Southern Baptist entity heads think they are entitled to tell the Southern Baptist Convention not only who should be president, but who should serve as trustees, also known as their bosses. In the last few weeks, Al Mohler and Russell Moore chimed in with vigorous Twitter support for J.D. Greear’s campaign for SBC president. Danny Akin went so far as to pen a commentary that was little more than a  campaign commercial for Greear. Now, Akin wants to tell Southern Baptists who should serve as trustees.

Akin tweeted what amounted to a call for quotas. He wrote, “This is extremely disappointing in terms of ethnic diversity. Very! We have got to do better than this. Our trustee boards must reflect the WHOLE SBC.” The tweet was a response to an SBC This Week tweet detailing the ethnic makeup of the new slate of trustee nominations.

Akin immediately denied this was a call for a quota, but that defies logic. When you demand candidates be of a certain percentage of a race, what else could it be?

Oh yeah, they call it diversity.

Diversity is nothing more than an excuse to justify racially based selection. This is another example of the Woke movement hitting the Southern Baptist Convention.

Akin impugned the character of the good Southern Baptists serving on the Committee on Nominations by questioning these nominees. It is a crude and disturbing power grab.

Morris H. Chapman, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and longtime president of the Southern Baptist Executive Committee, warned Southern Baptists about undue influence of entity heads on the election of SBC officers. He issued the warning way back in 2006, and the 2018 election is the epitome of entity heads trying to use their office to influence the SBC presidential race.

“Why then should any head of an entity seize the opportunity any given year for public participation, aside from voting as a messenger, in the election of our SBC officers? To do so risks much good will and enormous respect normally gained over many years by individuals who have been elected to lead entities of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Chapman warned. “When a president of an entity publicly endorses a potential nominee or nominates a candidate for elected office, he potentially alienates some who otherwise hold him in high esteem because they differ with the person he has embraced publicly for an elected office. Consequently, the entity head endangers his potential to provide effective counsel and spiritual leadership to the larger body of Southern Baptists although their beliefs may coincide with the entity head on most other issues.”

Chapman went on to point out that while he assumed only the best of Southern Baptists, that such political participation represented a real conflict of interest.

“Because we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, we assume the purest intentions of every SBC president. However, this does not obscure the reality that the potential for conflict exists if the president of an SBC entity is at the same time the president of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Chapman warned in 2006. “Nominating or being nominated for an elected officer of the SBC, or endorsing a nominee for an elected office, in my opinion, lessens the importance of the work to which the entity head has been called.”

Perhaps our entity heads should focus on their job instead of trying to micromanage every aspect of the Southern Baptist Convention from picking the next president to determining just how many Indians a trustee committee must have.

Sorry, but that is how we got Pocahontas.

Akin has no business expressing any opinion on trustee nominations. It isn’t his job. His job is to run his seminary. He should take Chapman’s advice from way back in 2006 and stop alienating Southern Baptists with such blatant political campaigning.

UPDATE: Our Southern Baptist elites don’t seem to practice what they preach. According to ERLC Watch’s tweet, “54 out of 58 positions at are occupied by whites. Perhaps you should worry about matters on your own seminary campus, rather than lecturing the fine men and women who serve on the Committee on Nominations.

UPDATE 2: Danny Akin runs the least diverse SBC seminary, according to this research compiled last year by Dr. Johnathan Pritchett.

10 thoughts on “Southern Baptist entity head demands quotas for trustees”

  1. A writer named dave miller at sbcvoices said the following, “No serious Christian can give weight to Capstone. It is the InfoWars of the SBC.”

    Interesting. This dave miller person calls himself a conservative, but the proper label for miller is something more like “stalinist”.

    This miller person wrote back in 2015, “We need leaders in the SBC with the intestinal fortitude not to let the angry voices drive them or discourage them and not to be bullied by the social media terrorists or their campaigns of mass destruction.”

    There you have it. Anyone who disagrees with this dave miller, rusty moore, et al is a terrorist bent on mass destruction.

    This miller person is pastor of Southern Hills Baptist Church in Iowa. A fellow Iowegian wrote an interesting comment about him on Yelp.

    “I cannot speak for the church itself, but after researching the pastor, looking for a healthy church to attend with my family, he appears condescending in his blog posts on Southern Baptist Voices. Many genuine questions about his topics included in his blogs were met with sarcasm and snarky remarks in his comment sections. Some were belittling and others were downright rude. His arrogance approaching people with disagreements is telling.”

    1. They sure do spend a lot of time attacking me for it to be something no serious Christian would take seriously.

      Oh well, what saddens me is their inability to engage the ideas. They go right to the ad hominem.

  2. Akin and Moore are far too self-righteous to foster constructive dialogue among all SBs. They have divided far more than they’ve united. IMO. Miller in a class all by himself.. SMH.

    1. Does Akin feel strongly enough about this to resign his post in favor of immediate replacement by a minority seminary president? Won’t hold my breath for that to happen.

      1. Of course not. Only the little guys need to give up their privilege. The enlightened elites need only preach to us.

        This is obviously an attempt by the Greear supporters to increase their base turnout to Dallas. They know Greear’s campaign has been ineffectual thus far, so nothing like a race controversy to make the progressives and millennials show up.

        1. Well. If they aren’t willing to lead by example, their hand-wringing is nothing more than soap opera.

          1. Several months ago, I suggested if Russell Moore was so worried about privilege and racial diversity, he should resign his job so Dr. Carol Swain could lead the ERLC.

            I’m guessing their six-figure salaries were more important to them than healing our racial divide. 🙂

          2. Good point. It’s interesting that rusty moore, the self-proclaimed champion of diversity, lives in non-diverse Brentwood, TN. According to wikipedia, Brentwood’s demographics are as follows, “The racial makeup of the city was 90.0% Caucasian, 3.0% African American, 0.2% Native American, 5.0% Asian, and 1.6% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.1% of the population. Brentwood is Tennessee’s best educated city, proportionately, with 98.4% of adult residents (25 and older) holding a high school diploma, and 68.4% of adults possessing a bachelor’s degree or higher (2010 Census).”

            Rusty needs to get out of his upper class white enclave. I think that rusty should pack up his family and move to East Nashville. Once rusty practices what he preaches, then we can talk.

  3. Here is the worst thing: NO ONE IS STOPPING ANYONE FROM BEING NOMINATED! Did those men nominate anyone? If we want to get someone who is not white we can. Just a really dumb argument by these men.

    1. Seminary Presidents and agency heads not always the sharpest tools in the shed.

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