The Rev. Ronnie Floyd, pastor of Cross Church of Springdale, is to be nominated as president of the Southern Baptist Convention during the denomination’s annual meeting June 10-11 in Baltimore.
The Rev. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., stated in an open letter to Southern Baptists on Thursday that he plans to nominate Floyd for the one-year position. He called Floyd a “visionary and a unifier.”
With 16 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
In the letter, Mohler said Floyd “has unparalleled experience as a leader among us, an unquestioned commitment to the Great Commission, and he has demonstrated an unstinting urgency to unite Southern Baptists around our shared beliefs, mission, and programs.”
Floyd said Thursday that Mohler contacted him Monday night to ask permission to nominate him for the post, and Floyd agreed.
Floyd has served as senior pastor of Cross Church, formerly First Baptist Church of Springdale, since 1986. Since that time, the church has grown dramatically and now has four campuses - in Springdale, Rogers and two in Fayetteville. Floyd said about 9,000 people attend the weekly worship services and other ministry gatherings.
Floyd was nominated for the presidency of the denom-ination in 2006 but lost to the Rev. Frank Page of South Carolina who many saw as a new voice for the denomination. Page now serves as president of the convention’s Executive Committee.
At the 2006 gathering, Floyd was criticized by some because his congregation was giving less than 1 percent of its undesignated income to the denomination’s Cooperative Program, which funds mission work. According to Mohler’s letter, last year Cross Church contributed more than $700,000 to the Cooperative Program, making the church “one of the convention’s leading contributors.”
Floyd reflected Thursday on his 2006 loss, saying “there’s a time and there’s a season for everything. It’s obvious that God had another plan, then.
“You learn, you grow, you mature and I think from where we are at this moment if the Southern Baptist Convention calls upon me to serve as president, I would humbly give myself in service in this capacity and do it with full joy.”
In recent years, Floyd has played a leading role in the denomination. He was chairman of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force, a group assembled by then-president the Rev. Johnny Hunt to come up with recommendations for how the denomination could better serve Christ through the Great Commission.
The Great Commission refers to Jesus’ command to his followers in Matthew 28 to go and teach all the nations “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Delegates, known as messengers, to the 2010 annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., overwhelmingly approved the task force’s recommendations, which called for changing the denomination’s missions efforts to focus on starting new churches, especially in areas outside the South. The adopted recommendations also called for allocating more money for international missions and urged all Southern Baptists to give more for evangelism efforts.
At that time, Floyd said the vote showed “a spirit of unity and love” in the desire to fulfill the Great Commission.
Floyd said Thursday that he still believes that fulfilling Jesus’ commandment to spread the “Good News” is the denomination’s most pressing mission.
“I believe that we need to be committed to cooperating with every church and association and state convention to reach the world for Christ,” he said. “That’s the heartbeat of who we are.”
The Rev. Fred Luter, pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans and the first black president of the denomination, will conclude his second term this year and will not be eligible for re-election at the meeting.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/21/2014