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Ronnie Floyd to be nominated for SBC president


WOODSTOCK, Ga. (BP)–Johnny Hunt, pastor of First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ga., announced May 7 that he will nominate Ronnie Floyd, pastor of First Baptist Church in Springdale, Ark., for president of the Southern Baptist convention during the annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C., June 13-14.

“Dr. Floyd is matched for our times because of his leadership through the years in our denomination,” Hunt said in a statement to Baptist Press. “He has served on the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention for 10 years, serving for two of those years as its chairman. While in this role, he served also as a member of the selected seven-member committee that restructured the Southern Baptist Convention.

“He also served on the search committee that called the president and chief executive officer of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee. He served as president of the 1997 Pastors’ Conference of the Southern Baptist Convention. Presently, he serves as a trustee of GuideStone Financial Services of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

Floyd has been pastor of the Arkansas congregation for almost 20 years. Under his leadership, the church grew from 3,700 members to more than 16,000 members and baptized more than 11,700 people.

Additionally, the church has planted 17 churches in the U.S. and overseas in the past seven years.

Floyd grew up in Texas and earned a master’s degree and a doctorate degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He and his wife, Jeana, have been married 29 years and have two married sons and one grandchild.

Information for the most recent year from Southern Baptists’ Annual Church Profile survey, 2005, for the FBC Springdale lists 819 baptisms. The church gave $32,000 through the Cooperative Program and $189,000 to SBC causes distributed through the SBC allocation budget. According to ACP, the church had total undesignated receipts of $11,952,137 and total mission expenditures of $1,637,503, including $54,261 for the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions and $9,516 for the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions.

FBC Springdale conducts an average of 12 international mission trips annually, and has started a total of 25 churches across America and the world since 1992. Floyd speaks daily on “Winners,” a TV ministry broadcast around America and the world by the Daystar Television Network. He has written 17 books and another, “The Top 10 Lessons Every Minister Needs To Know,” will be released later this year.

Under Floyd FBC Springdale added a second campus, the Church at Pinnacle Hills.

Previously, it had been thought that Hunt might be nominated for the office, but he chose not to allow that.

“I prayed about it,” Hunt told BP, who has been pastor of the 16,000 member church in metro Atlanta since 1986. “I e-mailed my prayer list of about 100 families who also prayed about it. I fasted and asked God to guide me. I just don’t feel it’s the time. Is it a forever no? I don’t know. But right now (this church) is in its greatest days in building for the kingdom.”
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Links
Full text of Hunt’s statement: http://fbcs.net/html/about_hunt_press.htm.
Biographical and church information: http://fbcs.net/html/about_key_info.htm.
— With reporting by Charlie Warren of the Arkansas Baptist.

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  • Sherri Brown