Southern Baptist Deacon

Wright encourages unity in Great Commission work

Wright thanked “the people of the convention who felt led for me to serve in this role another year” and noted that Page as Executive Committee (EC) president, Elliff as International Mission Board president and Ezell as North American Mission Board president all took office within the past year, marking a historic change of leadership in the SBC. Asked how the four men’s peacemaking personalities would influence Southern Baptists generally, Page replied: “We’re pastors. We’ve learned in church what it takes to get along and what it takes to not get along. And we’re committed to dialoging in the way Christ wants us to. We had enough of church members not doing that, and we’ve seen what happens when disagreements or even differences of opinion or differences of emphasis are dealt with in a Christlike way versus a non-Christlike way. So I hope we are setting examples.” In other action, messengers elected David Uth, pastor of First Baptist Church, Orlando, Fla., to preach the convention sermon at the 2012 annual meeting in New Orleans. Kenny Qualls, pastor of First Baptist Church, Arnold, Mo., was elected as the alternate. Mark Cottingham, of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, Marietta, Ga., was chosen as the 2012 music director, and Michael Adler of Shades Mountain Baptist Church, Vestavia Hills, as alternate.

Will Republicans start listening to Southern Baptists on immigration?

The Southern Baptist Convention recently passed a resolution calling for "a just and compassionate path to legal status" for undocumented immigrants. It was a close vote, but an important milestone in the ongoing immigration debate-- a high-profile endorsement of common-sense, compassionate immigration policy from a very conservative denomination.

The convention also added the vague "clarification" that "this resolution is not to be construed as support for amnesty for any undocumented immigrant."

Of course, immigration reform advocates from all religious backgrounds have always been clear about this -- "amnesty" is just a code-word used by the Right to gin up anxieties and trigger stereotypes. What immigration reform advocates are actually proposing is a path to citizenship contingent upon undocumented immigrants passing background checks, paying back taxes, learning English, and fulfilling other obligations before beginning the process of earning their citizenship.

Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said this very clearly back in 2007 :

This also goes for all those politicians who've used political excuses to avoid standing up for immigrants and tackling the pressing need to fix our broken immigration system. Using code words like "amnesty" and hiding behind a false belief that the American people don't want immigration reform isn't acceptable.

Cynthia Tucker at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution puts it well:

As I noted last week , the governor of Alabama, who signed their extreme anti-immigrant bill into law, is a Southern Baptist deacon. I hope he, and the other politicians who seem interested in scoring political points at the expense of hard-working families stuck in our broken immigration system, are listening to the Southern Baptists and paying attention to this moral marker.

Photo of Landmark Baptist Church, the former First Baptist Chruch of Augusta and the birthplace of the Southern Baptist Convention. Credit J. Stephen Conn, Flickr .