October 23, 2024
ANAHEIM, Calif. – Lee Brand Jr., the Southern Baptist Convention’s current first vice president, will officially nominate Georgia’s Javier Chavez for the position of recording secretary at an annual meeting that begins Tuesday.
The announcement was made on Monday.
Brand also serves as a vice president and dean at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary.
In making the announcement, Chavez said he and Brand share a common friendship and that both have stood strong to defend the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture.
Chavez, a church planter and senior pastor of Iglesia Bautista Amistad Cristiana International in Gainesville, Ga., has served in various denominational roles over the years, including a a member of the 2018 SBC Committee on Committees, as 2019-2020 second vice president of the Georgia Baptist Convention and the state convention’s executive committee.
Chavez was nominated for SBC second vice president at the 2021 annual meeting in Nashville; and was narrowly defeated in a runoff vote.
Chavez, a former missionary kid, immigrated to the United States as a transfer college student and went on to pursue master and doctoral studies at Wheaton College and Biola University. He met his wife in Chicago, and as newlyweds embarked on a journey to South America to serve as missionaries for thirteen years. All four children were born while they were serving the Lord in Peru.
Chavez explained, “I was called, not necessarily to be a pastor, but I was called to serve people. I became a pastor when I lived in the Peruvian jungle. That is where I learned to be a pastor. That is where I learned to love people.”
Amistad Christiana is a church with a multifaceted ministry and works closely with Chattahoochee Baptist Association, the Intercultural Church Planting of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board and is a cooperating church with #ReachingNextGen, an emphasis through the GBMB to share the Gospel with children and teenagers and disciple them in the faith. In addition to his role as pastor, Chavez finds time to be a visiting professor in the School of Theology and Missions at Truett McConnell University.
Chavez has expressed a willingness to serve not only because he wants to represent mainstream Southern Baptists but also the growing population of Hispanics in America.
“Hispanics now number more than 65 million people or almost 20 percent of the population in the United States, but we only have 3,600 Hispanic churches in our convention,” he said. “We must do a better job of reaching out to this segment of our population. I commend the SBC for its concern in planting new churches and sending more Hispanics into the mission field, but I also believe that the Hispanic church in America needs to move from the receiving end to the contributing end in terms of financial support and become a part of the conversation where decisions are made.
Chavez’s church urged him to seek the office of recording secretary “so that I might represent the sentiment of the growing Spanish-speaking demographic of our convention.”
“After prayer and discussing the matter with my family, we agreed that it would be good for me and my church to not only participate in the life of our Southern Baptist Convention, but to make myself available for an office that is less political and more about service,” he said.
“The idea of serving has represented my heart and the passion of my ministry for 21 years. The mere idea of being able to communicate what takes place at our annual meetings in the Spanish language, which is the language spoken in almost 4,000 churches across the SBC presents to us an opportunity to become a convention of congregations that resembles more of what heaven looks like.”
