Minister renounces ordination with Southern Baptists, seeing racism in denomination
Lawrence Ware's tipping point was a recent debate over a resolution to disavow white supremacy.
Lawrence Ware, a pastor and scholar in Oklahoma City, publicly renounced his ordination in the Southern Baptist Convention because of the racism he sees within the country’s largest Protestant denomination.
He announced his decision in a July 17 op-ed piece in the New York Times, giving as his reasoning that he could “no longer be part of an organization that is complicit in the disturbing rise of the so-called alt-right, whose members support the abhorrent policies of Donald Trump, and whose troubling racial history and current actions reveal a deep commitment to white supremacy.”
Ware will continue to be a minister at Prospect Church in Oklahoma City, which is connected to the Progressive National Baptist Convention as well as to the Nashville, Tennessee-based SBC. Ware will continue to associate with the PNBC but will no longer be involved with the church’s Southern Baptist Convention-related work. (In the Southern Baptist Convention, ordination is a local church matter. The denomination doesn’t ordain or license ministers.)
