Southern Baptists Diversifying to Survive
Minority Outreach Seen as Key to Crisis

By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 16, 2008; A01

Seven years ago, the Rev. Eric Redmond never imagined himself leading a congregation in the overwhelmingly white Southern Baptist Convention.

Now, the young Temple Hills minister is the highest-ranking African American in the 16 million-member denomination and a representative of the changing times confronting Southern Baptists and other mostly white Protestant denominations.

Faced with a crisis of aging and departing members, the nation's largest non-Catholic Christian bodies -- Southern Baptists, United Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians -- are reaching out to minorities in ways they never have before.

Yet, while local churches often remain predominately black or white, the outreach does result in a more diverse national organization.

By establishing churches in minority communities, changing worship practices, electing minorities to leadership positions and purging racism from their language and attitudes, the faiths are seeking to draw in communities of color as a way to boost stagnating or falling membership. The consequences of ignoring those communities, they warn, are dire.

"You can almost calculate the time when we close the door and turn off the lights if we don't become a more diverse church," said Sherman Hicks, executive director of multicultural ministries for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a 4.9 million-member denomination that is 97 percent white.

But of all the denominations seeking to diversify, many agree that the Southern Baptist Convention -- an association of about 40,000 congregations that make up the nation's largest Protestant denomination -- has the farthest to travel.

From its 1845 birth in Georgia as a haven for white Baptists who supported slavery, the SBC has had troubled relations with African Americans. For 150 years, by its own admission, it was hostile to black progress, often speaking in favor of Jim Crow laws.

But in 1995, the Southern Baptists did an about-face, issuing a public apology for their history of bigotry and vowing to "eradicate racism in all its forms" from its ranks.

These days, the faith that was once proudly white now touts the fact that almost 20 percent of its congregations are predominantly black, Latino or Asian. Hundreds of minorities serve in leadership posts in its state conventions, seminaries and other organizations.

The SBC Mission Board estimates that the number of black members has doubled to about 1 million since the 1995 apology.

Southern Baptists are starting churches in black communities and, while they insist they don't recruit from predominantly black denominations, the outreach strategy includes welcoming black preachers from those bodies and offering them multi-day "boot camps" -- intensive teaching in starting Southern Baptist churches.

"I wish it was all just spiritual, but some of it is pragmatic as well," said the Rev. Frank S. Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "Our highest growth is coming in ethnic congregations, so it's very important for the growth of our convention . . . If we're going to reach our nation, we're going to need to reach ethnic groups."

The SBC encourages new pastors to network with other black Southern Baptist leaders, offering them names and contact information. A recent publication details African Americans' involvement in the SBC since its founding, although it omits any mention of past racism and the 1995 apology.

Redmond, 40, was a member of the predominantly black Progressive National Baptist Convention and a professor of Bible and theology at Washington Bible College in Lanham when he was asked to fill in as minister at Hillcrest Baptist Church in 2001.

The Progressive and the Southern Baptists are just two of several U.S. Baptist denominations. There are at least four historically black Baptist organizations, five in the evangelical tradition, plus at least one more in the mainline tradition, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Redmond was attracted by the Southern Baptists' theologically and socially conservative stances on abortion and same-sex marriage and the conviction that the Bible is the word of God and entirely without error. Black Baptist preachers generally place a greater emphasis on social justice and activism than their Southern Baptist counterparts.

"For an outsider, we think of the old convention with all its cultural conservatism, separatism and fundamentalism," Redmond said. "But what I found were people that were seeking to be very welcoming to African Americans in particular and to ethnic minorities in general."

After a short stint as temporary minister, Redmond became Hillcrest's first black pastor. He was elected second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention last year.

From an average of 250 worshipers before Redmond came, Hillcrest now draws an average of 375 worshipers on Sundays. The nursery school, which saw only a handful of children a few years ago, is up to 30 children.

But white flight took its toll.

Like other predominantly black Southern Baptist churches, 55-year-old Hillcrest had been mostly white. But as more black residents moved into Prince George's County in the 1980s and 1990s, the church attracted black members and lost most of its white worshipers even before Redmond arrived.

Newer members say they were attracted by Redmond's conservative beliefs and his dynamic preaching. But some said that getting past the Southern Baptist affiliation wasn't easy.

"It was hard," said Nicole Lawrence, 30, a homemaker who joined Hillcrest with her husband, Christopher, and two children two years ago. Lawrence, who grew up a Presbyterian, said her parents and friends were opposed to the move because of the SBC's racist past. "I tried to emphasize that the people aren't like that now," she said.

The Southern Baptist Convention needs more people like Nicole Lawrence. Its membership, which grew at a torrid pace from the 1970s through the 1990s, has stalled, and the annual number of baptisms -- a key growth figure -- has dropped in recent years.

Redmond and other black Southern Baptists say they are pushing the denomination to address issues of concern to African Americans, such as the plight of poor, urban Americans, out-of-wedlock births, civil rights and racial injustice.

"The most important thing for the Southern Baptist Convention to do socially is to attempt to move away from addressing only upper-middle-class, conservative issues," said Redmond. "We have to stop thinking of ourselves as trying to hedge a June Cleaverish class of Christianity."

Since coming to Hillcrest, Redmond has revamped the worship style to add African American church traditions. Redmond said there was "dead silence" when he preached, and hymns were sung only to piano or organ.

But now services at Hillcrest, a tall, steepled church surrounded by modest brick ranch homes, are a mix of worship traditions. They include such staid Baptist hymns as "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" as well as a swaying, clapping choir, accompanied by drums and electric keyboards, and worshipers who call out "amen," "mmm-hmm" and "preach, pastor" to his sermons.

"We had to make changes that were appropriate for reaching a contemporary African American culture," he said. "People are free to express themselves -- to cry aloud, to clap and to have other emotions displayed in the service."

Bow-tied and goateed, the slightly built Redmond is an energetic preacher. His voice frequently rises to a shout and he throws his arms wide from the pulpit as he makes his points.

But despite Redmond's enthusiasm, skeptics say it will take more than gospel singing and dynamic young preachers to make Southern Baptists more diverse.

Forrest Harris, president of the American Baptist College and professor of practical theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School, said that Southern Baptists have shown no interest in taking on issues that have long been the focus of African American Baptist denominations, such as social justice and improving African American communities.

The diversity effort, said Harris, "doesn't seek to change or transform the way in which injustice and the problems of [black] communities need to be addressed."

Staff writer Hamil H. Harris contributed to this report.