Barber: ‘Vision of cooperation’ can offset SBC’s hindrances

SBC President Bart Barber reminded Executive Committee members that Southern Baptists have been this way before, threatened by “monetary shortfalls, leadership scandals, doctrinal conflict and political humiliation,” but the vision of cooperation that united them prevailed a century ago and can prevail now.

Barber, at the EC meeting in Nashville Monday (Sept. 18), drew on his church history background to recount the state of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1920s and ‘30s. Their favored political candidate had lost, the culture was moving sharply against them, and in the midst of their most ambitious fundraising campaign, the economy crashed.

“Our economic problems were made worse by the fact that we faced leadership problems in the 1920s and the 1930s,” Barber, pastor of First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, said.

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