By Samantha Adams
Staff Writer
Fred Luter, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, shares a laugh with Lanese Dockery, first lady of the university, after he spoke in chapel Sept. 26.
Fred Luter, the first black president of the Southern Baptist Convention, was inducted into the R.G. Lee Society of Fellows by Union University President David S. Dockery after Luter spoke in chapel Sept. 26.
Luter also serves as senior pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans.
The induction, one of the highest honors the university gives to pastors, acknowledges Luter’s leadership in Southern Baptist life, Dockery said as he announced the induction.
“Our speaker for today is an incredible leader and statesman in Southern Baptist life,”
Dockery said while introducing Luter during the chapel service. He called Luter “God’s man for this hour.”
Before becoming president of the SBC, Luter was elected SBC first vice president — the first African-American to hold that position as well. On the day the election results for vice president were announced, Dockery posted on his Twitter account, @davidsdockery, “Hope he will be elected president in New Orleans!”
The same day, an Associated Press story by Travis Loller and Terry Tang picked up Dockery’s tweet, and for the next year people speculated Luter’s election to SBC president at the 2012 SBC Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
The historic SBC election of Luter to the presidency demonstrates the strides the SBC has made toward racial reconciliation since its beginning.
Baptists in the South formed the SBC in 1845 so they could have a missions agency that would not exclude slave-holders from the mission field, like the Baptists in the northern states were beginning to do, said Dr. James Patterson, a church historian who serves as university professor and associate dean of the School of Theology and Missions.
Patterson has written many works related to evangelical and Baptist history.
Patterson said the first real public acknowledgement that Southern Baptists “were really wrong” for opposing black men’s and women’s rights came in 1995, 150 years after the convention was founded.
The fact that Luter was elected SBC president June 19, 2012, without opposition suggests Southern Baptists are making progress, Patterson said. However, they must guard against it only being a symbolic move and nothing more, he said.
“Union has been very sensitive to this issue and, in fact, Dr. Dockery was given an award locally in the area of racial reconciliation,” Patterson said. “It’s been one of his themes.”
Patterson alluded to the William D. Smart Jr. Race Relations Award that Dockery received May 27, 2012, from the Jackson-Madison County branch of the NAACP.
Hopefully students will graduate with a better sense of the issues and an understanding that more still needs to be done and that the kingdom is multi-enthnic (and) multiracial, Patterson said.
“As kingdom people, we need to have that global vision that encompasses it all,” Patterson said. “The peoples of the Lord are not just white suburbanites.
Luter did not discuss the challenges or benefits of racial reconciliation when he spoke at the Union chapel service in the G.M. Savage Memorial Chapel. His message, which attracted an overflow audience, focused not on race but on challenges every Christian faces and the importance of Christians having renewed minds.
In his message, Luter asked, “How can we as sons and daughters of God be victorious against the tempting tactics of the enemy that come against our mind every day of our lives?”
A renewed mind is the answer, Luter said, because it focuses Christians on Christ, makes them think about their life choices and reminds them of the cross.
