The black pastor who introduced a resolution condemning the alt-right at the Southern Baptist Convention's (SBC) annual meeting in June has set out why, despite the denomination's initial failure to pass it, he is staying in the Southern Baptists.
Dwight McKissic, who for 33 years has been the senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, outlined his position in an opinion piece in the Washington Post yesterday.
He was responding to a New York Times article on July 17 by Lawrence Ware, a black academic and minister who announced that he was leaving the SBC, which is the nation's largest evangelical Protestant group.
Ware described being racially abused at the Convention and said he was leaving for several reasons, including the group's overwhelming support for Donald Trump, positioning on issues relating to homosexuality and the staggered process of passing McKissic's resolution.
McKissic wrote that while there are 'plenty of things in the SBC that make me uncomfortable', he opted to stay for three reasons: his long personal history with the group, the support he has received from SBC national leaders, and his desire to see Jesus' prayer answered that the Church would be united.
'When the SBC is persuaded to address the needs of African American communities – such as building up the black family, assisting ex-convicts with employment, removing payday loan offices from our neighborhoods, addressing disparities and inequities in the criminal justice system and addressing police brutality – it will have a huge positive impact on black SBC churches,' McKissic wrote.
He added that a common perception among African-American pastors and churches 'is that in order to be welcomed, we have to park our brains, culture, history, politics, worship practices, critical thinking skills and autonomy at the door'.
The group, he said, must work to ensure that this is not true, so they can recruit more congregations to cooperate with the SBC.
In March, McKissic wrote that it was going to be 'difficult for me to be able to continue to say, I'm proud and grateful to be a Southern Baptist' in the wake of Trump's election as president and its fallout.
A number of white, conservative churches stopped supporting the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the SBC agency led by Russell Moore, because of Moore's criticisms of Trump.
Nonetheless, even with the denomination's shortcomings, 'churches that focus their attention on the mission of our Lord Jesus will not find a better body to cooperate with than the SBC. Not everything in the SBC is what it should be, but I am called to work within to help it become what it can be,' McKissic wrote in his article.
