Ed Stetzer:
It’s a good question.
I think the answer is yes. I think that part of the reason is, is, I was there, and to see the future of the SBC was there, as long — as well as the president of the SBC. And the future of the SBC was, for example, new churches. The insider lingo is church plants.
Sixty percent of the church plants in the Southern Baptist Convention by the Send Network and the North America Mission Board are non-Anglo. The future was there. The next generation was there. The future was there.
What’s surprising to a lot of people is that, among Southern Baptists, there’s actually a quarter of the churches are predominantly non-Anglo. The future was there.
So I think, at the same time, there was a very significant kind of get-out-the-vote campaign for people who were concerned that maybe talking about these things or other things indicated some sort of liberal drift. That’s the language that was used, some sort of liberal drift.
And I know, to our viewers, Southern Baptists having liberal labeled at anybody in the convention probably seems a bit odd, but it’s — it was a charge that was made.
And so I think what happened is, this was an all-out get-out-the-vote moment. And I think, ultimately, the future is going to continue to move forward, the convention is going to continue to be more diverse, a surprising level of diversity to people on the outside.
And so, no, I do think this was a watershed moment. I’m going to mix metaphors. There’s a fork in the road, and that fork has been taken. And it doesn’t mean — we’re all living in a new level of constant argument. Social media has become weaponized.
I think, Southern Baptists are going to get — get used to a significant number of people who are upset about these issues. It’s all of us. I serve at a local church. There’s — this is always going to be the case now moving forward.
And the reality is, we have to do the right thing, even when it’s the hard thing.
