“I’ve lost confidence that an (African-Īmerican) man will ever be elected as an entity head,” he tweeted Sunday before the vote. Today we showed the watching world that we honor both.”ĭwight McKissic, a Black pastor also from Arlington, Texas, said he respected Wellman but didn’t understand why the committee appeared ready to bypass McLaurin.
“We have made resolution after resolution, from apologies on slavery to Confederate flags,” but they won’t be effective “if the heart of the convention does not change,” he wrote.Īfter the vote, Vines told The Associated Press: “Today’s vote was about process and integrity.
The denomination “always seems to have issues with hiring a person of color for a senior leadership position,” wrote Vines, pastor of New Seasons Church in Spring Valley, California. Vines didn’t take issue with Wellman but said the process was secretive and didn’t “pass the smell test.” Vines - a former SBC vice president and former president of the National African American Fellowship within the SBC - challenged the selection process last week in an open letter to the Executive Committee. Under committee bylaws, the presidential selection process will begin anew under a new search committee, which was created on Monday.īishop A.B. Wellman himself had been chair of the Executive Committee’s board until resigning last month. The Executive Committee, meeting in private session in Dallas on Monday, voted down a recommendation from its search committee to choose a white pastor, Jared Wellman of Arlington, Texas, to be its next president. While the SBC elected its first Black president in 2012, no African Americans have led any of the denomination’s powerful agencies or seminaries.
The selection process hit a nerve in a denomination that has lost some Black clergy in recent years over what they have seen as a failure of the mostly white-led denomination to make good on its pledges to reform after its history of supporting slavery and segregation. That 50-31 vote came after some of the denomination’s prominent Black clergy questioned the selection process, which they saw as bypassing an African American pastor who has led the committee as interim president for more than a year. Instead, the Executive Committee found itself tangled in yet another dispute, voting down a recommendation to make its own former chairman its president in what had become a racially fraught decision.
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