NY Times: “Minutes before thousands of Southern Baptists voted for their next president, the most famous man in the room made a surprise appearance at a microphone on the convention floor.
For years Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California, was a hero for Southern Baptists. He built what became the denomination’s largest church, trained 1.1 million pastors around the world and wrote one of history’s best-selling books, “The Purpose Driven Life.”
But on Tuesday, as infighting over weighty topics like politics and sexual abuse consumed the country’s largest Protestant denomination, Mr. Warren came to the convention he once personified to offer what sounded like a lover’s goodbye.
He is on the brink of retirement, and the denomination has been drifting from the compassionate conservatism and “seeker-sensitive” style Mr. Warren came to represent. Southern Baptists spent part of the afternoon debating whether to oust his church over its ordination of three women as pastors last year. “We have to decide if we will treat each other as allies or adversaries,” Mr. Warren said. The response in the room was tepid.
Hours later, the denomination announced Bart Barber as its new president after a tense and unusually politicized contest for a religious group that is moving deeper into an era of hardening divisions, and farther away from the tradition that shaped Mr. Warren.
The choice of Mr. Barber, a pastor in rural Texas, is a victory for establishment leadership that has shown openness to making changes in the wake of a sex abuse scandal and not shied away from broader discussions of race and the role of women. It also sets up more pitched internal clashes between those who back such leadership and an energized ultraconservative wing pushing for a harder, bolder line in national culture wars.”