Have you seen TIME Magazine’s analysis of Frank Page’s election to the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention? Here’s the headline and the lead of the story written by David VanBiema:
The Bloggers’ Favorite Southern Baptist: The upset victory of a non-anointed candidate to lead America’s largest Protestant denomination signals the growing power of online activists, even in old-line churches . . . For those who follow the internal politics of the Southern Baptist Convention . . . the most interesting news out of their annual meeting, held this week in Greensboro, N.C., is that bloggers elected a president (source).
I don’t think that this analysis of the election is on target. The Baptist Press reports that fewer than 200 people showed up to the “Younger Leaders Summit†at the Southern Baptist Convention. These younger leaders are the ones who are most associated with all the sound and fury in the SBC blogosphere, and “fewer than two hundred†doesn’t not amount to much in an election in which 8,961 votes were cast. Put simply, there likely were not enough bloggers at the convention to have a significant impact on the vote.
So technically speaking, the bloggers didn’t “elect†a president, as the Time article suggests. What their influence was on messengers who did cast votes remains to be seen.
(HT: Missional Baptist Blog)
