bloggers elect upstart SoBapt president....bloggers beat leaders

http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/453719.html

Blessed be the bloggers
For they shall influence church policy and politics

Yonat Shimron, Staff Writer

The election of the Rev. Frank Page as president of the Southern Baptist Convention last week may have been historic in one key way: It marked the first time that a major religious group opted for an upstart candidate on the strength of a technological innovation -- the blog.
Blogs, or personal Web logs, have been around for awhile. But the popularity of faith-based blogs is challenging the way religious institutions function and leveling the field between clergy and laity.

Blogs give ordinary people a pulpit and make clergy one of a crowd.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the weeks leading up to the Southern Baptist Convention, held last week at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex. In recent years, the convention of the nation's largest Protestant denomination has offered up unchallenged candidates for the presidency.

....

"It's the ultimate exercise of free speech," said Tony Cartledge, the editor of the Biblical Recorder, the state Baptist newspaper, and a blogger himself. "It's out there for the world to read."

The Rev. Wade Burleson of Enid, Okla., led the blogging charge. He has found in blogs an effective tool for grassroots organizing. Increasingly, he is being joined by others.

"In the past, if you disagreed they squashed you," Burleson said, speaking of the Southern Baptist leadership. "They can't do that anymore."

more....

This article was linked from this comment (which in turn was a link from http://www.somareview.com. Somareview is a journal about religion and culture.)

http://www.getreligion.org/

Saturday, June 24

Actually, the “moderates” over at Associated Baptist Press had this story going into the convention. Click here to see their story on the rising tide of Baptist bloggers. And, of course, I mentioned this angle here at GetReligion in my post on the surprise election of the Rev. Frank Page. I’ve continued to receive emails from old Baptist sources of mine ever since about the blogging hooks in this story.

No doubt about it. There’s a story in there that affects everybody from the Southern Baptists to the Episcopalians. As the old saying goes: Freedom of the press belongs to people who own one.


(The Associated Baptist Press is run by the moderates in the SBC who left when the convention was taken over by the RW.)