According to NPR, Russell Moore (41) became “the public face of Evangelical Christians” recently when he was appointed to be the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Southern Baptists, NPR explains,

…represent nearly 40,000 churches and missions, claiming nearly 16 million members in the country. As the leader of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, where he succeeds the very influential and prominent Richard Land, Mr. Moore will be at the forefront of some of the most contentious issues of our time.

So what is Mr. Moore’s chief objective?

“My top priority is to prepare Evangelical Christian churches to live as faithful witnesses in a post-Bible Belt America. I think that we’re living in a time when the traditional structures of the Bible belt — the day in which Evangelical Christians can assume that we are a moral majority in this country, those days are over. And so we have to learn how to be a prophetic minority in this country, and how to be faithful in a culture without simply being absorbed into that culture.”

There’s a much-appreciated humility and sense of realism to these words. Time will tell whether Moore means them, and acts accordingly.