2021-Present
Adoniram Judson Gavel
of Southern Baptist Convention
Nashville, Tennessee TN
This press release from Religion News Service on June 15, 2021, best tells this story though I have added an interesting caveat as a conclusion.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS). As outgoing Southern Baptist Convention President J. D. Greear prepared to open his final annual meeting in that role, he determined to follow through on his plans to change the way he officially got it started.
Traditionally, Southern Baptists open the two-day meeting…with the banging of a gavel. In most years, the meetings have featured the Broadus gavel, named for John A. Broadus, a founding faculty member of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary who was also an enslaver and a believer in white superiority.
This year, Greear told Religion News Service prior to the meeting that would use a different gavel, name for a pioneering missionary.
“I’ll be using the Judson Gavel,“ he told RNS.
“Great Commission Baptists” is a moniker adopted by some Southern Baptists that simultaneously deemphasizes their regional affiliation and focuses on the command of Jesus to his followers to spread his message worldwide.
In a 2020 statement, Greear had said that he thought “it is time to retire the Broadus gavel.” He added that “it is time for this gavel to go back into the display case at the Executive Committee offices.”
Broadus was the author books on homiletics, or the art of preaching, including “On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons.”
But he also was a promoter of the Confederacy in a denomination that has its origins in a defense of slavery.
“At the 1863 meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Augusta, Georgia, Broadus drafted resolutions pledging Southern Baptist support of the Confederacy,” reads the SBC flagship seminary’s 2019 report on slavery and racism in its history.
Nine years later, Broadus presented the gavel to the SBC “for the use of the President, which he had brought from Jerusalem for that purpose,” according to a historical note about the gavel included in the denomination’s 1939 Annual….[1]
It is appropriate to recall that Adoniram Judson left his bed in Moulmein on Wednesday, April 3, 1850, to board the Aristide Marie hoping that sea air would restore is declining health. This last desperate effort did not work and on April 12, 1850, Judson died and was buried in the Andaman Sea. Dr. Greear writes, “The Judson gavel I used was made from the bed post of Judson’s final bed in Burma!”[2] Now every time that Great Commission Baptists gather, the sound of Adoniram Judson’s deathbed-made-gavel calls them back to the ministry of missions.
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[1] Adelle M. Banks, RNS, “Gavel Named for Enslaver Replaced with One Recalling Missionary at SBC Meeting,” Word and Way, June 15, 2021, p. 3.
[2] J.D. Greear email to Jerry Cain, November 30, 2024.