Most new SBC trustees first-time nominees

GREENSBORO, N.C. (BP) — New trustees of the Southern Baptist Convention’s entities are diverse, have an average age of 48 and are overwhelmingly first-time nominees.

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Of the 105 nominations made by the Committee on Nominations, only three have ever served on an SBC board, messengers were told in approving the new trustees June 13.

“That is absolutely extraordinary,” SBC President Bobby Welch said. He commended the 70-member committee for “reach[ing] down into the body life of this convention and find[ing] more folks to fill more places at a time like this.”

Photo by James A. Smith, Sr.

Guy Sanders, pastor of First Baptist Church in New Port Richey, chaired the 2006 Committee on Nominations.

“We’ve worked cooperatively with a good committee,” said committee chairman Guy Sanders, pastor of First Baptist Church in New Port Richey. “All along the way I believe we’ve evidenced love for the Lord Jesus Christ, a commitment to excellence and the real spirit of enjoyable unity.”

Sanders emphasized that the committee’s report broadens the first-time representation of people in the convention, demonstrates financial cooperation and enlists people who will encourage evangelism as they guide the SBC’s entities.

The churches which nominees represent give an average of more than 9 percent of their budgets through the Cooperative Program and have an average of 48 baptisms per church. “If we all did that, we’d baptize 2 million a year,” Sanders noted.

Church attendance ranges from 43 in a newly planted church to congregations with thousands of members. The youngest nominees are two pastors, both 29, and the eldest is a 75-year-old female.

“Our committee has worked very diligently to present to this convention a slate of nominees full of diversity, free of personal agenda and faithful to the Great Commission through Southern Baptist cooperation,” Sanders said.

“It follows the full gamut of who we are as Southern Baptists.”

In an interview with Florida Baptist Witness following his report, Sanders spoke to some criticisms of the nominations process, including the nominations of a father and son from different churches and a Nevada woman related by marriage to Southwestern Seminary president Paige Patterson.

Sanders called “unfounded” charges that the Committee on Nominations process this year or in the past has been the subject of “manipulation.”

Regarding the nomination of Kathleen Kelly of Nevada to the International Mission Board and the fact that she is the sister of Dorothy Patterson, Sanders told the Witness, “I don’t think we can somehow disqualify someone simply because they’re related to another. The nominators from Nevada both addressed that issue in the meeting and said this woman is not voting for somebody else, she’s her own person, she’s one of the best laypeople we have in the state of Nevada. …”

Sanders, who served on the Committee on Nominations once before ten years ago, said the committee’s work, although stressful at times, was “an excellent experience.”