Amid crises, rural roots anchor Southern Baptists’ president

[Stevicus]

Amid crises, rural roots anchor Southern Baptists’ president | AP News

FARMERSVILLE, Texas (AP) — On the first Saturday of fall, a sweating Bart Barber trekked across a weedy pasture in search of Bully Graham, the would-be patriarch of the rural Baptist pastor’s fledgling cattle herd.

With the afternoon temperature in the mid-90s, the 52-year-old Texan found the bull — whose nickname reflects his owner’s deep affection for the late Rev. Billy Graham — and 11 heifers cooling under a canopy of trees.

“Hey, baby girl,” Barber said as he patted one of the cows, a favorite he dubbed Lottie Moon after the namesake of his denomination’s international missions offering.

For nearly a quarter-century, Barber enjoyed relative obscurity as a minister in this town of 3,600, about 50 miles northeast of Dallas. That changed in June as delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Anaheim, California, chose Barber to lead the nation’s largest Protestant denomination at a time of major crisis.

The previous month a scathing, 288-page investigative report hit the denomination’s 13.7 million members. It laid out the findings of an independent probe detailing how Southern Baptist leaders stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations.

While the Department of Justice is investigating the sexual abuse allegations in the SBC, they've elected a "folksy" small town pastor to lead them. Barber calls himself a "peacemaker" and a "unifier."

In August, SBC leaders revealed that the Department of Justice was investigating several of its major entities, giving few details but indicating that the inquiry concerned the sex abuse allegations.

Barber’s background as a trusted, small-town preacher — not to mention his folksy sense of humor and self-deprecating style — helps explain why fellow Baptists picked him.

“In this moment where I think there’s a lot of widespread distrust of these big institutions, I think a lot of people find it refreshing that the one leading us is an everyday pastor,” said Daniel Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

A staunch theological conservative, Barber touts biblical inerrancy, opposes women serving as pastors and supports abortion bans. In running for SBC president, he expressed a desire to be a peacemaker and a unifier. Emerging from a field of four candidates, he received 61% of votes in a run-off against Tom Ascol, a Florida pastor who vowed to take the denomination further right.

He won in a runoff where the other candidate wanted to take the denomination further right.

The article mentions that, in addition to the sex abuse scandal, the denomination is losing membership.

The SBC faces multiple challenges. Rank-and-file Baptists have demonstrated a strong commitment to implementing sex abuse reforms, but the final outcome remains unclear. The denomination also has a problem with falling membership, which has slid 16% from its 2006 peak. Annual baptisms last year were 154,701, down 63% from their 1999 high, according to SBC affiliate Lifeway Christian Resources.

Nathan Finn, a church historian and provost of North Greenville University in South Carolina, agreed that Barber’s small-town appeal is a big part of why Baptists turned to him to lead the SBC through such troubled times.

“To many Southern Baptists, Bart is an appealing president precisely because he does not pastor a suburban megachurch or lead a seminary,” Finn said via email. “He pastors a ‘normal’ Southern Baptist church and sounds like the pastor down the road. I think many find him to be a breath of fresh air as well as a thoughtful voice to represent Southern Baptists to the outside world.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. They've had a reputation for being ultra-conservative.

Barber appointed an abuse task force which will make recommendations at next year's meeting in New Orleans.

“Though he is a well-educated church historian and an expert on SBC history and polity, Bart is not an elitist,” Finn added. “He gives the impression that he would rather be working on his farm than hobnobbing with denominational leaders.”

For his part, Barber said he ran for president because he prayed and concluded God was calling him to do it, not because of the sex abuse crisis.

Still, after recently appointing an abuse task force that will make recommendations at next year’s annual meeting in New Orleans, he said Southern Baptists are determined that there must be reforms and identifying solutions to the problem is his top priority.

“Look who all has been touched by this,” Barber said of sex abuse. “It’s in public schools. It’s in Scouting. It’s in the military. It’s in Hollywood. It’s in sports. It’s in USA Gymnastics.

“And so if Southern Baptists, who also have problems in this area, can lead the way to real solutions … that would be a great shining victory for the SBC,” he added. “And what Hollywood and USA Gymnastics and the government and the military … don’t have is the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit and the promise of God himself that he has built his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”

Barber grew up in a Southern Baptist family in Lake City, Arkansas. Baptized just before his sixth birthday, he felt God calling him to ministry at age 11 and preached his first sermon at 15.

His late father, Jim, ran the home office for an Arkansas congressman, a Democrat named Bill Alexander. His stay-at-home mother, Carolyn, now 77, taught him to read by the time he entered kindergarten and made sure he paid attention in church.

Will the SBC become more moderate? Or will they move further to the right? Will the victims of sex abuse (allegedly covered up by the church for more than two decades) see justice?

 

[AlexanderG]

I think it will splinter and fragment as all denominations do, and one of the fragments will continue to be the most far-right, reactionary population.

Religion is just about catering to your own personality type and preferences, since there's no objective tool to determine which denomination or interpretation is more correct than any other. If you don't mesh well with your current church, you just shop around for one where most people do agree with your personal views.

Not many people like to be associated with moral disgrace and hypocrisy, so I expect people will continue to leave. Apparently, about 75% of evangelicals who leave their faith are women. The reasons for this are becoming increasingly obvious. What young woman today wants to be told how to behave by a sexually corrupt group of old men, be told to feel guilty and dirty about all their natural thoughts and desires, and even be molested by these leaders and then gaslighted and blamed for it?

 

[exchemist]

I think it will splinter and fragment as all denominations do, and one of the fragments will continue to be the most far-right, reactionary population.

Religion is just about catering to your own personality type and preferences, since there's no objective tool to determine which denomination or interpretation is more correct than any other. If you don't mesh well with your current church, you just shop around for one where most people do agree with your personal views.

Not many people like to be associated with moral disgrace and hypocrisy, so I expect people will continue to leave. Apparently, about 75% of evangelicals who leave their faith are women. The reasons for this are becoming increasingly obvious. What young woman today wants to be told how to behave by a sexually corrupt group of old men, be told to feel guilty and dirty about all their natural thoughts and desires, and even be molested by these leaders and then gaslighted and blamed for it?

You could be right. Protestants have something of a reputation for being fissiparous and setting up new churches whenever they have a disagreement. It goes with the habit of constructing your own homespun theology, from your personal reading of the bible.

 

[Brickjectivity]

Will the SBC become more moderate? Or will they move further to the right? Will the victims of sex abuse (allegedly covered up by the church for more than two decades) see justice?

I suspect that the SBC baptists are more moderate than they are perceived to be. When people invest their lives into something, they sometimes endure disagreement and extremism and oversights and wrongs or evils. That doesn't mean they aren't present and don't have any matter or weight.

There is a newpaper that many people receive which focuses upon the Baptists. Many people have invested their lives into baptist churches and into supporting the thousands of baptist churches. That isn't going to change. The church will return towards its roots and shift left. Its going back between Boaz and Jachin. Its not going to shift left towards sin or towards evil or towards nonsense but towards unity and away from finger-pointing.