Southern Baptists meeting in Nashville elected Alabama pastor Ed Litton as president of the denomination and made strong statements on sexual abuse and racism on day one of its 2021 annual meeting.
Litton won in a close run-off election with Georgia pastor Mike Stone, receiving 52.04% of the vote. Southern Seminary President Al Mohler and Northwest Baptist Convention Executive Director Randy Adams also were candidates in the election, but were eliminated after the first vote Tuesday afternoon.
In a press conference after his election, Litton said part of the reason he ran for SBC president was to bring attention to the true focus of the SBC family: to get the gospel to as many people as possible.
“We exalt the gospel above all else,” Litton said in a conversation with both religious and secular press in which he often struck a pastoral tone while discussing racial tensions, sexual abuse, politics, and gender roles in the church.
“Going forward, I want to be clear that my goal is to build bridges and not walls.”
His election comes as the SBC is divided on several issues, including the handling of sexual abuse and how to address race and racism. Voters in Nashville (called “messengers” at the SBC annual meeting) considered measures on both issues, beginning with an amendment to the SBC Constitution introduced in 2019. The amendment, which messengers approved in Nashville, specifies sexual abuse as grounds for discontinuing fellowship with a church.
Additionally, Baptists added a goal to the set of strategic initiatives in Executive Committee President Ronnie Floyd’s Vision 2025 plan for the SBC. Along with goals in missions, church planting, giving, and reach young people with the gospel, messenger Ben Cole proposed another prong be added to the plan: “That we prayerfully endeavor, before God, to eliminate all incidents of sex abuse and racial discrimination among our churches.”
The 2021 Resolutions Committee brought a slate of 10 resolutions, nine of which were adopted by messengers in Nashville. (A resolution on Christian citizenship was omitted when debate ran over the time allotted.) The committee was expected to address race and racism in the measure it introduced in Nashville, due in large part to Resolution 9 on Critical Race Theory adopted in 2019. Earlier Tuesday, a messenger brought a motion to rescind that resolution.
Most of the resolutions were introduced by one or two committee members, but the whole stood together while Chairman James Merritt introduced Resolution 2: “On the Sufficiency of Scripture for Race and Racial Reconciliation.” The resolution, which doesn’t mention Critical Race Theory by name, reaffirms “our agreement with historic, biblically-faithful Southern Baptist condemnations of racism in all forms,” and rejects “any theory or worldview that sees the primary problem of humanity as anything other than sin against God and the ultimate solution as anything other than redemption found only in Christ.”
Messengers debated the resolution until Merritt issued a firm explanation of how the committee arrived at the measure. “What we have done in this resolution is say, ‘Let’s settle this issue once and for all, yesterday, today and forever.
“We reject any theory that goes against the worldview that our problem is anything other than sin, and the solution is anything other than salvation.”
The 2021 SBC annual meeting concludes June 16. Watch online at sbcannualmeeting.net/live.