By PETER SMITH Associated Press
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Southern Baptists on Tuesday elected a new leader who has decried a “decline and drift” within the denomination and whose supporters include an outspoken faction seeking to move the solidly conservative body even further to the right.
Delegates elected Florida pastor Willy Rice to be its next president. He won 58% of the votes over South Carolina pastor Josh Powell on the opening day of the two-day annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Rice, senior pastor of Calvary Church in Clearwater, drew support from advocacy groups such as the Center for Baptist Leadership which have argued SBC leadership has gone “woke” on issues ranging from race to gender to immigration.
The denomination is already staunchly conservative in areas ranging from its advocacy against abortion to its faith statement declaring the office of pastor is limited to men. But the main debates within the SBC have been over how far to move on the religious and political right.
On his webpage, Rice called on Southern Baptists to hold to core convictions rather than occupying a “mushy evangelical middle ground.”
Rice had led efforts last year to abolish the denomination’s public-policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, saying it had failed to heed member criticisms, such as allegations of receiving funding from progressive organizations.
The motion failed, but the organization’s president resigned soon afterward.
Rice has also contended that moves for reform on the handling of sexual abuse in the denomination have “gone off the tracks almost from the start.” He has written that the effort was not about stopping sexual abuse, contending that it was instead about introducing secular ideologies and “stopping the nation’s largest group of conservative Christians.”
Rice has also called for an addition to the Baptist Faith and Message, the denomination’s statement of faith, declaring gender to be biologically determined and unchangeable.
More than 11,000 delegates, known as messengers, were registered on Tuesday.
They are expected to vote Wednesday on a proposed constitutional amendment that would formally ban churches with women pastors.
Rice has supported that amendment along with creating a task force to study the issue, saying it is important to clearly separate the role of pastor from other legitimate ministry roles for women.
It will be the fourth year in a row that messengers vote on an amendment regarding women pastors, after the previous three fell short of supermajorities needed for passage. The Baptist Faith and Message opposes women pastors.
SBC churches are independent, and the denomination can’t tell them what to do. But the denomination can exclude a church from its ranks, and it has already expelled some churches with women in senior pastoral positions, contending that they are out of sync with the SBC’s statement of faith.
But opinions have been more mixed on the status of churches with women in associate pastoral roles. The currently proposed amendment specifically bans churches where women have the office of pastor or are functioning as one, including “preaching to the assembled congregation.”
The latest version of the amendment is being proposed by Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky. He has said a constitutional amendment would provide clarity and prevent the long and time-consuming debates that the issue has drawn in recent years.
The meeting will also address resolutions on antisemitism and immigration.
The annual gathering follows the release of internal statistics showing a continuation of a nearly two-decade-long decline in membership. It’s down to 12.3 million, the lowest since 1973.