BIRMINGHAM (AL)
Birmingham News
June 9, 2019
By Greg Garrison
Southern Baptists from across the country have arrived in Birmingham and more are on the way.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the annual meeting of the 14.8-million-member denomination, gathers Tuesday and Wednesday at the BJCC Legacy Arena. It’s the first time the Southern Baptist Convention has met in Birmingham since 1941.
It will be an opportunity for many Southern Baptists in Alabama to attend for the first time.
“So many wanted to go as messengers who have never been,” said the Rev. Joe Godfrey, former president of the Alabama Baptist Convention.
The number of messengers, or voting delegates, allowed from each Southern Baptist church depends on its size.
“It’s based on church membership or giving record,” Godfrey said. “The maximum number is ten from each church.”
The Rev. J.D. Greear, 46, senior pastor of The Summit Church in Durham, N.C., will preside at the meeting after being elected president last year. He has made addressing sexual abuse by clergy a priority issue.
“We need to have a posture of lament,” Greear said this past week on a Facebook live video. “Whether or not it’s happened to me, to somebody I know or somebody in my church, it’s happened to churches that bear the name Southern Baptist, and we need to lament that, lament the pain of victims and grieve with them. Lament that it happened on our watch.”
Greear announced a Sexual Abuse Advisory Study in July. More than half of study group is women.
Initial recommendations of the study group include calling for repentance “for decades of inaction.”
A group of sexual abuse survivors and victims’ advocates plans to protest outside the Legacy Arena on Tuesday about 6 p.m. They requested display space in a meeting hall, and permission to rally on the plaza, but were denied by the convention, said the Rev. Ashley Easter, a spokesperson for the rally who grew up in an independent Baptist church and is now an ordained minister in the Progressive Christian Alliance.
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