The Southern Baptists have been meeting this week, and elected a new president – the bloggers’ candidate, according to this TIME article:
Pounding this and other issues home was a new power bloc in the Convention: bloggers. Southern Baptist-focused blogs began popping up about a year ago, when a group of younger (under 40) Baptists frustrated at the inaccessibility of the levers of power began meeting to discuss their concerns. Suddenly about a dozen blogs bloomed, perhaps the most influential being sbcoutpost.com, run by Rev. Marty Duren, a younger Georgia pastor. Last year they publicized a gathering that eventually put together a manifesto called the Memphis Declaration, which consisted of a list of Public Repentences, many of them for the SBC’s arrogance within and outside its organization, and even included a repentance for "having condemned those without Christ before we have loved them."
This week’s winner, Page, could hardly be called a young Turk, at age 53. Yet the Declaration signers clearly saw him as the most attractive candidate, and the blogs posted positively. Says Bob Allen, a veteran Baptist journalist and now the managing editor of Ethicsdaily.com, part of a more moderate Baptist group that pays close attention to the SBC, scene, "Without the bloggers Page wouldn’t have been elected. He was a relative unknown, and the bloggers really have created the whole conversation. It’s very much a generation shift."
God forbid we actually detail the issues of concern in the article, though. An blog interview with Page from mid-May
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