Newly elected Southern Baptist president from Charlotte opposes women as pastors – MASHAHER

The Rev. Clint Pressley woke up Thursday morning praying for the Southern Baptist Convention, he told his 9,000 followers on social media site X, the former Twitter.

“Pray I don’t embarrass us,” the Charlotte pastor quipped.

The morning before, Pressley was elected president of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination during its annual meeting in Indianapolis.

The longtime pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church topped a field of six candidates. He won a second runoff ballot with 56% of the vote over Dan Spencer, pastor of First Baptist Church in Sevierville, Tennessee.

Congratulations soon poured in for the Charlotte native, including on social media, from his megachurch.

“I love my church man!” Pressley replied.

Pressley was elected at a controversial time for the denomination. At its annual meeting, the convention voted to oppose in vitro fertilization and nearly voted to penalize Southern Baptist churches that have women ministers.

During a post-election news conference Wednesday, Pressley addressed divisive issues facing the convention while saying “there’s a lot to celebrate” in the Southern Baptist Convention, “especially as it points to biblical fidelity, real clear mission focus.”

“I think that’s part of what the president’s job is: To do all you can by way of influence to make sure, as a convention of churches, we are focused what our mission is,” he said. “So I look forward to next year. It’s a great time to celebrate.”

Who is new Southern Baptist president?

Pressley and his wife, Connie, have two sons.

As a boy, he belonged to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

During Wednesday’s news conference, Pressley recalled how his life changed when his family switched to a Southern Baptist church.

“Never heard anything like that,” he said.

His family joined Hickory Grove when Pressley was a teenager, according to his biography on the church website.

He graduated from Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with a bachelor of arts degree and obtained his master of divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

He pastored two churches in Mississippi and returned to Hickory Grove in 1999 as senior associate pastor of preaching.

In 2004, he left to become senior pastor of historic Dauphin Way Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama, and returned to Hickory Grove in 2010 as co-pastor. A year later, he was installed as senior pastor.

Pressley has held volunteer leadership roles with the convention since 2013, when he was vice president of its pastor’s conference.

He was first vice president of the convention in 2014-2015 and has been a trustee of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary since 2015. He’s been on the N.C. Baptist Board of Directors since last year.

Pressley said he’s glad to serve as president, but said it’s also a volunteer position, meaning he’ll need help running the annual convention.

“It sounds like you have a whole lot of power, but you don’t,” he told reporters.

Amendment to ban women pastors fails

Pressley said he supported the failed Law Amendment, which would have barred churches that have women pastors.

“I thought it provided really great clarity,” he told reporters. “I have brothers that are just as theologically robust as I would like to be myself that were against it.

“Then we have maintained a real sense of God’s good design, not only in marriage, but how he’s given us to live as men and women,” Pressley said.

Still, Southern Baptists can remain united despite such differences, he said.

“We need to be unified around not only our understanding of the Bible and our love for the Bible, love for the Gospel, love for the mission,” he said. “We’re unified around the Baptist Faith and Message that we affirm.

“So there’s a lot we can really be glad of,” he said. “You walk away with the Law Amendment not passing, (but) we have not abandoned biblical truth. At all.”

Pressley also addressed sexual abuse. An investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News in 2019 exposed sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention.

“I think you can be really confident, as you’ve seen in the last couple of years, that the Southern Baptist Convention takes sexual abuse terribly seriously and that people have worked really hard,” he said.

And he responded to the passage of a resolution that warned about the ethics of in vitro fertilization.

He said he and his wife had thought about that and other options when dealing with infertility. Pastors should use the resolution to help Southern Baptists think through the issue, he said.

“We have just not thought about it very much,” he said.

Pressley was traveling Thursday and could not be reached by The Charlotte Observer.