Ed Young, 87, resigns from Second Baptist Houston and is replaced by his son – Baptist News Global

When Ed Young Became a Pastor from the Second Baptist Church of Houston, Jimmy Carter was president of the United States.

Forty-six years later, at age 87, the famous pastor retired and named his 60-year-old son to succeed him.

Pastors of Southern Baptist churches naming their successors are extremely rare. And sons who follow their fathers into the same chair are increasingly rare. But Second Baptist Houston is not a typical Southern Baptist church.

The Young family in the 1970s. (Facebook)

In 1976, Ed Young was 42 years old and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Columbia, SC. ​​He was educated at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, considered one of the most progressive of the six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was not considered a fundamentalist when called to serve the Second Baptist Church. Those were different times in the country and in the SBC.

After Young, his wife and three boys settled in Texas, they made history in the state’s two largest cities and helped change the direction of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Second Baptist was already a large church by most standards, with about 500 people in attendance on Sundays. Over the next five decades, it grew into a multi-campus congregation with an attendance of 18,000. Sensitization the magazine ranked Second Baptist as the 17th largest church in the country last year. Four years ago, he ranked sixth nationally.

Meanwhile, Young’s eldest son, also named Ed Young, started a new church in the northern suburbs of Dallas in 1989 and immediately gained attention through his creative action and preaching, making Fellowship Church today the 10th largest church in the country with attendance weekly of 24,000 people.

Elder Ed Young remained at the helm of the Houston church twenty years past the traditional retirement age, still traveling by helicopter between campuses to give Sunday sermons. Always a staunch conservative, his sermons in recent years have made headlines for their political content – ​​for example claiming that immigrants are “undesirables” and “trash”.

Now a third young person will become pastor of one of the largest churches in America.

Ben Young recently preached at Second Baptist Houston. (Screenshot)

Ben Young, the middle child, is less known outside of Houston. He is the author or co-author of six books, serves as chaplain to the Houston Astros, previously hosted a radio show and is listed as an associate pastor at Second Baptist.

His official biography states that he was “educated” at Baylor University, Southwestern Theological Seminary, and Bethel Theological Seminary in San Diego, but does not list degrees earned. He is listed as a faculty member and director of Houston Theological Seminary’s Second Baptist Campus – a satellite of Houston Christian University’s seminary. The most recent course listing shows Young teaching a course on “The Rise of Neo-Marxism.”

The elder Ed Young and his first wife, who died in 2017, raised three boys. The third and youngest is Cliff, who sings with the contemporary Christian music group Caedmon’s Call.

Joel Osteen

In American religious life, there are few examples of children following famous fathers as pastors of large churches. Some of them are not success stories – Robert Schuller’s son Robert following him to the Crystal Cathedral, for example. But one of the notable success stories is also in Houston: Joel Osteen took the pulpit at Lakewood Church after his father, John Osteen, died of a heart attack in 1999. Lakewood is now the third largest church in America, with approximately 45,000 worshippers. .

Another notable example In Southern Baptist life is the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, where Homer Lindsay Jr. followed his father, Homer Lindsay Sr. in 1975, launching one of the nation’s first megachurches. Lindsay Jr. eventually brought in a co-pastor, Jerry Vines.

Lindsay, Vines, and Ed Young were among the first to issue a call for more conservatism within the Southern Baptist Convention, known as a “conservative resurgence.” Young and Vines were elected president of the SBC during these years of political maneuvering.

Ed Young and Second Baptist Houston also played another notable role in the conservative movement within the SBC. It was there that Paul Pressler and John Baugh met and took sides in the coming battle. Pressler, an appeals court judge, was a co-architect of the “conservative resurgence,” while Baugh, a successful businessman, became a supporter and funder of the “moderate” opposition to what Pressler was doing.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Paul Pressler and John Baugh were together Sunday school directors at Second Baptist. John Baugh and his wife, Eula Mae, were among the very first Southern Baptist lay leaders to sound the alarm about what was to come. Eula Mae Baugh had been part of the pastor search committee that called Ed Young to Houston.

The lieutenant governor of Texas. Dan Patrick preaches at Second Baptist Houston on May 12. (Screenshot)

THE Houston Chronicle and other local media outlets reported on Ed Young’s retirement announcement, which came at the end of last Sunday’s service on the church’s main campus, Woodway.

“We are not resigning, we are stepping up to use our core spiritual gifts,” Young said through tears, according to the Chronicle. “I am stepping up my efforts to maximize what God has given me and what God has given my amazing wife, Lisa.”

One of the most remarkable of the Second Baptist Today’s members are Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a former radio talk show host from Houston.

THE the Chronicle reported: “Young also hosted a private luncheon in April hosted by the American Renewal Project, a group aimed at recruiting and training clergy and congregants to win seats on school boards, city councils, county commissions and in the Texas State Legislature. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a longtime member of Second Baptist, attended the rally, where he told far-right Christians that “we will lose this nation” if conservatives do not win the presidential election in november.

Patrick also reportedly told the crowd that political conservatives were fighting “a battle of darkness and light,” adding, “There are people who pray to God, believe in God, raise their families in the work of God and there There are people here who don’t do it. believing in God and wanting to expel God. They hate God. This is the battle we find ourselves in.

Young invited Patrick to give a similar message on Mother’s Day, May 12, at Second Baptist. Two Sundays later, on May 26, Young announced his retirement.

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