A contested race for president and an upset victory by a relative outsider. What will it signify?

The Southern Baptist Convention elected Frank Page its new president Tuesday, choosing a pastor who had said that it would take a "miracle" for him to win and heralding a new direction for the denomination.

Page's surprising win over two higher-profile candidates follows years of tightly scripted politics and intolerance for internal dissent. He called his victory evidence that Southern Baptists believe "we could do together a lot more and a lot better than what we can do separately."

"I'm a little taken aback by this," Page said. "Because I have not been known across the nation, ... I truly believe (the election) is God's people saying we want to see broadened involvement."

Winning just over 50 percent of the vote on the first ballot, Page bested Ronnie Floyd, a megachurch pastor from Springdale, Ark., and Jerry Sutton, pastor at Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn., and currently the SBC's first vice president.

The 53-year-old Page is pastor at First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., a small, upstate community north of Greenville. During his campaign, he emphasized the importance of giving to the Southern Baptists' cooperative program, in which autonomous congregations pool money to fund overseas and domestic missions. That seemed to strike a chord with delegates to the SBC's annual meeting.

In the years since moderates stopped participating in SBC politics, candidates for the SBC presidency have typically run unopposed or faced only token opposition. But this year, concerns about stagnating memberships, declining baptism rates and the future of the cooperative program led to the first contested presidential race in recent memory.

Johnny Hunt, a pastor from Woodstock, Ga., was the leadership's choice for president but unexpectedly dropped out of the race in late April. He was replaced by Floyd, head of the First Baptist Church in Springdale, Ark., and the nearby Church at Pinnacle Hills.

Then Page entered the race, leading a group that criticized the low levels of cooperative program giving at Floyd's churches. Page's church, by contrast, gives 12 percent of its undesignated offerings to the program.

Many smaller Southern Baptist congregations see the cooperative program as a crucial collective effort for the denomination and the best way for them to carry out influential missionary and evangelistic work.

Rallying around Page were a group of younger pastors and others who have felt marginalized by an older generation that led the conservative takeover of the SBC in the 1970s and 1980s. Some have dissented on theological issues like whether strict Calvinists and charismatic Christians should be welcome in the denomination, while at least one has been reprimanded for airing concerns on his Internet blog.

The fundamentalist takeover that happened three decades ago revitalized the SBC, but created serious rifts within the denomination. Will this upset victory be the beginning of a new direction for the largest Protestant group in the United States, or will it merely be a brief interlude between traditionalist leaders?

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