(RNS) — When North Carolina pastor Clint Pressley was elected as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, he hoped to calm some of the tensions that have roiled the nation’s largest Protestant denomination in recent years — arguments over critical race theory, politics, abuse, the role of women in ministry and claims the denomination had become too liberal or woke.
For the most part, he said, that has happened.
“I do feel like right now it’s less contentious than it has been the last several years,” Pressley told Religion News Service in an interview earlier this spring. “One of the goals was to bring some of that temperature down, and I feel like we’re seeing some of that.”
Still, he admitted, when Southern Baptists hold their annual meeting, something unpredictable is bound to happen.
This year, more than 10,000 local church representatives, known as messengers, will gather at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center in downtown Dallas on June 10 and 11 for the denomination’s annual meeting. They’ll vote on a budget, elect a president, pass resolutions and debate motions — in a meeting run by “Robert’s Rules of Order,” when any messenger can stand up at a microphone and say their piece.
This year’s agenda will likely include a vote on what to do with women staff pastors in churches and whether to shut down the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission — the SBC’s public policy arm, which is under fire for not getting in line with President Trump’s MAGA agenda.
FILE – Messengers vote at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis, Wednesday, June 12, 2024. (RNS Photo/AJ Mast)
The budget, usually a mundane debate, may also cause some fireworks this year. The SBC’s Executive Committee is asking for an extra $3 million this year to pay legal bills. Those funds would come off the top of what’s known as the $190 million Cooperative Program budget — a pool of funds from churches used to fund missions and national ministries.
Over the past four years, the Executive Committee has paid more than $14 million in legal fees stemming from a sexual abuse investigation report — including more than $3 million to fight lawsuits from a pair of former SBC leaders accused of abuse. Those legal fees have drained the Executive Committee’s reserves.
Pressley says the messengers have the final say, but he supports the $3 million request.
“I do think that the SBC and the EC will have an obligation to pay its bills,” Pressley said.
During the meeting, messengers will also hear an update on reforms meant to address sexual abuse, including more training for churches and an updated website with more resources for congregations.
FILE – SBC president pastor Clint Pressley at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis, Wednesday, June 12, 2024. (RNS Photo/AJ Mast)
The centerpiece of the denomination’s abuse reforms — a database to track abusive pastors — appears dead in the water. The proposed database, overwhelmingly approve by messengers, has been stalled for years because of a lack of legal challenges and denominational red tape.
“Our focus is training church leaders to access state and national databases already available to them,” Jeffrey Iorg, president of the Executive Committee, told RNS in an email. A spokesman said Iorg will address the abuser database during his report to the Annual Meeting.
The role of women leaders in the church — a subject of debate since 2019, when former SBC Bible teacher Beth Moore tweeted about preaching on Mother’s Day — will be back up for debate in June.
A group of pastors plans to resurrect the so-called Law Amendment, a proposal to ban churches where women have the title of pastor. That amendment, which would change the SBC’s constitution, failed last year on a second vote. It gained new life, however, after a denominational committee failed to expel a South Carolina megachurch that had a woman teaching pastor on staff.
Since 2000, the SBC’s statement of faith has restricted the role of pastor to men. But that restriction has rarely been enforced in the past by the annual meeting. Some Southern Baptists have argued the restriction only applies to a senior pastor, while others say it means no woman can have the title of pastor — even if they have the title of children’s pastor or music pastor.
Beth Allison Barr. (Photo by Dust in the Wind Photography)
“We want to be a convention in friendly cooperation with churches that closely identify with our confession of faith, including our clearly stated beliefs about biblical qualifications for pastoral office,” a group of pastors who hope to resurrect the Law Amendment wrote in an open letter to the denomination.
Baylor historian Beth Allison Barr, author of “Becoming the Pastor’s Wife,” said the SBC seems determined to keep women from any public leadership roles in the church.
“The SBC is not listening to women,” she said. “It’s walked away from the sex abuse reforms. It has continued doggedly to push this path of pushing women completely out of all pastoral roles.”
Barr said that every year, the SBC raises hundreds of millions of dollars for missions through offerings named after two legendary women leaders — Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon. Yet today’s SBC continues to refuse to let women lead churches, she said.
“I don’t know why they are treating women this way, when the only reason the SBC is so successful is because of women,” she said.
The debates over politics, abuse reform and women in ministry come as the SBC faces continued decline. The denomination lost nearly a quarter-million members last year — the 18th year in a row that membership has gone down. Currently the SBC claims 12.7 million members, the lowest total in 50 years, down from 16.3 million in 2006.
George Yancey. (Photo © Baylor University)
Giving to the SBC’s Cooperative Program, which turns 100 this year, was also below budget by about $3.5 million as of May, according to the Baptist Press, an official SBC publication. Designated giving is down more than 10%.
Baylor University sociologist George Yancey said the SBC is likely to continue to decline in the future, in part because the denomination is becoming more fundamentalist and less evangelical.
“And fundamentalist is that you circle the wagons, and you make entrance very hard,” he said. “There’s sort of a purifying type of mentality.”
Evangelicals, he said, are open to partnering with other groups on issues they care about, while fundamentalists are suspicious of outsiders and see partnering with them as problematic, a dynamic Yancey sees playing out in the SBC. Southern Baptists also face competition from nondenominational churches, where people can find similar values without denominational infighting. There’s also the reality that SBC churches are filled with older worshippers.
Two-thirds of adult Southern Baptists are 50 or older, according to data from the Pew Religious Landscape Study. Only 10% are between the ages of 18 and 29.
The most heated debate during the upcoming convention may involve the ERLC, the denomination’s public policy arm, which has long been criticized for not getting in line with President Trump’s agenda. Much of the controversy over the agency, which speaks to social issues like abortion, immigration and gender, dates back to former leader Russell Moore, who has long been critical of Trump. Even though Moore resigned in 2021, the group’s critics remain unsatisfied.
Since 2016, three votes to defund or disband the ERLC pushed by critics have failed. But they have continued to gain support — more than a quarter of messengers in 2024 appeared to support shuttering the agency. The SBC’s rules require two votes in successive annual meetings to shut it down. The ERLC has also had internal conflict — last summer, the group’s former board chair announced that Brent Leatherwood, Moore’s successor, had been fired, only to have the entire board say the chair announcement was invalid.
A group called the Center for Baptist Leadership — headed by former Trump administration official William Wolfe and funded by a Presbyterian publication, has led the charge against the ERLC — with an aggressive strategy of social media posts and podcasts. The group claims the ERLC is out of touch with average Southern Baptists, has few ties to the Trump administration and has been too willing to work with secular groups.
The CBL has particularly been critical of the ERLC’s partnership with the Evangelical Immigration Table — a coalition whose founders included legendary SBC ethicist Richard Land, a longtime GOP activist, World Relief, Focus on the Family and the National Association of Evangelicals. The coalition has long supported both border security and a path to citizenship for people in the country illegally — something Southern Baptists have supported as well.
But the coalition also partners with the National Immigration Forum, which has gotten funding from the Open Society Foundation founded by billionaire George Soros. That has led to claims that liberal groups have infiltrated the convention — something convention leaders deny.
The ERLC has been on a public relations push in recent months, including a new video promoting its accomplishments.
“The ERLC is an institution that has stood the test of time and proclaimed to our nation’s leaders time and again that the Southern Baptist Convention is still here, still standing on truth and still cares about the welfare of this country and its people,” ERLC President Brent Leatherwood said in the video.
Pressley, who will likely be elected to a second year as president next week, has said he won’t take sides in the debate over the ERLC, insisting the messengers will have the final say. He’s spent the last year traveling the country, visiting with churches and ministry leaders, and says he has been encouraged by what he’s seen.
He’s proud of the way Southern Baptists worked together and said denominational leaders have to go out of their way to earn trust.
“I think we’ve got to continually prove and earn the trust of our church members, just like you have to do if you’re a pastor,” he said. “You’re continually earning that and proving that you would be trustworthy. I think the SBC has to keep doing that.”
