Barber's reelection seems to indicate that Southern Baptists approve of the direction the convention is going and marks the third time a candidate backed by the Conservative Baptist Network has been defeated.
The two candidates for SBC president hold many of the same beliefs but disagree sharply over how to handle the issue of sexual abuse and over the direction of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
For only the second time in more than three decades, a Southern Baptist Convention president will face a challenge for reelection.
“I would permanently ‘defrock’ Johnny Hunt if I had the authority to do so,” Bart Barber, sitting president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in a statement released Tuesday. Hunt, who served as president of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination from 2008 to 2010, stepped aside
While Bart Barber has been involved with Southern Baptist Convention polity for years — he was the head of the resolutions committee that selected and shaped many of the proposed reforms — Barber is the first SBC president in nearly two decades not to emerge
The election was one of the closely watched aspects of the two-day meeting, during which messengers, or delegates, addressed a sexual abuse investigation. Barber received 61% of the votes in the second round of voting at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention on