Fred Luter

Dr Fred Luter Jr. from New Orleans, is the senior pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, based in New Orleans. He was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2012 to 2014. Luter had begun his ministry in 1977 in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward after he suffered a motorcycle accident. He has credited his motorcycling misadventure as his “road to Damascus moment”—his analogy to the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. He began as a street preacher at the corner of Caffin and Galvez. His first sermon in a church building was in 1983 at New Orleans’ Law Street Missionary Baptist Church. He was a staff minister at the city’s Greater Liberty Baptist Church when he learned of the opening at Franklin Avenue Baptist Church and is still currently there.