Sometime around mid-afternoon Tuesday, the Southern Baptist Convention is expected to elect a black New Orleans preacher, the Rev. Fred Luter, as the first African-American president in its history. At one level it’s a historic moment for Southern Baptists. The denomination was founded in 1845, when Southern slave-holding Baptists broke from national Baptists who opposed slavery.
More than a century later, Southern Baptist sheriffs, congressmen, county officials — not to mention some clergy — preached racial segregation deep into the 1960s.
But on the eve of the two-day meeting at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, Luter, 55, enters the convention unopposed for the presidency of the 16 million-member denomination.
For months, Southern Baptist leaders and the Baptist press have been treating his election as both a certainty and a cultural triumph.
“With Fred’s election the Southern Baptist Convention is going to affirm that change has to come,” said the Rev. David Crosby, of First Baptist Church of New Orleans, who will nominate Luter on Tuesday.
Others cautioned that the election does not by itself signal wholesale change.
In the Southern Baptist world, the president’s influence lies in the power to nominate like-minded people to seminaries and agency boards. Presidents typically serve two one-year terms, so it takes several in succession to change the course of Baptist life.
“Luter could be the first of a series of presidents moving the denomination toward a more racially and ethnically sensitive position,” said Bill Leonard, a former Southern Baptist who is now chair of Baptist studies at Wake Forest University Divinity School.
“But if it stops with him and it turns out he is the only one, it will be a moot point.”
A bastion of white, evangelical values
The largest Protestant denomination in the country, the Southern Baptist Convention is still a powerful bastion of white, evangelical values. But in recent years, Southern Baptist demographers have issued a steady drumbeat of warnings.
Eighty percent of its congregations are white. And unless it opens itself to black, Hispanic and Asian members, the convention will be isolated on a melting demographic ice floe.
Ed Stetzer, an official with LifeWay Christian Resources, a research agency affiliated with the convention, has pointed out that the denomination’s post-World War II growth curve peaked, then flattened, and now has tipped into a decline that, without radical change, will certainly accelerate.
LifeWay’s figures show that Southern Baptist baptisms have been in stubborn decline for a decade. And between 2010 and 2011, Stetzer said the denomination's net growth in churches was only 37 — statistically, less than a rounding error in a denomination of about 46,000 churches.
The changes reflect two tectonic social shifts: the well-documented, growing antipathy of young adults to structured denominational life in any form, and the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of the American population, where whites hold less and less numerical sway.
Against that backdrop, the arrival of Luter, a charismatic preacher who grew up in the Lower 9th Ward and leads a robust black church, looks like a gift from God.
“I believe this is election is providential. I really do,” said Crosby, who grew close to Luter after Crosby and his largely white congregation shared their Lakeview church with Luter’s after Hurricane Katrina.
A pastor's pastor
Luter’s candidacy appears to cover all the bases, according to many Baptist leaders.
He is Biblically orthodox and devoted to evangelism, the engine of Baptist life. Having built Franklin Avenue Baptist Church from 50 members in 1986 to 8,000 on the eve of Hurricane Katrina, then having rebuilt it from nearly nothing after the storm to 4,500 today, he is seen as a pastor’s pastor, said Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.
And he can preach.
In 2001, Luter was given the choice speaking slot at the last Southern Baptist gathering in New Orleans, which was held at the Superdome. Preaching out of his own black pulpit tradition, Luter delivered an electrifying tour de force that jolted nearly 10,000 white evangelicals to their feet, roaring with approval.
It also put him on their radar as a potential president.
Growing up in the Lower 9th Ward
There is little evidence left of Luter’s boyhood in the Lower 9th Ward.
Two houses where he grew up exist only in memory. His grandparents’ houses are gone. So are his schools, Alfred Lawless Elementary and Alfred Lawless Junior High. All vacant lots.
What remains, although as an empty, graffiti-marred husk, is Greater Mount Carmel Baptist Church at the corner of Forstall and North Galvez streets.
In was a thriving center in Luter’s youth.
Luter said he grew up in that church, hauled there week after week by his mother, Viola, a seamstress and hospital worker who held down several jobs. Not enough to make ends meet, “but just to get them close enough to wave at each other.”
It was there, Luter said, that in 1977, recovering from a motorcycle accident that could have killed him, he hobbled up the aisle on crutches and at the age of 20 and apologized to the congregation for “living a lie.”
On his back in Charity Hospital a few weeks earlier, with a head injury and his left leg in pieces, Luter said he had experienced an epiphany.
It was engineered by a deacon who wagged his finger in young Luter’s face and warned that he was throwing his life away.
The deacon left. “And I told God if you save my life, I’ll serve you the rest of my life,” Luter said.
'Get to 'em fast and quick'
In subsequent weeks, Luter began to delve into the Bible seriously. He asked questions of elders. And he began to preach in the toughest arenas around, on the street corners of the Lower 9th Ward.
These were places like Caffin Avenue and North Galvez Street, near the dry cleaners, corner groceries and liquor stores of that close-knit world, where people who had known young Luter all their lives watched him preach through a bullhorn, his “half-mile hailer.”
“They thought I was going through a phase.”
He also learned to preach fast. “I preached on street corners. I learned you got to get to ‘em fast and quick.”
Luter didn’t know much about doctrine. Rather, “we were testifying about what God had done in our lives.”
What formal theological education he has he picked up part time in classes at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
Luter honed his skills until he was 29, when as young married man he was called to Franklin Avenue Baptist Church.
Once a vibrant, white Southern Baptist congregation hollowed out by neighborhood flight, it had morphed to a tiny black church of 50 members, on the verge of extinction.
He was ordained and installed on the same day.
“They told me resurrect it, or we’re going to bury it.”
Now 26 years later, Luter has preached in hundreds of pulpits around the country, building a thick network of friends who say they consider his election this week inevitable.
But Luter has said the Baptist presidency “was never on my bucket list.”
His agenda, he says, is perfectly mainstream: to restore Southern Baptist growth and reinvigorate evangelism, especially among young adults and ethnic communities.
But many question whether Luter’s election will open the door for future black leadership across the landscape of Baptist institutions, and whether accumulating minority voices will challenge the convention’s conservative outlook on political issues like capital punishment, criminal justice reform and health care.
“We often say that African American churches reflect right-of-center theology and left-of-center social consciousness,” said Leonard, of Wake Forest.
Some admirers, like Crosby, hope Luter’s ascendency will signal a new Baptist willingness to be challenged by newcomers on traditional social issues.
Those challenges are inevitable if the convention is serious about doing what it takes to stay vibrant, Crosby said.
'Sensitivity and compassion' on Trayvon Martin issue
Luter has already made his voice heard on one issue.
When Richard Land, who is white and one of the most prominent Southern Baptist voices in the country, recently berated black leaders for politicizing the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, thus seeming to minimize the issues it raised, Luter was among Southern Baptist leaders who publicly chastised Land.
“I’d never heard a Southern Baptist leader speak with that kind of sensitivity and compassion toward a racial situation,” said the Rev. William Dwight McKissic Sr., the African American pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas.
“That was shocking to me. That brought tears to my eyes.
“I thought, ‘We’re going to get a president who understands.’”
Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3344.