There is an effort underway within America’s largest protestant denomination to pull the Southern Baptist Convention back from falling further into the false gospel of social justice, or “wokeness,” as it has been popularly termed. Over the last several years, the SBC has found itself in a contentious fight that in many ways mirrors the broader culture war that has been raging across the country at large.

Leadership at the SBC has been steadily drifting left, as concerns over how the church appears to the “watching world” have been used to justify compromises on principles and standards that were once considered foundational to the faith. Unfortunately, like many within broader American culture, the siren song of social justice has been playing more loudly in their ears than the biblical gospel call. As a result, dangerous and explicitly anti-biblical views such as critical race theory have been allowed to sneak in.

As the reality of a battle for holding to biblical Christianity and the true gospel has become more intense, a group of conservatives within the SBC is stepping up in an effort to direct the church back onto the solid ground of God’s Word. This group of concerned Southern Baptists has nominated Pastor Tom Ascol for president of the SBC and missionary and author Voddie Baucham for president of the SBC’s Pastors’ Conference.

Ascol is the pastor of a “typical SBC church” in Cape Coral, Florida, and also serves as the president of Founders Ministries and the Institute for Public Theology. Ascol contends that much of the problem with SBC leadership in recent years stems from the fact that “churches like ours have just been dismissed time and again by SBC leadership when we raise concerns about things that are happening in some of our institutions.” He says: “We’re told, ‘You know, there’s nothing to see here. You’re meddling in business that doesn’t pertain to you.’”

He points to some examples of this dynamic at play, such as SBC seminary faculty pushing CRT ideology onto students and encouraging them to identify their white privilege, or the SBC adopting a committee’s resolution in 2019 to classify CRT as an “analytical tool” useful for explaining “how race has and continues to function in society.”

Baucham, who is black and has been quite outspoken against social justice and CRT movements calling them false gospels, published a book last year titled Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, which became a bestseller. If he’s elected president of the SBC’s Pastors’ Conference, he’ll have an opportunity to “see a revival in great biblical preaching in the SBC.” He explains, “The Pastors’ Conference has the potential to play a significant part in that, especially if it is part of a larger movement that brings a man like Tom Ascol into the SBC presidency.”

The SBC’s annual meeting is scheduled to take place in Anaheim, California, in June, and a new president will be elected. Current SBC President Ed Litton is taking the unusual step of not running for reelection following controversy over his plagiarism of sermons.

Hopefully, the SBC will experience a solidification of biblical fidelity with the leadership’s primary concern. As Ascol puts it, the priority is not in whether the “world is watching” but rather “that God is watching, that He alone defines our terms and sets our agenda, and God is not woke.”