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Rolland Slade, senior pastor of Meridian Baptist Church in El Cajon, California, has been elected as the first African American chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Execu­tive Committee, the group that runs the business of the nation’s largest Protes­tant denomination outside its annual meetings.

He was elected unanimously.

Slade was previously vice chairman of the Executive Committee and chair of its Cooperative Program Committee, which handles the denomination’s central funding mechanism.

Since the beginning of 2019, Southern Baptist Convention president J. D. Greear has been among the highest-profile advocates for preventing sexual abuse and protecting victims of abuse in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Now advocates for abuse survivors are criticizing Greear af­ter his church de­cided to hire a teaching pastor who has been accused of mishandling an abuse claim in the past.