Tennessee pastor Willie McLaurin has been named interim president and CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, becoming the first African American to lead one of the denomination’s ministry entities in its more than 175-year history.
For some in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the senior pastor must be a man, but staff and other pastoral roles can be filled by women. For others, pastoral duties, especially preaching, are limited to men, and women are only allowed to teach the Bible
In episode 26 of Dangerous Dogma, Nancy Ammerman, professor emerita of sociology of religion at Boston University, talks about Southern Baptist conflicts, fundamentalism, sociology of religion, and her new book Studying Lived Religion.
In recent weeks, state Baptist groups in North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Florida, and California have set up committees or task forces to address sexual abuse. Attempts to set up similar responses failed in Mississippi and Missouri.
Lawyers for Georgia pastor Mike Stone filed a complaint Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee accusing former Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore of defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Since 2018, the Southern Baptist Convention has lost a series of high-profile leaders whose tenures ended due to controversy or misconduct. The latest to depart is Ronnie Floyd, a former megachurch pastor who resigned as president of the SBC’s Nashville-based Executive Committee in mid-October.
A top committee of the Southern Baptist Convention agreed Tuesday (Oct. 5) to open up legally protected records to investigators who will look into how it handled, or mishandled, cases of sexual abuse within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination over the past two decades.
Amid debates within the Southern Baptist Convention over investigating clergy sexual abuse, a trustee of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission penned a letter attacking former ERLC President Russell Moore.
On Tuesday, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee called for a further week of deliberations with a special task force on sexual abuse after failing to agree on the ground rules for a third party review commissioned to study the denomination’s handling of abuse claims.
Members of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee remain divided on whether to waive attorney-client privilege as part of the investigation — despite the fact that SBC messengers voted for such waving of privilege.