Southern Baptists are gathered in Dallas this week for the denomination's annual gathering and business meeting against a backdrop of concern regarding members of its leadership, a continued decline in membership and a vote to decide who will become the next president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Delegates, referred to as messengers, also will vote on a resolution affirming that men belonging to the largest Protestant denomination in the United States have abused, silenced and objectified women.
The vote comes on the heels of an announcement Friday that Paige Patterson had withdrawn from giving the keynote sermon at this year's meeting.
Patterson -- a two-term president of the convention who led the denomination's conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, and who is a former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth -- was fired May 30 from the seminary's top post because of his mishandling of a rape allegation while he was president at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina.
