History-Making Vote?
Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt looks out over more than 11,000 messengers to last week’s Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Orlando, Fla. Via uplifted ballot, messengers overwhelmingly voted to adopt the recommendations of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force, a major emphasis of Hunt’s presidency. (Photo by Matt Miller/BP)
Southern Baptists look to future,
overwhelmingly approve GCR report
Orlando, Fla.—At what many Southern Baptists feel was a gathering that will long be remembered, messengers to last week’s Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting cast their votes to move ahead with a Great Commission Resurgence.
One year after messengers approved Johnny Hunt’s push for the formation of a Great Commission Resurgence Task Force, Southern Baptists overwhelmingly adopted the group’s seven recommendations.
An estimated 75 to 80 percent of the more than 11,000 SBC messengers—670 of whom came from Kentucky—voted for the task force’s report.
Discussion from the floor on the GCR recommendations lasted two hours, in which only one amendment was passed. That amendment added stronger language affirming Southern Baptists’ Cooperative Program as “the most effective means of mobilizing our churches and extending our outreach.”
Messengers were introduced to the next SBC Executive Committee president, Frank Page. The former South Carolina pastor will step into the shoes of outgoing president, Morris Chapman, who will retire Sept. 30.
Despite receiving less than 60 percent of the vote from the members of the Executive Committee, Page, who has been vice president of evangelization at the North American Mission Board since last October, gratefully accepted the role. “I do so with a great sense of calling and destiny, my awareness that God has a great future for Southern Baptists,” he said.
Georgia pastor Bryant Wright was elected president of the SBC, defeating Florida pastor Ted Traylor in a run-off vote. Bryant won the final vote with 4,225 ballots cast (55.11 percent) to Traylor’s 3,371 (43.97 percent).
Wright, pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga., beat out a presidential field of Traylor, pastor of Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola, Fla., Jimmy Jackson, pastor of Whitesburg Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala., and Leo Endel, executive director of the Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention.
Western Recorder issue date: June 22, 2010
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