NASHVILLE (BP) – South Carolina pastor Tom Tucker’s reelection, June 14, as vice chairman of the SBC Executive Committee became moot, June 16, when messengers to the 2021 SBC Annual Meeting rejected a motion to nominate him to a second term on the Executive Committee.
The Executive Committee elected Tucker to a second term as vice chair during its meeting Monday with the knowledge that while eligible to serve, his term was expiring and he was not among nominees to the Executive Committee for the coming year, and that he could only fulfill the post if messengers amended the 2021 Committee on Nominations report to include Tucker among nominees.
Messenger Lewis Richerson, pastor of Woodlawn Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, La., offered a motion Wednesday to nominate Tucker, a vocational evangelist from South Carolina, in place of nominee David Sons, lead pastor of Lake Murray Baptist Church in Lexington, S.C. Richerson said it was customary for EC members to be nominated to two consecutive terms.
But Andrew Hopper, chairman of the Committee on Nominations and pastor of Mercy Hill Church in Greensboro, N.C., said in response that the decision to exclude Tucker from the nominees was a unanimous decision made more than a year ago.
His term was set to expire in 2020, but was extended a year by the cancellation of the 2020 SBC Annual Meeting because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tucker was elected EC vice chairman in June 2020.
Hopper noted that while Tucker had only served one full term – plus the extra year after the cancellation of the 2020 Annual Meeting – his tenure on the EC had begun when he filled a vacancy for an EC slot in a previous term that had two years remaining.
The EC is expected to hold an election for vice chair to fill the vacancy during its next called meeting, which is scheduled for September.