The Ethics & Non secular Liberty Fee’s interim chief, Brent Leatherwood, will develop into its subsequent president.
Leatherwood spent the previous yr as appearing president, main the Southern Baptist Conference’s public coverage arm throughout a historic span that included the reversal of Roe v. Wade and landmark denominational strikes on abuse reform. The ERLC board of trustees unanimously accredited his appointment on Tuesday.
A five-year employees member on the ERLC, Leatherwood was chief of employees underneath the earlier interim chief, Daniel Patterson, and vice chairman of exterior affairs underneath former president Russell Moore, who left his place and the SBC in 2021. (Moore is now editor in chief of CT.)
Like throughout Moore’s management, the ERLC has continued to be a subject of debate within the Southern Baptist Conference (SBC), whose 48,000 church buildings function independently however cooperatively. For some Southern Baptists, the ERLC’s lobbying and coaching efforts round issues like religious liberty and sanctity of life symbolize an vital type of witness and engagement. Critics, although, consider the ERLC and its leaders have taken stances that don’t symbolize the denomination general.
On the annual assembly in June, as in earlier years, a proposal to defund the ERLC was voted down. Former ERLC president Richard Land instructed the conference, “I can’t think about a extra damaging second for the Southern Baptist Conference to defund the ERLC.”
Leatherwood additionally bumped into pushback when he offered a imaginative and prescient for pro-life campaigns within the “post-Roe” period however didn’t agree with an abolitionist minority who wished to criminalize abortion. “You aren’t going to get me to say I wish to throw moms behind bars,” he mentioned from the stage.
The ERLC has additionally been concerned in addressing probably the most high-profile challenge the SBC has confronted in recent times: its response to abuse. The ERLC had launched the Caring Well Initiative and convention again in 2018 to assist practice church buildings in how to answer survivors.
The surface investigation into the SBC’s Government Committee (EC), made public in a 288-page report in Could, revealed how its leaders clashed with the ERLC over abuse, together with censoring ERLC supplies that described a sexual abuse “disaster” within the SBC.
“It’s important that we resist the urge to react defensively or from a place of defending ourselves or an establishment reasonably than valuable people made in God’s picture. Whether or not at a church or an entity, we should foster an setting the place survivors are assured they are going to be acquired, listened to, and supported,” Leatherwood wrote in Could.
“It’s crucial that the tales of survivors be met with the identical compassion Jesus exhibited for many who had been marginalized or susceptible.”
Final yr, the ERLC began an “audit and evaluation of sexual abuse inside the SBC,” separate from the EC investigation.
Leatherwood has a background working for the Republican Celebration in Tennessee and on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
When he moved from politics to the ERLC, he said, “I’ve come to understand that politics flows downstream from tradition. So, if I really wish to make a distinction, I’ve to be lively upstream.”
Over the previous few weeks, Leatherwood has led the ERLC because it joined an amicus transient siding with the non secular liberty rights of Yeshiva College, known as consideration to the mistreatment of Uyghurs in China, and applauded Tennessee’s not too long ago enacted abortion restrictions.
Leatherwood mentioned he was “honored and humbled” to develop into the subsequent president. “True management begins as service,” he mentioned in an announcement. “That has been the guts I’ve introduced every day to the ERLC these previous 12 months. And it’s that very same coronary heart I’ll proceed to carry as this new chapter begins.”
He additionally emphasised the significance of the ERLC’s cooperation with church buildings, state conventions, and different entities.
Southern Baptists have seen giving ranges climb, furthering its mission work, over the course of the pandemic; nevertheless, annual membership and baptisms have declined yr after yr for greater than a decade, dropping greater than 1,000,000 members in a three-year span, in keeping with SBC experiences.
