James A. Smith Sr./Florida Baptist Witness

TAYLORS, S.C. (BP)--The Southern Baptist Convention presidential election generated considerable discussion about the relative importance of the Cooperative Program -— Southern Baptists’ unified missions funding and delivery system -— and probably resulted in Frank Page’s surprise victory this year.

TAYLORS, S.C. (BP)-—As Frank Page recounts it, he didn’t want to be president of the Southern Baptist Convention. And he never believed he would win even after he felt compelled by God to be a candidate. But winning an election wasn’t really the point of his reluctant candidacy anyway.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (BP)--A nearly year-long effort to allow Florida citizens to vote on a state constitutional amendment protecting traditional marriage failed to gain the necessary 611,000 valid petitions, leaders of the Florida Coalition to Protect Marriage announced Feb. 1.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)--Southern Baptist evangelism statistics are grim, but they could be far worse.
      That’s the finding of a major new study by a leading church growth expert who argues empirical evidence demonstrates the Southern Baptist Convention is in an “evangelistic crisis” despite the conservative resurgence, whose leaders cited greater soul-winning results as a key priority in their desired reform of the nation's largest non-Catholic denomination.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)--A leading church growth scholar will soon publish the results of a major new study which asserts the Southern Baptist Convention is evangelistically “on the path of slow but discernable deterioration,” but he argues the state of affairs would be far worse without the denomination’s conservative resurgence and recommends a “modest proposal” for the SBC to “recapture an evangelistic zeal that has been waning for over fifty years.”