the sense of how special and unusual the Baptist ritual of baptism was,” Kidd said. “For even centuries after the beginning of the new Baptist movement, in the early 1600s, Baptists went through a lot of persecution, because of how their baptism ritual was held in derision, even by a lot of other Protestants. I think that that’s something to be respected and understood. A lot of Baptists suffered at least harassment and ridicule, if not imprisonment and fines for upholding what we consider to be the biblical view of baptism.”

TOBIN PERRY is a writer and member of Center of Hope Church in Evansville, Indiana.

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Photo Illustration by Andy Beachum

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Southern Baptists Champion Religious Liberty

BY TOBIN PERRY

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rowing up Baptist, Bob Roberts Jr., understood the importance of religious freedom. He’d heard the stories about Baptists who had played seminal roles in the development of religious freedom in America.

But it wasn’t until his church partnered with a country in Southeast Asia with a long history of struggles with religious freedom, that he truly understood its importance.

Invited by the country’s leadership to visit both Christian churches and religious services of other religions, Roberts saw firsthand the impact on people when they don’t have religious freedom.

“I began to meet many of the leading pastors in [the country]. This was in the early 2000s,” said Roberts, the global senior pastor of Northwood Church in Keller, Texas. “Many that I heard about had been in and out of jail. But sitting at a table with them, hearing their stories had a profound impact on me, how they were persecuted, went to prison. Some of them knew people who even died for the Gospel.”

Roberts was so moved by what he saw that, at one point, he went to another room and wept.

“We didn’t just visit the churches,” Roberts added. “We visited with other non-Christian religions as well, and they were facing similar

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persecution that impacted me. It’s one thing to intellectually know those things. It’s quite another thing to see people who’ve really paid a price.

And it had a radical impact on me.”

The profound impact of that trip led to numerous opportunities for Roberts to advocate religious freedom for all.

“Both politically and philosophically, there has to be religious freedom for all, or it’s religious freedom for none,” Roberts said. “Missiologically, if I don’t provide for religious freedom of people of other religions here in America, it directly impacts how those people are treated in the countries where Christians are a minority.”

WHAT BAPTISTS BELIEVE ABOUT RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

For Southern Baptists like Roberts, religious liberty isn’t just about a trip to a civics class but grounded in more than four hundred years of history and shaped by the blood and tears of pastors, missionaries, and lay people on the front lines of the Great Commission.

“It’s one of our core Baptist distinctives,” said Jason Thacker, chair of research in technology ethics and leads the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) Research Institute. “Baptists had been involved in various degrees and forms over many generations, advocating for religious freedom, because we see it as central—not only to our Baptist faith, but really to the Christian faith—that faith cannot be coerced. Faith cannot be forced upon someone. There’s a freedom of conscience. There’s a freedom of will—and that salvation comes through personal belief.”

The Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the Southern Baptist statement of faith, defines the Convention’s convictions regarding religious liberty in Article XVII: “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it.”

The article affirms the belief in a separation of church and state and the duty of Christians to

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obey the state “in all things not contrary to the revealed will of God.” Article XVII concludes with: “A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal, and this implies the right of free and unhindered access to God on the part of all men, and the right to form and propagate opinions in the sphere of religion without interference by the civil power.”

The biblical texts that undergird those statements, particularly a commitment to the Great Commission, have fueled 175 years of Southern Baptist efforts to speak up for the religious liberty of Christians and non-Christians alike.

“Religious liberty is probably the main theological contribution that Baptists have brought to church history,” said Rodrick Durst, chair of history and theological studies at Gateway Seminary in Ontario, California.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF BAPTIST VIEWS ON RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Baptist religious liberty convictions extend back to the beginning of the Baptist movement and even back to the first stirrings of religious liberty in Europe. Early Baptists entered a world dominated by state churches, where the modern concept of religious freedom would have been nearly inconceivable.

Nathan Finn, dean of the university faculty and a professor of Christian studies and history at North Greenville University in Tigerville, South Carolina, says the Baptist vision of religious liberty extends back to the radical Puritans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who didn’t want to be a part of the Church of England.

“For those of us now who are part of the Baptist movement, the roots of the way we talk about religious liberty actually predate the Baptists,” Finn said. “It was our forefathers, if you will, and radical English puritanism who broke away from the Church of England. One of the reasons was they wanted to have religious freedom.”

Radical English Puritans, Finn added, wanted to be free to obey the Scriptures. In the early

George W. Truett (right) and SBC President James B. Gambrell on the steps of the US Capitol building in 1920. Image Courtesy of Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives

seventeenth century, some of these Puritans broke away from the rest over the issue of infant baptism.

“Before we believed in believer’s baptism, we believed in religious liberty,” Finn said. “Then one of the first ways that we exercised our religious freedom was by rejecting infant baptism and embracing the baptism of [believers] alone.”

Baptists were involved in many of the key events that helped define the development of religious freedom within the American context. Some of those events include: In 1611–12, Thomas Helwys, who started the first Baptist church in England, published the first book-length defense of religious liberty in English.

In A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, Helwys calls for complete liberty of conscience for all people.

After conflict with the Puritan leaders of New England over, among other issues, the relationship of the church to the government, Roger Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

He founded the colony of Rhode Island as a “shelter for persons distressed of conscience.” Williams founded the first Baptist church in America in 1638.

Baptist preacher John Leland, a friend to both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, helped ensure the inclusion of the First Amendment in the US Constitution, guaranteeing religious liberty. The addition came as a compromise between Madison and Leland whereas Madison agreed to fight for the amendment’s passage in exchange for the preacher’s promise to drop out of a contested congressional race against Madison.

In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802, President Thomas Jefferson first described a “wall of separation between church and state.” Though at times controversial in its application, Jefferson’s description of that wall would be recounted countless times in later religious liberty debates.

George W. Truett’s famous 1920 speech on religious liberty from the steps of the US Capitol became an influential event for many 20th century political and religious leaders. The First Baptist Church of Dallas pastor spoke to 15,000 people—many of whom were Southern Baptists in town for the SBC annual meeting, along with members of Congress, cabinet officials, and Supreme Court justices.

Truett told those assembled, “It is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship, or to pay taxes for the support of a religious organization to which they do not believe. God wants free worshipers and no other kind.”

Southern Baptists have supported a number of institutions dedicated to addressing religious liberty issues. In 1947, Southern Baptists voted to provide Cooperative Program funding to the Social Service Commission (SSC). In 1997, the SSC was renamed the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. In recent years, the ERLC has advocated on behalf of Southern Baptists on a number of significant religious freedom cases.

For example, the ERLC joined an amicus brief in a case heard earlier this year in the US Supreme Court regarding the city of Boston’s decision not to allow a Christian flag to be flown as one of three in front of its city hall. According to an ERLC explainer on the case, it’s seen as an opportunity for the court to clarify its understanding of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making any law “respecting the establishment of religion.”

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The ERLC was involved in a number of cases related to government restrictions of churches during the COVID-19 pandemic. The entity advocated on behalf of equal treatment of churches as local, state, and federal governments mandated shutdowns and gathering size limitations.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND THE GREAT COMMISSION

The ERLC hasn’t just advocated on behalf of religious freedom for Christians. In 2021–22, by resolution of SBC messengers to the 2021 SBC Annual Meeting, the ERLC has advocated on behalf of Uyghur Muslims who are the subject of intense persecution in the Xinjiang region of China. The Uyghurs are Chinese citizens whose religious convictions moves them to stand against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The ERLC worked to gain passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Act in Washington in December 2021 to push against the slave labor and population control efforts Uyghurs are being subjected to by the CCP. “That’s one of the key tension points, especially in recent years,” Thacker said. “Whether it be the ERLC or other organizations who uphold religious freedom and partnering with those who we fundamentally disagree on very important issues, especially issues of understanding of who God is and Scripture and the Gospel and things like that,” Thacker said. “Because religious freedom is the freedom for all to believe, as they see fit in that sense, and to be able to live out their deeply held religious beliefs.”

Thacker noted two important reasons why the religious liberty of all is important to Southern Baptists. First, he recognized that government restrictions allowed to stand against non-Baptists may eventually inhibit the religious freedom of Baptists to worship freely.

Most important, Thacker notes, the issue goes back to the concept of “soul freedom.” Spiritual decisions belong between the person and

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God and should not be in the sphere of governmental authority.

Andrew Walker, a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, points to missiology, noting that to advance the Gospel, people must have an opportunity to respond to it. While God works in many places around the world where religious freedom isn’t available, Walker says, “any hurdle or obstacle that’s standing in the way, is an impediment to religious liberty, we should fight against.”

In fact, every Southern Baptist interviewed for this article related, in one way or another, the need for religious freedom to a commitment to the Great Commission. “[Early] Baptists believed that as long as the state was staying out of the business of dictating religion, and Jews and Muslims and infidels, and atheists had the right to be wrong, that also meant that Baptists and other Bible-believing Christians had the right to proclaim the truth of the Gospel over them,” said Finn, describing the missional convictions of early Baptists related to religious liberty. “For Baptists, it’s always been more than just defending their own right of worship, but defending true religious freedom for all people, for the sake of human flourishing and the advance of the Gospel.”

Durst referenced Romans 13 and the Christian’s identity as a kingdom representative.

“We are citizens without borders, kingdom citizens, and our Great Commission is to cross borders for the Gospel,” Durst said. “We live in the ‘already, but not yet kingdom come.’ Religious liberty is a witness. It’s a part of Christian discipleship, because we must be willing to go into the public place and live for Christ.”

TOBIN PERRY is a writer and member of Center of Hope Church in Evansville, Indiana.

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S B C U P D AT E

EC President Search Team Names Chair, Plans Season of Prayer

BY SCOTT BARKLEY

T

he six-member search team tasked with selecting the next president and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee is calling on all Southern Baptists to be part of the process.

“We want to get the message out that everyone in this convention matters,” said Mike Keahbone, pastor of First Baptist Church in Lawton, Oklahoma. “Everyone has a role to play and if you aren’t involved, your [SBC] family suffers.”

The team held its first meeting March 3 via Zoom, with Keahbone sharing the news of the call to prayer on Twitter March 4. “All of us need to be in fervent prayer for our next leader. #doyourpart,” he wrote.

California pastor and EC chairman Rolland Slade, also a member of the search team in an ex officio role, reported that Adron Robinson, senior pastor of Hillcrest Baptist Church in Country Club Hills, Illinois, will serve as chair; David Sons, lead pastor of Lake Murray Baptist Church

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SBC.NET | SUMMER 2022

in Lexington, South Carolina, will be vice-chair; and Philip Robertson, senior pastor of Philadelphia Baptist Church in Deville, Louisiana, will serve as secretary.

“I’m honored my peers selected me for this role and I’ll do my best throughout the process,” said Robinson. “The Lord knows who our next EC president will be and it is our job to seek His will in this process. We’re asking Southern Baptists to join us over the next month for this season of prayer so we can hear from God collectively and be of one accord.”

In looking through documentation of previous searches for a president/CEO, the team noticed there hadn’t been a recorded call to prayer for Southern Baptists on the matter. The current season in the convention cries out for it, Keahbone commented.

“With everything going on—racial reconciliation, the abuse investigation, and a report about to come out on it—there are a lot of eyes on the SBC,” he said. “This hire could be one of the most significant we’ve ever made.”

A prayer strategy will be shared by the group soon, Keahbone added. Other members of the team are Mollie Duddleston, director of ministry operations at Cross Church in Springdale, Arkansas, and Jeremy Morton, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Georgia.

“We need to rally everyone connected to Southern Baptists to take a season and enter a time of fervent prayer for who God is going to put in that position, for us to have wisdom and discernment,” Keahbone said. “We want this to be God’s man, and everyone is excited about that.”

A version of this article was published in Baptist Press on March 4, 2022.

SCOTT BARKLEY is national correspondent for Baptist Press.

S B C U P D AT E

California Southern Baptists Begin Search for New Executive Director

BY DIANA CHANDLER

The new leader tasked with overseeing CSBC’s strategic vision and leading its decision making should be a man called and sent

by God and able to navigate California’s unique diversity.”

Victor Chayasirisobhon, president California Southern Baptist Convention

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SBC.NET | SUMMER 2022

T

he California Southern Baptist Convention (CSBC) has launched a search for a new executive director to replace Bill Agee, who is retiring.

The new leader tasked with overseeing CSBC’s strategic vision and leading its decision making should be a man called and sent by God and able to navigate California’s unique diversity, said CSBC President Victor Chayasirisobhon, who is also a member of the search committee.

“California is a large and diverse state that has unique challenges that only someone with experience here can truly know and therefore I think it is important that this person know California

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California is a large and diverse state that has unique challenges that only someone with experience here can truly know and therefore I think it is important that this person know California intimately.”

Victor Chayasirisobhon

intimately,” Chayasirisobhon told Baptist Press.

“Due to the diversity of the state, I think it is important for our future director to be culturally intelligent and pay attention to the little nuances of cross-cultural interaction.

“They should be able to see through the lenses of many different perspectives,” said Chayasirisobhon, who pastors First Southern Baptist Church of Anaheim and is director of missions of the Orange County Southern Baptist Association. “The person should be someone who understands that the SBC is a family and that we are to work together in unity. We may not always agree on everything but there is a difference in building understanding as a family than there is when you are not.”

The new leader must have served as a pastor in the western US, have experience in organizational leadership, possess at least a master’s degree but preferably a doctorate, and must be a strong communicator with cultural intelligence among other attributes, according to the job description.

The CSBC’s goals, Chayasirisobhon says, include planting churches to reach all of California, equipping churches fulfill their mission, ministering to children and youth, building unity with cultural understanding among churches, working with SBC partners in accomplishing the Great Commandment and Great Commission, conducting disaster relief, and welcoming attendees to the 2022 SBC Annual Meeting in Anaheim.

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The CSBC Executive Board accepted Agee’s retirement in January, allowing him to leave through a transitional process ending December 31 and expanding the role of Associate Executive Director Pete Ramirez during the transition.

Joining Chayasirisobhon on the search committee are chairman Shawn Beaty, pastor of Clovis Hills Community Church in Clovis and an CSBC Executive Board member; Bushawn Carpenter, pastor of Total Restoration Church in Barstow; Narri Cooper, a member of Seasons Church in Spring Valley; Becky Duron, a member of The Vine Church in Rancho Cucamonga; Kendrick Neal, lead pastor of Calvary Church in West Hills; Charles Woods, pastor of Feather River Baptist Church in Olivehurst; and ex officio member Daniel Cassels, pastor of Life Way Fellowship of Santa Maria and CSBC Executive Board chairman.

The CSBC, a fellowship of 2,300 churches comprising about 450,000 members of diverse ethnicities and languages, is one of 42 Southern Baptist state conventions cooperating with the Southern Baptist Convention. About 80 languages are spoken among CSBC congregations.

A version of this article was published in Baptist Press on March 10, 2022.

DIANA CHANDLER is Baptist Press’s senior writer.

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COMMUNISM IS NOT DEA DEAD D Although Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union about three decades ago, its global influence continues to threaten and oppress God’s people today.

C

ommunism was upheld as an answer to corruption and greed that would eliminate conflict between the classes, or “the exploitation of one part of society by the other.” In theory, it would create a utopian paradise on earth. In practice, however, it was what Richard Wurmbrand, founder of The Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) who spent 14 years in Communist prisons for his faith, called the “principal enemy.”

When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 with the aim of “liberating” the working class, they wrote, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” They believed these class struggles could be resolved by abolishing the ownership of private property and allowing the government to manage it for public use.

In the process of obliterating class

barriers, the Communists also suppressed what they viewed as a major threat to their ideology — religion and the church.

Marx famously called religion “the opium of the people,” a tool used by capitalists to suppress and deceive the working class. And in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels brashly asserted that “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.”

They were not alone in that belief.

Vladimir Lenin, who in 1917 led the Bolshevik Revolution that transformed Russia into a bastion of Communism, stated his intent toward the church: “We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological weapons.” The Communist Party had become atheistic in word and deed.

This is the atheistic Communism that

Richard Wurmbrand experienced when the Soviet Union occupied his Romanian homeland in 1944. After being ransomed out of Communist Romania, he boldly spoke out about Communism’s effects on Christians and Christianity: I cannot agree … that the principal foe today is the materialism of the West. Today the principal enemy is Communism. Capitalism might have its evils, but it gives to the church the liberty to work at the salvation of souls. Communism ... uproots religion. The missionary energies must be concentrated upon the Communist lands.

Although he wrote these words in 1969, they are still relevant today.

Communism has a global influence that continues to threaten and oppress God’s people.

vom.org

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THE VOICE OF THE MARTYRS

All About Control After the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, many of the remaining Communist countries became economically unstable without the financial support of the Soviet Union. These countries therefore shifted tactics, focusing more on global economic expansion and control than on territorial and political expansion.

In the late 1970s, years prior to the collapse of Soviet Communism, Deng Xiaoping had adjusted China’s economic policies and begun to engage in the world economy. China continued to implement capitalist principles over the next two decades to bolster its wealth and global image.

Some Western leaders thought China’s international business dealings would force its government to relax restrictions on human rights, including the treatment of Christians, particularly house church Christians. But doing business with the world has not forced Communist power brokers to relinquish control over the country’s citizens. As China’s wealth has grown, so has the government’s ability to track, monitor and control the Chinese people. Recent crackdowns on the church in China have resulted in more arrests and harassment, and Chinese believers are once again being forced “underground.”

Similarly, in the relatively tiny and economically weak nation of Cuba, little has changed for Christians in 60 years under Communism. In the words of one Cuban pastor, “The world has to understand that Cuba is still a Communist country.”

In 1959, Fidel Castro’s Communists overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. For Castro and his followers, Communism was a plausible answer to the corruption and greed that had flourished in Batista’s government.

The revolution, however, resulted in no improvements. Cubans must still use ration books to purchase food, there is no private banking system and even doctors

2

earn only the equivalent of about $40 a month. In typical Communist style, the government inventories what each citizen owns; if a person has too much, the government confiscates it.

In addition to these economic hardships, the church in Cuba has faced ongoing persecution and harassment from the Communist government. Cuban pastors have told VOM that they know the government plants spies in their church services, hoping to catch the pastors saying something that can be used against them. Pastors are also routinely detained and questioned for hours or days at a time before being fined and released.

In addition, many Christian students are refused diplomas unless they bow before a statue of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentinian Marxist revolutionary who helped Castro overthrow the Batista government.

No legal Christian bookstores exist in Cuba, and no new church buildings have been constructed since the Communist takeover in 1959. Existing churches face constant harassment, with the government cutting electricity and water to some church buildings, and demolishing others.

Global Influence While China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba are considered some of the last “Communist” nations, the ideology remains influential in several other nations, including India and Nepal. In India, Communist groups are called Naxalites, a name originating from the town of Naxalbari in northeastern India where an uprising occurred in the late 1960s. The Naxalites claim to represent the poorest in Indian society, especially those from a low caste or no caste in the Hindu-dominated country.

Although the Naxalites don’t commonly persecute Christians, VOM field leaders say Hindu extremists often pay or incite Naxalites to persecute Christians. Naxalites were responsible for

the 2019 murders of two Christians in separate incidents.

In Nepal, Communist Maoist guerrillas were instrumental in the Nepalese Civil War that led to the 2008 overthrow of the country’s monarchy, which had ruled the Himalayan nation for more than two centuries. Today, the Communist Party holds seats in parliament, and Maoist groups have been known to persecute Christians.

In restricted nations like Eritrea and North Korea, dictatorial leaders educated in Communist doctrine apply the ideology’s values without a Communist political party.

Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, studied in China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), absorbing Chairman Mao Zedong’s strong-arm approach to governance. Upon his return to Eritrea, Afwerki founded his own Marxist revolutionary movement — the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, later renamed The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. Afwerki and his followers joined in a 30-year battle for independence from Ethiopia that resulted in defeat for Ethiopia, independence for Eritrea and a presidency for Afwerki in 1993.

While many Eritreans had looked with hope toward their new nation’s government, Afwerki’s totalitarian tendencies became more apparent with each

E Ernesto “Che” Guevara with Fidel Castro, who overthrew Fulgencio Batista to establish Communism in Cuba. Today, students in Cuba are required to bow before a statue of Che Guevara before they can obtain their diploma.

Communism Today

Areas of the World Where Christians Are Significantly Oppressed by Communism Today

World Population: 7.7 billion Approximately 3 billion people live in countries where Christians face Communist oppression.

NORTHKOREA KOREA NORTH NEPAL NEPAL

INDIA INDIA

CHINA CHINA

LAOS LAOS

CUBA CUBA VENEZUELA VENEZUELA

ERITREA ERITREA VIETNAM VIETNAM

COLOMBIA COLOMBIA (FARC) (FARC)

E North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung received training from the Communists in the Soviet Union.

passing year. In keeping with his Marxist governmental policies, he also embraced atheism. Christians in Eritrea are harshly persecuted to this day, some enduring years of imprisonment in extreme conditions.

Like Eritrea’s leader, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung underwent military and political training in the Soviet Union in the 1930s after joining a Communist youth organization. With the help of the Soviets, specifically Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung formed what we know as North Korea, one of the most repressive nations in the world today.

North Korea is unique among Communist-influenced governments. While most Communist countries embrace and promote atheism, North Korea upholds Communist principles in a totalitarian-style government that requires

citizens to worship Kim Il Sung, who is venerated as a god. The state religion, Juche, was created as a distortion of Christianity. For example, instead of the Ten Commandments, North Koreans are to follow the “Ten Principles,” among which is this revealing statement: “We must make absolute the authority of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.”

The Last Victory Communism is not dead. As economically empowered Communist nations strengthen and expand their global influence, their governments continue to actively persecute our Christian brothers and sisters in Christ.

And contrary to the ideals of Marx and Engels, Communist and Communistinfluenced countries around the world are rife with corruption, greed and gross social injustice.

Despite the efforts of Communist nations in Eastern Europe to suppress and eradicate the church by imprisoning and torturing pastors, destroying church buildings and banning Bibles, the church simply went underground and remained faithful to Christ. Some Christians, like Richard Wurmbrand, emerged stronger,

calling out the evils of the atheistic Communist system while emphasizing the urgency to win Communists for Christ.

And Christians in Communist and Communist-influenced countries live and act in that same spirit today.

During a television interview in Australia in 1970, Richard Wurmbrand was asked if Communism was a threat to the church in the country. “Not the church of Christ,” he replied. “Even the gates of hell cannot prevail against her. It is Communism which is rather endangered by the existence of the church, because the last victory is ours. … We don’t tremble before Communism. They should be in panic because of us.”

The faithful witness of our brothers and sisters in Christ causes panic and fear within Communist governments.

These courageous believers know their promise of an eternal kingdom far outweighs any suffering they may endure under the godless agenda of a temporal kingdom. While their witness inspires us to stand with them and reach out to our neighbors with the gospel, may our knowledge of Communism’s atheistic roots and agenda keep us vigilant in prayer and action.  vom.org

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S B C U P D AT E

Missie Branch Image Courtesy of Lifeway Christian Resources

Lifeway Trustees Elect First African American Woman Trustee Chair

BY CAROL PIPES

F

or the first time in its 130-year history, Lifeway Christian Resources has an African American woman as trustee chair. Missie Branch was elected Tuesday, March 8, by Lifeway trustees during a special-called meeting.

Branch is assistant dean of students to women and director of graduate life at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. A member of Imago Dei Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, Branch began her service on the board in 2017.

Lifeway CEO Ben Mandrell shared his excitement about this historic moment and praised Branch’s leadership ability, character, and love for the local church.

“Missie’s character, commitment to the local church, and investment in tomorrow’s ministry leaders give me confidence that she’s the person to lead our board,” Mandrell said. “I’m excited and thankful for her historic appointment as the first African American female to chair our board.

“Missie is a bright person with a tremendous amount of insight and an inner strength from the Lord. I believe she will be a strong, unifying leader. She is a great friend to Lifeway, and I look forward to our deepened partnership.”

Branch expressed her appreciation for the board and their trust in her to lead them well.

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“I am humbled by the confidence of my fellow board members. Leading alongside a group like ours is an honor.

When asked to join the board a few years ago, I never anticipated an opportunity like this. I love serving an organization whose mission is directly linked to the ministry and mission of the local church.

I’m determined to work with my fellow board members as we seek to honor the Lord and serve our Convention.”

Missie Branch, assistant dean of students to women; director of graduate life Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

“I am humbled by the confidence of my fellow board members,” Branch said. “Leading alongside a group like ours is an honor. When asked to join the board a few years ago, I never anticipated an opportunity like this. I love serving an organization whose mission is directly linked to the ministry and mission of the local church.

I’m determined to work with my fellow board

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SBC.NET | SUMMER 2022

members as we seek to honor the Lord and serve our Convention.”

Branch was elected vice chair during the trustee meeting held January 25. She fills the role vacated by Greg Kannady, who stepped down as chair due to a recent health issue. While Kannady plans to continue his service as a board member, he shared with trustees via email he felt it would be wise to replace him as board chair.

Mandrell offered his appreciation for Kannady’s continued commitment to Lifeway. “We’re all praying for Greg and his family as they face this health challenge together,” Mandrell said.

Trustees also elected Luther McDaniel, CFO at Empirical Capital Partners, to serve as vice chair. McDaniel has served on the board since 2016. He’s a member of First Baptist Church, Hendersonville, Tennessee.

“Luther McDaniel’s financial and business expertise is invaluable as he steps into the vice chair role,” Mandrell said. “I’m grateful for his leadership and for the other men and women who faithfully serve on our board.”

Ben Posey, pastor of First Baptist Church in Leroy, Alabama, continues to serve as recording secretary.

“I so appreciate Ben’s servant leadership and devotion to serving Christ and His church,” Mandrell said. “The church he pastors is similar to a large majority of Southern Baptist churches—churches that rely on the resources Lifeway provides. It’s indispensable to have pastors like Ben providing feedback and speaking into those resources.”

The next Lifeway trustee meeting is scheduled for August 29–30, 2022.

A version of this article was published in Baptist Press on March 8, 2022.

CAROL PIPES is director of corporate communications for Lifeway Christian Resources.

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S B C U P D AT E

Michael Crawford is the newly-elected executive director for the General Mission Board of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware. Image Courtesy of BCM/D

Crawford Named Executive Director of BCM/D

BY SHARON MAGER

T

he General Mission Board of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware (BCM/D) unanimously named Michael Crawford as the convention’s executive director Thursday, March 17.

Crawford, who has served with the BCM/D for eight years, succeeds Kevin Smith, who, feeling a call to pastoral ministry, resigned in 2021. BCM/D State Director of Evangelism Mark Dooley became the interim executive director following Smith’s resignation, working with an interim leadership team that included Crawford and Associate Executive Director Tom Stolle.

Previously, Crawford served as SEND Network Director for Maryland/Delaware and planted and served at Freedom Church in Baltimore.

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He co-founded The Banquet Network, a non-profit interdenominational entity designed to assess and equip churches with resources to start and strengthen special needs ministries. He also founded The Subversive Institute, an organization designed to serve the marginalized in Baltimore. Additionally, Crawford is the author of 100 Meditations: An Everyday Book for Everyday People and Don’t Plant, be Planted: Observations About Starting a Church.

“Crawford is a phenomenal leader,” Stolle said. “He is uniquely gifted in the areas of vision and strategy, combined with a pastor’s heart. He not only knows scripture; he lives it out. He is a man of great passion. He cares deeply about the pastors, local associations, and the churches affiliated with the BCM/D. His love, care, and concern for the convention staff are obvious. He’s the right leader at the right time. I truly believe God has called him to serve in this capacity.”

Tim Simpson, pastor of congregational care at Greenridge Baptist Church in Boyds, Maryland, and chair of the executive director search committee thanked those who have been praying for the committee.

“The Lord was gracious and gave us a strong sense of His leadership and teamwork,” Simpson said, adding that after interviewing a group of candidates in January and February, the search team was in agreement.

“We were united that Crawford was the man uniquely gifted to lead our two-state convention,” he said. “Crawford is a passionate follower of Jesus Christ, loves the mission of the local church, and cares deeply for our pastors, church planters, directors of missions, and our BCM/D staff members. He is a rare mix of visionary leadership and collaborative strategy-building wrapped in a shepherd’s heart.”

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I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t have all the gifts.

This has to be a collaborative team effort. I hope to bring a sense of a renewed culture of oneness and unity and purpose and calling and a kind of solidification.”

Michael Crawford, executive director Baptist Convention of Maryland/ Delaware

Other committee members were Co-Chair Van-Kim Lin, Village Church Baltimore; Lynn Davis, High Tide Church, Dagsboro, Delaware; Tammy Lashey, wife of Mark Lashey, pastor of LifeHouse Church, Townsend, Delaware; Harold Phillips, senior pastor, Pleasant View Baptist Church, Port Deposit, Maryland; Wanda Minter, wife of Pastor Anthony Minter, First Rock Baptist Church, Washington, DC; Fred Caudle, senior pastor, The Church @ St. Charles, Waldorf, Maryland; Frank Duncan, senior pastor, Paramount Baptist Church, Hagerstown, Maryland; Greg Kame, senior pastor, Glen Burnie Baptist Church, Glen Burnie, Maryland; and Tim Byer, senior pastor, Faith Baptist Church, Glen Burnie, Maryland.

COLL ABOR ATION AND STR ATEGY

“I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t have all the gifts,” Crawford told staff members during a Q&A time before the mission board’s

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vote. “This has to be a collaborative team effort.

I hope to bring a sense of a renewed culture of oneness and unity and purpose and calling and a kind of solidification.”

Crawford looked ahead and smiled, saying, “The possibilities are what excite me the most.

The people in this room with amazing gift sets and experience excite me. It excites me to think about all the pastors all over the region that have a heart for Jesus who are laboring. It excites me to think about what we could do if we had a clear, articulated vision married with strategy and then resourced—what could actually happen! Those things excite me.”

Crawford added that he’s also excited about the future of Skycroft Conference Center—a three hundred-acre, BCM/D-owned retreat center in Middletown, Maryland. He emphasized the need for increased Skycroft promotion and said he envisions a new multi-purpose room at the facility and the possibility of using Skycroft to host the convention’s annual meeting.

“It’s a phenomenal place,” he said. “I think it should be the premiere ministry conference center in the Northeast.”

Asked about some of the concerns in the Southern Baptist Convention, such as “wokeism” and hyper-Calvinism, Crawford responded: “They are just distractions. That’s not a hard question for me.” Crawford emphasized the need to focus on the BCM/D’s mission of starting and strengthening churches.

SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

Crawford was born in California in 1968, the youngest of eight children. His mother accepted a new job when he was nine years old, and the family moved from the San Fernando Valley to the affluent Malibu Hills. Following his 1986 graduation from Crossroads High School in Santa Monica, he briefly attended UCLA before God reached into his heart and changed his life forever. During a difficult period, while dealing

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Michael and Dani Crawford Image Courtesy of BCM/D

The possibilities are what excite me the most. The people in this room with amazing gift sets and experience excite me. It excites me to think about all the pastors all over the region that have a heart for Jesus who are laboring.

It excites me to think about what we could do if we had a clear, articulated vision married with strategy and then resourced— what could actually happen!

Those things excite me.”

Michael Crawford

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with severe mental health challenges, Crawford remembered his brother’s testimony, read the “red letters” in a Bible and gave his life to Jesus.

He transferred to The Master’s College in Santa Clarita, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science, with an emphasis in philosophy in 1991. In 1997, he earned a Master of Divinity from The Master’s Seminary in Los Angeles.

PERSONAL LIFE

Crawford is an avid athlete who has completed seven triathlons, including three sprints, two Olympics, one Eagle, and one Iron Man. He and his wife, Dani, have been married for twenty-eight years and have five young adult children: Claudia, Tabitha, Nehemiah, Keturah, and Ezra.

A version of this article was published in Baptist Press on March 17, 2022.

SHARON MAGER is communications specialist and BaptistLIFE correspondent at the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware.

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S B C U P D AT E

St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square in New Orleans | istockphoto

Bigger Crowds Lead to Tough, Necessary Decision for the SBC

BY JONATHAN HOWE

T

he 2021 SBC Annual Meeting was the largest crowd we have hosted at an SBC annual meeting in a generation. This June’s meeting in Anaheim is shaping up to draw close to 10,000 for a gathering on the West Coast— nearly doubling the number of messengers from our gathering in Phoenix in 2017.

This started in 2018 when more than 9,600 messengers came to Dallas. After adding in guests, exhibitors, credentialed press, and others, the official attendance was 16,032. Then in 2019, 8,183 messengers and 13,502 total attendees made their way to Birmingham, Alabama.

And 2021 blew past those totals with 15,726 messengers and 21,474 total attendees making Music City their home for the week.

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It’s safe to say a new generation of Southern Baptists has engaged with the Convention, and attendance at our annual meetings has ballooned.

As the entity in charge of planning and promoting the annual meeting, the SBC Executive Committee is ecstatic over the response we’ve seen in recent years.

But that leaves us with a major problem for 2023.

When Charlotte, North Carolina, was selected in 2016 as the host city for the 2023 SBC Annual Meeting, the plans allowed for a maximum of 8,000 messengers and guests in the 280,000 square feet of available space at the Charlotte Convention Center.

Simply put, Charlotte simply does not have adequate space to host the SBC Annual Meeting in 2023.

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We inquired of every major city and convention center in the southeast United States. In the end, only one city was able to meet our four major needs for 2023: geographic proximity to Southern Baptists, hotel availability, available dates, and available space.

That city is New Orleans, Louisiana.

The space now required to host an annual meeting exceeds 400,000 square feet—225,000 for the main hall, 150,000 for the exhibit hall, and 50,000 for registration and storage. This year in Anaheim, we will utilize more than 500,000 square feet. Last year in Nashville, we required more than 400,000 square feet—and truly needed more.

Charlotte has only 280,000 square feet of meeting space—less than 75 percent of what is needed to meet the current demands of our annual gathering.

Several conversations have taken place with meeting organizers and city officials in Charlotte over the past few months. Our team visited the city in February to see if any workable solution could be found. Ultimately, we were unable to find a way to keep the meeting in Charlotte— there simply was nowhere for us to hold the meeting as needed in the Queen City.

We also began researching options and earnestly praying for an alternative to Charlotte that would meet the current needs of our Convention for the 2023 SBC Annual Meeting. We inquired of every major city and convention center in the

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southeast United States. In the end, only one city was able to meet our four major needs for 2023: geographic proximity to Southern Baptists, hotel availability, available dates, and available space.

That city is New Orleans, Louisiana.

The annual meeting was last held in New Orleans in 2012—a historic gathering that saw Fred Luter elected SBC president. After meeting with city and convention center officials in New Orleans as well as with SBC Executive Committee officers, SBC EC Chairman Rolland Slade has called a special meeting of the EC in order for EC members to vote to relocate the 2023 Annual Meeting. This is in accordance with SBC Constitution Article 11.3, since the city of Charlotte is unable to fulfill its commitments to host the event—they simply do not have space for us to meet as needed.

Please understand this move comes at no fault to Charlotte other than the space they have available. The city wants to host Southern Baptists, but simply cannot. Our meeting has grown beyond the city’s capability and usable space.

We will do everything in our power to honor the Queen City as this move is made, and it is our prayer that Southern Baptists will honor Charlotte for its willingness to host us.

As for New Orleans, several updates have been made to the city and the convention center since Southern Baptists last met on the bayou, and we are getting ready for an annual meeting unlike any the Crescent City has seen.

See you in Anaheim . . . and then—prayerfully—New Orleans!

A version of this article was published in Baptist Press on April 18, 2022.

JONATHAN HOWE is vice president for communications at the SBC Executive Committee.

S B C U P D AT E

Kyle Wilson (left), associate pastor of student ministries at University Baptist Church in Houston, speaks with Bob and Kelli Hines on March 26. Hines is an astronaut who pilots the SpaceX Crew-4 mission to the International Space Station. Image Courtesy of University Baptist Church

Texas Church Commissions SpaceX Astronaut for Upcoming Mission

BY BONNIE SHAW

O

n March 27, University Baptist Church in Houston commissioned one of their own to go out to the furthest mission fields.

Astronaut Bob Hines, a member of UBC, is scheduled to launch into space on April 19. There, he will spend 144 days on the International Space Station and be the pilot on the SpaceX Crew-4 mission, a four-person team that will launch out of Cape Canaveral.

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March 27 was the last Sunday before Hines went into a three-week quarantine as preparation for launch. Associate Pastor of Student Ministries Kyle Wilson led the congregation in a prayer over the Hines family, including Bob’s wife, Kelli, and his three daughters. In addition to praying for safety during the mission, Wilson also emphasized that it was the church’s duty to take care of the family during Hines’ absence.

SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) headquarters in Hawthorne, California | istockphoto

“We have the honor and the blessing as those that get to stay here to take care of Bob’s family,” Wilson said.

Hines expressed his gratefulness to God that he was fulfilling a childhood dream. He spoke of his excitement at seeing Earth from afar. “[I] want to look at this amazing creation that God has given us and just be in awe of it,” he said.

Hines is an active member of the church, where he has served as a Sunday School teacher.

His daughter also sings in the praise team.

This is not the first astronaut commissioning service for UBC, which is located less than three miles away from the NASA Johnson Space Center. Texas Baptists Executive Director David Hardage, who served as interim pastor at UBC in early 2022, was surprised when he first learned that he was preaching to literal rocket scientists each Sunday. It was an honor, he said, to witness the church’s commissioning of Hines.

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“The church pledged to pray for him when he launches in mid-April and while he’s on the International Space Station,” he said. “Additionally, the church will be diligent in providing care for his wife and three daughters while away. Bob is a strong believer and committed church member and is also quite excited about fulfilling a lifelong dream of space flight.”

Hardage’s last Sunday as interim coincided with the commissioning. Starting the following week, Will Rushing began serving as the new senior pastor of UBC. A version of this article was published in Baptist Press on March 29, 2022.

BONNIE SHAW is a writer for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

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S B C U P D AT E

Diana Scoggin (left) and Mickey Ebert, hand chocolate milk and juice boxes to a Ukrainian mother in a train station in Suceava, Romania. Scoggin and Ebert arrived as part of a Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) team and are SBDR volunteers with the Missouri Baptist Convention. Image Courtesy of IMB

Disaster Relief Volunteers Comfort Traumatized Refugees; Southern Baptists Raise $8M So Far

BY CAROLINE ANDERSON

“Y

ou are safe.” These were the words a Ukrainian woman, her daughter, and an elderly woman needed to hear while waiting for their train. “Breathe in.

Breathe out.”

Mickey Ebert first spoke these words to a woman and her daughter at a train station in Suceava, Romania. The mother tried to put on a brave face as she walked into the station. Ebert welcomed her and handed her a piece of paper with a QR code on it that read, “Hope for Ukraine.” When the mother turned to sit down, tears filled her eyes.

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Ebert is the leader of a team of Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) volunteers who represent Southern Baptists from Missouri, California, and Texas. She’s a member of Blue Springs Baptist Church in Independence, Missouri.

“Were you scared?” Ebert asked the daughter tenderly. She nodded, and Ebert later said it was evident the daughter, age ten, was also striving to be strong for her mother.

“You are brave. You are full of courage. You are here in a safe place,” Ebert said.

Ebert’s voice is soft and gentle, with the tenor of someone who often works with children—

“Leaving, at ten years old, you may have had to leave your pet.

At ten years old, all your safety is with your school, your home, your parents. If she has a father, he’s there fighting. There’s no adventure. There’s just grief and sadness and that feeling of leaving all that you knew.”

Mickey Ebert, volunteer Southern Baptist Disaster Relief

at age seventy-one, she has forty years of teaching experience. In addition to teaching, Ebert also worked for the National Archives and was a chaplain for a disaster relief chainsaw team.

Ebert got her start in SBDR in 2017 during Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas.

“Let them take care of you; they are safe,” Ebert told the girl and her mother, gesturing to the help station in the center of the waiting hall.

Ebert and her team are one of twelve Southern Baptist volunteer teams that have traveled from the United States to Eastern Europe to serve Ukrainian refugees. To date, Southern Baptists have donated more than $8 million to Send Relief and the International Mission Board (IMB) to go toward Ukrainian relief efforts.

Romanian volunteers are at the station around the clock. Train tickets are free for Ukrainians.

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One volunteer, Klara, said at the beginning of the crisis, she worked twenty-hour shifts as the fire station’s red buses ferried weary Ukrainian refugees from the border of Romania and Ukraine.

Most of the volunteers went to the border, Klara said. Not many thought to come and assist Ukrainians who were boarding trains to take them to cities across Europe.

Donning their yellow hats, vests, and volunteer badges, Ebert, and her SBDR teammates Diana Scoggin from First Baptist Camdenton, Missouri, and Terry James from King’s Trail Cowboy Church in Whitewright, Texas, visited the train station with Marcela, a Romanian Baptist, to pass out juice boxes and pray for refugees waiting for trains.

For eighteen years, Ebert taught fifth grade.

After learning that the girl was ten years old and that she was in fifth grade, Ebert shared how she treasured those years teaching fifth graders.

“Leaving, at ten years old, you may have had to leave your pet. At ten years old, all your safety is with your school, your home, your parents,” said Ebert. “If she has a father, he’s there fighting.

There’s no adventure. There’s just grief and sadness and that feeling of leaving all that you knew.”

Ebert asked the mother and daughter if she could pray for them. Before leaving, Ebert told the ten-year-old she was beautiful.

“No, you are beautiful,” the girl told her.

Ebert noticed an older refugee woman sitting a few seats down from the mother and daughter.

She sniffled and wiped away tears.

The night before, four rockets landed near this woman’s home. One of them exploded, but she didn’t know what happened to those who were near the blast. She was worried about the people who remain in her town.

Though there are no alarms or bombs on this side of the border in Suceava, she said she still hears ringing in her ears. The sirens are not abating in her memory.

“Tell her she is safe now,” Ebert told a translator.

Mickey Ebert leans in to pray for a Ukrainian woman. Ebert always asks if she can pray for those she interacts with. Ebert is the leader of a team of Southern Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers who represent the Baptist state conventions of Missouri, California, and the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. Image Courtesy of IMB

“When you turn on the TV you see war; when you turn on your phone, you see the war.

You can’t escape the reality; you can’t get over it. You can’t just ignore it because you have no way to ignore it,” the woman told Ebert.

“She even prays for the Russians to be healthy because you have to pray even for the enemy,” Klara translated. “It doesn’t matter. No one should die.”

Jesus said you should love your enemy, the woman explained, and she was raised to believe that.

Ebert then asked to pray for her.

“Earlier we prayed for health; now we pray for peace,” the woman said.

Ebert and the older woman bowed their heads. Ebert voiced a prayer asking for peace for

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the woman and for a silencing of the sirens in the woman’s mind.

“I prayed for her, and I prayed for the Russian people,” Ebert said. “I prayed that God would hold her in His hands and give her a peace over [what’s happening in] Ukraine, but also a peace in her heart and a peace in her mind.”

A version of this article was published in Baptist Press on April 13, 2022.

CAROLINE ANDERSON is a writer for the International Mission Board.

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Pastor Dale Rogers (left) prays with Fred Hall before baptizing him on Baptism Sunday, April 24, 2022.

Image Courtesy of Dale Rogers via Twitter @DaleRogers5829

Triple-Stroke Survivor Leaves Hospice, Joins Hundreds Baptized on Baptism Sunday

BY DIANA CHANDLER

W

idower Fred Hall had suffered three strokes and was in hospice when his pastor Dale Rogers visited in January.

“He was pretty bad off. They didn’t think he was going to make it. He couldn’t hardly lift his head or anything,” Rogers told Baptist Press. “He got better and I went in there one time to visit him and caught him crawling on the floor.

“I said what are you doing? He said, ‘Well, I can’t walk yet, but I can sure crawl.’ He told me there, that when he got back, able to do it, he wanted to be baptized. And I had a fifteen-yearold who had just received the Lord, and (Hall) wanted to be baptized with him.”

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Rogers baptized Hall on April 24 at Dunham Woods Baptist Church as Southern Baptists nationally celebrated Baptism Sunday, an official Southern Baptist Convention calendar observance.

“Since he could walk, he wanted to be baptized to rededicate his life. He wanted everybody to see that just because he was in hospice, doesn’t mean it was it, it was over with. God just moved in his life and brought him out of hospice. After three strokes, he got in the pool and he was able to get out of the pool.”

Rogers considers Hall, in his 80s, a miracle.

“Fred Hall, he’s just one of them miracles that happened to us,” Rogers said. “He’s my door

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One of many baptisms that took place on Baptism Sunday, April 24, 2022.

Image Courtesy of George McCallum | via Twitter @ghmccallum

greeter now. We may have to sit a chair there for him, but he greets everybody coming in.”

For more than five years, Hall has attended the church that averages sixty in Sunday worship.

Posting good news on social media, Southern Baptist pastors celebrated many public proclamations of God’s grace.

Life Community Church in Jamestown, North Carolina, where Chad Grayson is lead pastor, baptized thirty-five. Pastor Jeremy Leithoff baptized five young believers at Maranatha Baptist Fellowship in Topeka, Kansas. Pastor Adam Crozier noted three baptisms at Trinity Southern Baptist Church in Falmouth, Kentucky, bringing the annual tally to twenty-nine.

Pastor Hector Medina baptized twelve at Saved By Grace, a church plant in Pomona, California. Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, Louisiana, pastored by John Fream, noted eighteen baptisms. Salt Church, a 2019 church plant in Gainesville, Florida, under the leadership of Paul Sabino, baptized ten.

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Pastor Dean Inserra celebrated thirty-nine baptisms at City Church in Tallahassee, Florida.

“Jesus lives. The local church is alive,” Inserra tweeted Sunday night. “The enemy hates it and prowls. Please pray for us! Let’s be unashamed of His name.”

At Dunham Woods Baptist, Rogers celebrated Hall’s testimony of God’s spiritual and physical deliverance.

“It shows that you’re never too old,” Rogers said. “You’re never too mature . . . to recognize what God has done in your life. We forget how great and how merciful He is to us. It was (Hall’s) way of showing the congregation that even though they thought it was over with for him, God still had a better plan.”

A version of this article was published in Baptist Press on April 25, 2022.

DIANA CHANDLER is Baptist Press’s senior writer.

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