By Ed Stetzer
This week, I am in New Orleans for the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting. This year’s gathering will be a historic one as Southern Baptists are poised to elect our first African-American convention president – Dr. Fred Luter. A denomination birthed with a racially-tinged history is now electing a descendant of slaves as its leader.
This is quite a story for the largest protestant denomination in America. So much so that both the New York Times and USA Today have run profiles on Dr. Luter. It also comes at a time when the SBC is more diverse than ever, seeing dramatic growth in ethnicity over the past 20 years. The percent of non-Anglo churches has moved from 1-in-20 to 1-in-5 in just two decades:
