SBC Conference Ends With Closing Challenge, New President
by Allie Martin
June 16, 2004
(AgapePress) - During the closing session of the Southern Baptists Convention Pastor's Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana, Bible teacher Voddie Baucham told pastors they need to be ready to pay a heavy price for preaching the gospel.
Baucham warned his audience that pastors in the United States will soon be faced with a choice, to either preach a watered-down gospel and obey the laws of man, or to preach the full gospel and risk the threat of jail, or even death. But regardless, he says, ministers of the gospel must never be afraid to speak the truth.
The well-known Bible teacher and evangelist preached from Acts Chapter 4, in which Peter and John refused to stop preaching Christ, even after they were arrested. He told the pastors at the conference that the current culture cannot be neutral when it comes to biblical Christianity.
"It is not an option," Baucham says, "because biblical Christianity does not fit within the confines of our culture's current philosophical thinking. That is why we are always going to be misrepresented, misquoted and misunderstood in the press -- because they operate from a philosophical grid that cannot comprehend what we believe or why. So neutrality is not an option."
As an African-American preacher, Baucham says he has been blasted and downgraded by some African American leaders for taking a stand on God's unchanging word. However, he does not let it bother him. "I fear no man," he says. "I want to know, where was Jesse Jackson's voice when the homosexuals were using the civil rights movement? Where was Al Sharpton? Where were our black pastors?"
Ever ready to exhort his fellow Christians to boldness, Baucham goes on to demand, "Where were you? Where are we? Where is our voice when children are being slaughtered all around us. Where is our voice?"
Electing a new leader
Southern Baptist Convention delegates, known as messengers, are heading home from their conference Wednesday with a new president at the helm. And although the only nominee for president going into this year's denomination's meeting was Pastor Bobby Welch of First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach, Florida, the election was not without contest.
Welch was nominated by Johnny Hunt, pastor of First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Georgia. However, in a surprise to many messengers, Pastor Dennis Connor of Cashie Baptist Church in Windsor, North Carolina, placed a name in nomination: Pastor Al Jarrell of Riverside Baptist Church in Merry Hill, North Carolina.
Rising to nominate Jarrell, Connor explained that he was doing so "because I have grown concerned in the nine years that I've been coming to these conventions as a pastor that the convention's leadership is growing further and further and further away from the grassroots of Southern Baptist life." However, when the ballot vote was tallied, Welch won with 3,997 votes over Jarrell's 1,020.
Notably, this was the first contested SBC presidential election since 1994, when the Southern Baptists convened in Orlando, Florida. That year, Pastor Jim Henry of Orlando's First Baptist Church defeated Alabama's Pastor Fred Wolfe for the denomination's top spot.
