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Depends on who you ask.

I've read blogs from angry Patterson supporters who are blatantly ignoring facts, and from others who are almost giddy and tempted to sing "Ding, Dong the Witch....." well you get the attitude.

The messengers, who really represented any hope for Patterson supporters to override the trustees and for him to have his way once again, smacked down the motion brought to dismiss the 12 members of Southwestern's trustee executive committee. I didn't see an exact count, but one blogger said it was basically a 95 to 5 margin. That leaves the trustee board in full control, and Patterson with no recourse except, perhaps, to go to the secular courts.

It's probably time to remove the windows.

The messengers also voted to give a second term to an ERLC trustee who was not renominated by the committee on boards. There was an agenda, or at least a lot of talk, about angry right wing Trump supporting Southern Baptists using their authority as messengers to remove enough ERLC trustees to get at Russell Moore, and this trustee from the Kansas-Nebraska convention, who was a supporter of Moore, was left off the nomination list, making it look deliberate. However, the messengers voted him back on. And so, the trustee system won two victories, and Moore remains firmly in the ERLC saddle.

And a "young Calvinist" has been elected president, someone who would have been considered anathema by the Pattersonians. His margin was pretty substantial too.

https://cacoethisscribendiblog.wordpres ... ut-sbc-18/

The true test of a "new" SBC is when they acknowledge publicly the Atlantic piece about the right wing political gene in the Pressler/Patterson takeover, my blog and Ellen Rosenberg's letter to me in the History forum of this site. This young Calvinist would never have this position were he not a bastard child of the Birch Society, Pressler, Helms, Patterson takeover. As molly worthen allows there was a false narrative at work over the nature of Scripture, but as Harold Bloom concluded in 93 and my recent definitive blog spotlights: "The tragedy of the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC is the result of political machinations masquerading as religious conviction!!!"

edges in the right direction but doesn't know the story like myself, Rosenberg and Garry Wills two reviews in the NR Rev of Books nor does he show he learned anything from Wuthnow's Rough Country

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ar/563000/

The SBC has been far more diverse than our close cousins for some years, particularly in regard to churches. A significant percentage of new church plants are ethnic and minority and have been for quite some time. To a notable degree, the future of the SBC rests with expansion ethnically rather than geographically. No one is predicting any big surge in white folks having big families again.

Merritt is pretty much on target but I'd caution against the silly notion of the SBC becoming CBF-lite. There's quite a bit of work that can be done short of women as senior pastors and gay affirming. Nonetheless, the old bulls are passing off the scene and there's a different crowd to take their place.

Don't take it personally but the non-SBCers here have gradually lost their 'feel' for SBC stuff and this group includes Stephen. Sandy, though a few years removed himself, still retains a pretty good sense of things.

Check my new post in the History forum