The new president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has no shortage of challenges in the early days of his leadership: unify a 14-million member body that’s become increasingly divided, create a task force that will oversee a third-party investigation of the denomination’s Executive Committee and its handling of sex abuse, move forward on racial reconciliation, and begin to reverse a decline in membership that’s over a decade in the making.
The new president, pastor Ed Litton, leads Redemption Church in Saraland, Alabama. At the denomination’s annual meeting in June, 13,131 Baptist messengers cast their vote for Litton, but it proved to be a narrow win, with just 556 votes separating him from Georgia pastor Mike Stone.
Litton spoke with CBN News in an interview this week, acknowledging that healing and unity is deeply needed in a convention that’s earned a reputation in recent years for its high-profile conflicts and controversies.
“We need awakening. We need revival in our hearts,” he said. “We need some of these very negative things that have gone on between us to be confessed, dealt with, forgiven.”
Litton said he’s also optimistic, sharing that many Baptist delegates at the meeting in Nashville assured him of their support after the election.
“They came up and said, ‘Hey I didn’t vote for you, but I love you and I’m praying for you’,” he said.
The convention has charged Litton with creating a task force by mid-July that will oversee an independent review of the Executive Committee and how it has handled charges of sex abuse and concerns from abuse survivors.
It’s an issue that has publicly dogged the convention since 2019, when the Houston Chronicle first reported more than 700 victims of abuse in Southern Baptist churches over a period of 20 years.
More recently, Dr. Russell Moore, the former head of the Southern Baptist’s public policy arm, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, complained in a leaked letter that the Executive Committee has resisted reform, noting several concerns including that it exonerated 7 of 10 churches with allegations of clergy sexual abuse after former SBC president J.D. Greear had moved to investigate them.
The denomination’s new task force will oversee the 3rd-party investigation with a report due at the 2022 annual meeting in Anaheim, California.
Litton plans to equally focus on racial reconciliation, a subject he’s immersed himself in since the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri.
As a leader in The Pledge Group, Litton has partnered with a racially diverse group of pastors in Mobile, Montgomery, and Charleston, South Carolina to lament racial oppression in their region and move forward with justice initiatives.
Still, the convention has made clear that it does not support Critical Race Theory, a framework that considers racism to be a systemic problem. Litton maintains that the Gospel is key to reconciliation.
“The truth is the power is not in a theory,” he told CBN News. “The power to bring healing and hope and togetherness is in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Southern Baptists are keenly aware of an ongoing drop in membership. It’s another focus for Litton, a long-time church planter himself.
The good news is that the denomination added 857 new congregations in 2020 with 6 in 10 being non-Anglo. That diversity in growth is an encouragement says Litton and part of the Baptist Revelations 7:9 vision: “There before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne.”
Litton, the son of a sailor, recalls growing up in Virginia Beach as his dad struggled with alcoholism.
At one point, as the drinking grew worse, a friend of his mother called The 700 Club.
“She called and said, ‘You need to pray for this family, they’re in crisis,’ – and we really were,” said Litton.
Shortly afterward, a local pastor led his father to Christ. It was a turning point not only for Litton’s dad, but the whole family.
“His life was so transformed,” said Litton. “He became the most amazing soul-winner I’d ever known, a great church man, a great dad.”
That soul-winning mission clearly helped to prepare Litton for his current role at a crucial moment in Baptist history.
###
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at CBN
