Retire Gavel Named for Slaveholder, Southern Baptist President J.D. Greear Says

(RNS) — For most of their history, Southern Baptists have opened their meetings with a gavel named for a slaveholder. 

The president of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination now says that gavel should be retired. 

“Southern Baptists, I think it is time to retire the Broadus gavel,” said J.D. Greear in a Wednesday (June 10) statement. “While we do not want to, nor could we, erase our history, it is time for this gavel to go back into the display case at the Executive Committee offices.”

The gavel, first used by SBC officials in 1872, was named for John A. Broadus, a Confederacy supporter and a founding faculty member of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the SBC’s flagship seminary.

The SBC president said he had felt uneasy using the gavel at the 2019 meeting in Birmingham, Alabama. He was aware of Broadus’ racial views but also said he “did seem to change some of his positions later in life.”

Greear said the gavel’s presence was sending a mixed message from a denomination that was founded in 1845 in defense of missionaries who owned slaves.

“Here we were, a convention of nearly 48,000 independent, autonomous churches, meeting in a city that has been filled with (a) horrific history of civil rights abuses making historic moves in the areas of diversity, abuse and mission, using a gavel named after a Southern Baptist who owned slaves and was…