A recent call to investigate the Executive Committee over abuse responses is the latest issue up for debate. Opposing factions in the SBC both say its future is at stake.
The bubbas-that-be in the SBC
How Russell Moore fell afoul of them.
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, speaks June 12, 2019, during the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex in Birmingham, Alabama. RNS photo by Butch Dill
June 9, 2021
(RNS) If you think it’s a coincidence that two accusatory letters from Russell Moore were leaked just before the Southern Baptist Convention convenes in Nashville, Tennessee, next week, I’ve got a big granite mountain east of Atlanta to sell you.
The main business of the annual meeting will be to elect a new SBC president to follow J.D. Greear, who, because the 2020 meeting was canceled due to COVID-19, has served two one-year terms.
Russell Moore is either a politically disillusioned troublemaker or a prophet in a time of darkness. In a 4,000-word letter charging the Southern Baptist Convention with racism and sexual abuse, he has single-handedly brought the evangelical Christian world to its knees.
Moore wrote his hard-charging letter in February 2020, while still serving as president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the influential policy arm of the Southern Baptists. But the letter didnât become public until it was leaked on June 2, the day after Immanuel Nashville, a church thatâs not part of the SBC, announced that Moore would become its pastor in residence and, perhaps not coincidentally, about 10 days before the Convention meets in Nashville to discuss its mission.