SBC Voices has been overwhelmingly fixated recently on questions of racial reconciliation. SBC Voices will be overwhelmingly fixated in the near future on same-sex marriage. I’m about to disengage from online media for a while in order to turn my attention to other tasks. This is a temporary vacation, not a retirement. But as a parting contribution, permit me an uncharacteristically brief post to connect these two topics.
A post of mine is forthcoming Monday at Canon & Culture in which I will suggest, among other things, that the racial integration of American Evangelicalism at the local-church level is an objective indispensable to the witness of our churches in a post-Obergefell America (I’m actually far more concerned about local-church integration than I am interested in the racial apportionment of boards and offices at the national level). Indeed, had this happened earlier, we’d be in a different position today, I think.
But, you can read that post for yourself when it comes out.
Here at SBC Voices I’ll offer this additional consideration: Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling has handed to Southern Baptists a golden opportunity such as has never come in my lifetime and may not soon come again. We can make great strides in breaking down racial barriers at this moment.
Many predominantly black denominations in the United States are going to embrace the same-sex marriage ruling and the new regime of law pretty rapidly. They’re going to do this because President Obama has embraced it (which will, sadly, trump what King Jesus thinks about it). If Southern Baptists from the national denominational level up to, most importantly, the local church level will seize this moment to extend a winsome hand of outreach to disaffected black Evangelicals, we might see over the next five years an historic movement of black Evangelicals into the Southern Baptist fold. And they’ll be just the black Evangelicals we’d most like to have: those whose commitment to Christ is strongest.
