The Southern Baptist Convention made history last week. The Convention – a denomination formed in 1845, in part, to support slavery, and later, with notable brave exceptions, largely supported Jim Crow segregation into the 1960s – elected its first African-American president, Dr. Fred Luter, Jr.
Dr. Luter's election symbolizes the Southern Baptist Convention having been transformed by the convicting power of God's Holy Spirit from a virtually all-white denomination as late as the mid-sixties to the most multi-ethnic major denomination in the United States today. Approximately 20 percent of Southern Baptists are non-Anglo (African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and Native-American, etc), and ten percent of Southern Baptist Convention churches are predominately African-American.
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