In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention voted yes to a reconciliation resolution. It expressed sorrow for the convention’s racial origin and past. It also contained a promise to seek reconciliation.
KirklandFred Luter, pastor of the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, helped write that resolution. On June 19, the Southern Baptist Convention added the exclamation point to that document by electing Luter as president of the SBC. No other African-American has held that position in the 167-year history of the convention.
Messengers to the annual meeting in New Orleans elected Luter with enthusiasm and unanimity. The former street preacher’s selection was hailed far and wide as historic. Historic is an adjective and is properly applied to happenings that have — or are expected to have — lasting importance.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to think that Luter’s election will not have lasting importance. For that to happen, though, it must not be what Luter himself called a “one-and-done deal.” Luter told Baptist Press, “If we stop appointing African-Americans or Asians or Hispanics to leadership roles in this convention after my term is over, we failed. We absolutely failed.”
He continued, “This was a genuine, authentic move by this convention that says our doors are open, and the only way they can see that is not just putting up an African-American president, but seeing other ethnic groups in other areas of this convention. Time will tell.”
American society is steadily becoming more non-white and multiethnic. Nowhere is the change more evident and more demanding than in the South, the heartland of the SBC. Minorities make up about 20 percent of the SBC’s more than 16 million members, and this number is on the rise. Southern Baptists have an opportunity to respond in a way that tells a watching world what we believe about our Lord and his church.
South Carolina’s executive director-treasurer, Jim Austin, has described the election of Fred Luter as personally “thrilling.” The new president’s selection, Austin told the Courier, is a “bright light on the path of Southern Baptist history.”
This “bright light” that Luter’s election shed on the faith journey of Southern Baptists can lead us where we need to go as a denomination and as individual members of SBC churches. If the doors of our convention are now open to all, our churches must also be. As the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has said, “The arc of the gospel is bent toward inclusiveness.”