I'm Warren Smith and today you'll be listening in on my conversation with the president of

the Southern Baptist Convention, Bart Barber.

There's an emptiness found in running away from the spiritual side of yourself that after

people dabble with that for a while, the nuns want to be something, finding that nothing

is not all that fulfilling.

And so I'm a long-term optimist for the health churches in the United States of America

and for the Southern Baptist Convention as well.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the country with

about 14 million members.

It is also the largest evangelical denomination in the nation.

So as the SPC goes, so go many of the 90 million Americans who identify as evangelicals.

These big numbers are reasons enough for me to want to interview Bart Barber, the new

president of the SPC, but it's also true that the SPC is at something of a crossroads.

It has been plagued with a sex abuse scandal that touched some of the most prominent leaders

in the denomination, all the while dividing those leaders who remained and lay people

alike who have been grappling with how to respond to the scandal.

Recent years have seen the resignation of arguably the denomination's most high-profile

leader, Russell Moore, as president of the SPC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

There's also been a slow erosion of membership in the SPC.

It has almost 2 million fewer members than it did 10 years ago.

And these are yet more reasons that I wanted to talk with my guest today, Bart Barber.

Barber sometimes describes himself as a country preacher.

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