Bart Barber has been reelected as president of the Southern Baptist Convention after messengers at the SBC Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, voted in favor of him over challenger Pastor Mike Stone of the Conservative Baptist Network.
This is Barber’s second term.
According to The Christian Post, Barber received 7,531 votes or 68.38 percent of the ballots, while Stone received 3,458 votes or 31.4 percent of the ballots cast. Twenty-five votes were disallowed, representing 0.23 percent of the votes cast.
After Barber was reelected, Pastor Jarrett Stephens of Champion Forest Baptist Church of Houston, Texas, who nominated Barber, asserted that the denomination was “headed in the right direction.”
“Dr. Barber has represented us well,” Stephens said. “As president, he has traveled tirelessly across the country to represent you by encouraging churches and celebrating missionaries, supporting church planters, and standing with those on the front lines of disaster relief.”
Meanwhile, Pastor Willy Rice of Calvary Church in Clearwater, Florida, who nominated Stone, said that Stone was “a man of conviction” amid “an hour marked by apostasy and idolatry.”
“Mike knows the times, and he knows what to do,” Rice said. “You can attack him, you can revile him, you can belittle him on Twitter with all the decorum of a middle school food fight, but this man will not bend, and this man will not fold.
“He has a spine of conviction as strong as his name. You don’t have to wonder if he will stand, and you don’t have to guess where he will stand,” he continued.
As Christian Headlines previously reported, Stone, a former Executive Committee member, announced in April that he was running for SBC president for a second time. He previously ran and lost to then-president Ed Litton in 2021.
In 2022, Barber defeated Litton after he was elected to lead the SBC during the Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California, following a second ballot runoff with 3,401 messenger votes, or 60.87 percent of the vote.
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Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Andranik Hakobyan
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for Christian Headlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.
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