Baltimore | Messengers to the SBC Annual Meeting have elected Dr. Ronnie Floyd to serve as President of the Southern Baptist Convention. He received 51.62% of the vote in a three candidate race.
Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY, nominated Floyd. Mohler said, “When Southern Baptists have needed Ronnie Floyd, he has always been there.”
Molher called Cross Church in northwest Arkansas, where Floyd is pastor, “evangelistic, faithful and innovative” and added that it is among the SBC’s top contributors to the Cooperative Program. Floyd has served in numerous SBC leadership posts, including chairman of the Great Commission Task Force, Mohler noted.
Floyd was one of the keynote speakers at the SBC Pastors’ Conference June 8-9 also at the Baltimore Convention Center. The only thing Southern Baptists should be known for is the “power and the glory of God,” Floyd said, urging preachers to make a commitment not to preach unless His glory is on them and they have heard from God.
In addition, he cautioned pastors about trying to be too “cool.” “Some of us have a heart to be so real with people that we just think if we’re cool enough, we’re going to get [the numbers],” he said. “We’re never going to be cool enough to win our towns, our rural settings, to win our cities, to win the nation, to win the world, to win the nations. We’re never going to be cool enough; the only thing that’s going to bring that is a binding movement of the spirit of God that comes only when we are going up to be with God.”
The two other candidates for SBC President, Dr. Dennis Kim and Pastor Jared Moore, received 40.70% and 5.91% each of the vote. 1.77% of the ballots were disallowed.
Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist in Arlington, TX, nominated Kim. “Could it be that God has sovereignly brought Dr. Kim into the life and legacy of the Southern Baptist Convention … for such a time as this?” McKissic asked. Global Mission Church in Silver Spring, MD., where Kim, a Korean American, is pastor, is thoroughly multicultural, McKissic said, adding that Kim would be the first SBC president not from the South. He called on messengers to vote for the candidate stating, “The election of Dr. Kim will signal our future.”
Bennie Smith, a deacon at New Salem Baptist in Hustonville, KY., where Moore is pastor, nominated Moore. “We are a small Baptist church, but I’m trying to speak for smaller churches,” Smith said. “The voice of an average person in our SBC would be valuable.”
Clint Pressley, pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist in Charlotte, NC, was elected first Vice President of the SBC by acclimation — there were no other nominees.
Pressley was nominated by Pastor Ted Traylor of Olive Baptist in Pensacola, FL who said he was a “team player.”
Traylor also called the younger man, Pressley a “weight-lifting, Bible-preaching, sharp-dressing Southern Baptist.”
Pressley is known to wear a seersucker suit on at least one day of the convention each year.
5,001 messengers were registered when the vote for president took place, but only 3,553 messengers voted.
With additional reporting from Baptist Press.
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