National Baptists re-elect Shaw as president

NEW ORLEANS — One of the nation’s largest black religious denominations handed a second five-year presidential term to a Philadelphia pastor who pulled the church out of scandal and disarray left by his predecessor.

Delegates to the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention USA re-elected William Shaw over a challenge by Franklyn Richardson of Mt. Vernon, N.Y.  Shaw pledged to continue to rehabilitate the convention, whose business affairs were left in a “shambles” by his predecessor, Henry J. Lyons of St. Petersburg, Fla. Lyons served nearly five years in prison for grand theft and racketeering.

Shaw, pastor of White Rock Baptist Church, forswore his $100,000 president’s salary to demonstrate his commitment to serving the convention. Shaw, 70, ran on his record, which included paying off a debt of nearly $3 million on the convention’s headquarters in Nashville, instituting new financial controls and retooling the convention’s constitution and bylaws.

Richardson, 55, had run twice before. He promised a broad platform of changes: increasing the size of the convention, moving all the business affairs of the convention from the president’s home church into the national headquarters, building a new hotel and publishing center on the Nashville site and reinvigorating the American Baptist College, the convention’s struggling Bible college.