SBC Prez Brags about His Church’s Affirmative Action Program ‘Two-Thirds of Them are Either Women or POC’
President of the Southern Baptist convention J.D. Greear publicly boasted during a 2019 speech at the Just Gospel conference that he was practicing affirmative action in his SBC committee appointments, explaining that nearly 70% of the people he appoints are either women or persons of color, in order so they can “shape the institutions and providing leadership and accountability.”
Furthermore, he says the SBC needs the specific wisdom that being black or brown brings, as predominantly white wisdom will not do.
At the Summit Church, we have explored, for example, what are ways that she can lead in the church that do not carry pastoral authority or violate the spirit of 1st Timothy 2. We have gone literally through our entire staff directory, through a couple of hundred different positions on staff, and just asked, “Where have we just traditionally assigned this to a man when it really could be done in a way that a woman could lead it, where somebody who’s not an elder could lead that?”
It’s led to a redefinition of dozens of jobs in our church, where we know that women that are very capable as leaders and capable as administrators and capable of vast ministry vision and wisdom can lead in those areas in ways that don’t necessarily carry elder-like authority…By the way, I know not everybody here is Southern Baptist, but that’s a question that those of you that are Southern Baptists, we’ve got to ask in the convention at large. …
So in the role that I have as president of the SBC, another one of my main tasks is...to appoint people on committees who will then appoint trustees who end up shaping the institutions and providing leadership and accountability. I’ll just tell you, of all the appointments that I’ve made, two-thirds of them are either women or they are people of color. I really do that for two reasons: one, that really is the future. …
Through an unbelievable act of generosity, already, right now, today, 20% of Southern Baptist membership is people of color, which is something, honestly, knowing our history, I do not understand. It is an act of extraordinary generosity. But already even with things the way they are, the membership is already 20% people of color. Sixty-three percent of all the churches that Southern Baptists planted last year were led by people of color. So it is the present, it is the very quickly coming future. That’s the first reason.
Secondly, we need their wisdom. It’s not like this act of grace of, “Oh, from up here, I just want to graciously share the stage because it’s,” no, I NEED the wisdom in a changing culture. There are things that God has put in this part of the body that I would be a much poorer Christian, a much poorer leader. And there are blind spots I will never see until God has filled his church with a variety of people and the kinds of people that make up the diversity of the church.
h/t to @wokepreachertv for the video and transcript
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The SBC is dead. It looks like Jesus is cutting that diseased branch off, just like the Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and the RCC too. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that doesn’t bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.