The new president of the Southern Baptist Convention is a staunchly conservative small-town preacher who touts biblical inerrancy, opposes women serving as pastors and supports abortion bans
Pastor Bart Barber, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, preaches from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Farmersville, Texas, on Sunday, Sept. 25, 2022. For nearly a quarter-century, Barber enjoyed relative obscurity as a pastor in this town of 3,600, about 50 miles northeast of Dallas. That changed in June as delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in California, chose Barber to lead the nation’s largest Protestant denomination at a time of major crisis.
The previous month a scathing, 288-page investigative report hit the denomination’s 13.7 million members. It laid out the findings of an independent probe detailing how Southern Baptist leaders stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations.
A staunch theological conservative, Barber touts biblical inerrancy, opposes women serving as pastors and supports abortion bans. In running for SBC president, he expressed a desire to be a peacemaker and a unifier. Emerging from a field of four candidates, he received 61% of votes in a run-off against Tom Ascol, a Florida pastor who vowed to take the denomination further right.
“Though he is a well-educated church historian and an expert on SBC history and polity, Bart is not an elitist,” Finn added. “He gives the impression that he would rather be working on his farm than hobnobbing with denominational leaders.” “And so if Southern Baptists, who also have problems in this area, can lead the way to real solutions … that would be a great shining victory for the SBC,” he added. “And what Hollywood and USA Gymnastics and the government and the military … don’t have is the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit and the promise of God himself that he has built his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
“It’s kind of weird,” Barber said. “Here we were in very small-town Arkansas — not a lot of money, not a lot of fame or anything like that — and a gubernatorial candidate would stop by the house. “He has the heart of a pastor. He is someone who really cares about folks,” Tracy Barber said of her husband of 30 years. “The people in our church are our family, and Farmersville is a small town, so it lends itself to that.”
On a recent Sunday, Barber got up at 4:30 a.m., attended a deacons meeting at 7 and preached at his congregation’s 8:30 and 11 worship assemblies. After a two-hour afternoon nap, he drove to Dallas and flew to Nashville, Tennessee, for meetings at the Southern Baptist Convention headquarters. “The thing that sticks out to me is just authenticity,” said Callagher, who is Catholic. “He lives his faith, and as Christians we have a lot of common ground.”
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