By Will Hall, Message Executive Editor
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (LBM)—J.D. Greear, pastor of The Summit in Durham, North Carolina, and serving his second term as SBC president, has named Ed Stetzer as the chair of the 2020 Resolutions Committee.
Stetzer likely will be considered a controversial choice by many Southern Baptists.
He is the interim teaching pastor for the Moody Church in Chicago, Illinois, a non-SBC congregation that ordains women as deaconesses and is elder-led.
He is not the first controversial choice put forth by Greear.
Despite promising to nominate candidates that looked like the rest of the Southern Baptist Convention, in 2019 Greear named his Committee on Committees, the group that shapes all trustee boards and the various SBC committees, with 31 percent identified as Calvinists by their beliefs and practices, compared to 10 percent of all Southern Baptists. One of the pastors on the list identified himself to his local newspaper as a non-denominational church with “Baptist” as its middle name.
Greear also favored mega-churches over the small congregations that typify the Southern Baptist Convention.
The average attendance among the committee members’ churches was 597. Meanwhile, just five percent of SBC congregations have more than 500 members attend the primary worship service. Instead, more than 80 percent of Southern Baptist churches average fewer than 150 weekly worshipers.
Stetzer will face demands from conservative Southern Baptists to retract or otherwise replace the controversial Resolution 9 passed by messengers in 2019. This measure lauded the neo-Marxist ideas of Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, both of which perpetuate racial divisiveness.
