By Bob Allen, Associated Baptist Press. BJC Staff Reports also contributed to this article.
President Obama announced plans May 11 to reappoint African-American Baptist leader William J. Shaw to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Shaw, immediate past president of the National Baptist Convention U.S.A. Inc., was appointed in June 2010 to the nine-member bipartisan panel charged with monitoring violations of religious freedom worldwide and making foreign policy recommendations based on their findings.
Pastor of White Rock Baptist Church in Philadelphia since 1956, Shaw served as president of the National Baptist Convention U.S.A. Inc., from 1999 to 2009. He has been a leader in the New Baptist Covenant, a movement to unite North American Baptists across racial and geographical lines that resulted in a mass meeting in Atlanta in 2008 and a series of regional gatherings linked by satellite television last fall. Shaw also served on the Board of Directors of the Baptist Joint Committee.
With the recent departure of five commissioners, including Southern Baptist Convention official Richard Land due to term limits, Shaw will be the panel’s lone Baptist. Along with Muslim law professor Azizah al Hibri and former GOP congressional counsel Ted van der Meid, he is one of three sitting members with watchdog experience. Current chairman Leonard Leo, executive vice-president of the Federalist Society and a commission member since 2007, steps down at the end of his second term.
Created in 1998, the panel nearly lost funding last year but survived with a three-year extension after a Senate amendment imposed new term limits for commissioners, who are appointed by leadership of both parties in the House and Senate and the White House.
From the June 2012 Report from the Capital. Click here for the next article.
