Baptist Press recently interviewed Pastors Josh Powell and Willy Rice, the two announced candidates for SBC president, asking their takes on current issues in the SBC including the Cooperative Program and women pastors. Read what they said below and find links to watch the full interviews. The vote to elect the next SBC president is scheduled for June 9 at 3:30 p.m. (Eastern) during the 2026 SBC Annual Meeting in Orlando.
Josh Powell
There are several aspects to serving as Southern Baptist Convention president, including being a voice that speaks to the issues. Josh Powell acknowledges that is baked into the job, but prefers an in-house approach that celebrates gains while addressing the issues that hinder fulfilling the Great Commission.
“There’s a resolve that I think [is] important to the presidency,” said Powell, pastor of Taylors (S.C.) First Baptist Church, in a recent interview with Baptist Press. He will accept a nomination at next month’s annual meeting to serve as president. “Here’s what [Southern Baptists] are coming to do, and we’re not going to move away from that. We’re not going to divide away from the task.
“There are a lot of people who, I think, want the SBC to be something that it’s not. We are a group of autonomous churches … gathered together … as we cooperate [in] the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. So we want to stay with a humble, faithful resolve to make sure we’re doing what we need to do.”
That isn’t to ignore issues within the Convention.
“Looking back on our history, we’ve had challenges,” he said. “There are problems, things we have to walk through. Cooperation is hard.
“[But] there are two options we can take. There are those in the convention [who] want to focus on our problems … to talk about them all the time. I would rather focus on the priorities, because I believe that … you cannot focus on the priorities and the problems at the same time.”
That takes a shift of focus.
“Southern Baptists are at their best when they’re laser-focused on the priority of the Great Commission that we do together,” he said. “One of my hopes is that out of a difficult past six or seven years … we can start focusing on the priorities gain … start pressing hard on the gas of the Great Commission.”
Presidential responsibilities
Powell said he knows the convention president doesn’t speak “for every single person in the SBC.”
If elected, and someone were to ask for his opinion, he would first turn to James 1 where it says “if somebody needs wisdom, let them ask. And so, the first move for me is always [to] pray.”
“I want to be one who speaks to unify, not divide,” he said.
When it comes to the annual meeting, messengers and entity leaders look to the president to set tone.
“I just want to create a meeting that is God-glorifying, Christ-exalting and mission-focused to who we are,” he said. “So let’s address the things we need to address. Let’s deal with those things. I want to create that kind of atmosphere for our messengers.”
The president also chooses who will serve on the Committee on Committees and the Resolutions Committee.
Powell said he would have three criteria for choosing committee members:
- They must be a believer in Jesus Christ.
- They must be a believer in Jesus Christ demonstrating the fruit of the Spirit. (Galatians 5:22-23)
- They must be an active member who is serving faithfully in a Southern Baptist church that is committed to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 and to the Cooperative Program.
When it comes to the Resolutions Committee, Powell said, those same criteria apply and he would choose people who are “not agenda driven” but are “committed to our cooperative work together.”
The committee member would work “to speak clearly on issues that we are united on and … in a way that testifies to our greater mission and calling,” he said.
Credentials Committee debate
In recent years, a proposed amendment to the SBC Constitution failed to reach the two-thirds voting threshold required. Recommendations by a task force on defining “friendly cooperation” when it comes to churches were delivered in 2024. The mechanisms by which to determine a church’s cooperation within the SBC are in place, Powell said, it’s just a matter of enforcing them.
“The Credentials Committee just needs to do what the messengers have been clear on,” he said. “They have been clear over and over again on … the women pastor issue. The Baptist Faith and Message is absolutely clear on this. I urge the Credentials Committee to do what the messengers have been clear on [because] the messengers have the ultimate final authority.”
Powell voted twice in support of the so-called Law Amendment that would have amended the SBC Constitution and again in favor of a version further amended by Texas pastor Juan Sanchez.
He recommends a reevaluation of the Credentials Committee itself. One of the recommendations by the aforementioned 2024 task force, the Cooperation Group, was to decouple the Credentials Committee from the SBC Executive Committee and have it report directly to the messengers, for instance.
“The Convention approved those recommendations, and then they weren’t put into place,” Powell said. “I still think that’s the best way to handle it.”
Taking influence from the messengers tends to bring division, he added. Giving them a more direct line to such discussions strengthens their collective voice.
“I think you can set it up and organize it in such a way that we can deal with the business very cleanly, very clearly and establish the fact that the messengers understand the [Baptist Faith and Message] to be what it is, and we want churches to abide by that.”
One way is to provide an opportunity for messengers to unseat those from a church that the Credentials Committee has recommended for such a vote. A church would be given the opportunity over the next year to address the issue and bring itself back into friendly cooperation.
“It would almost lead to a disciplinary process that hopefully would welcome a brother or sister church back to us,” said Powell. “We can work together and put something like this in place that would make a powerful statement.”
He considers Southern Baptist churches to be “clearly” complementarian with the “adjudication” of the process being the issue.
“I am not suggesting I’ve got every answer. What I am suggesting is that we have seen a task force already, and] they have already made recommendations,” he said. “… Let’s put those [recommendations] into work.”
Concerns: Ministry pipeline, trust, CP
There are other issues to command the next SBC president’s attention, Powell noted, including encouraging the next generation of pastors and leadership, Cooperative Program support and addressing issues of trust.
“I have concerns about how we can strengthen our trustee system,” said Powell, who recently completed his tenure as trustee chairman at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “Our messengers have clearly said [it’s] the best system we have.
“There’s no way to manage the entities as a convention, so we have to have trustees who manage them.”
His concerns lie in adequately training trustees for times like leadership changes, which have been common in recent years in the SBC.
“We have to make sure they’re equipped and ready to understand their responsibility both to the institution and the Convention,” he said.
The number of churches without a pastor has caught his attention as well.
“How do we steward into the next generation the idea of calling out the called, and pressing in on them to raise them up to carry the mantle of the Great Commission through our cooperative work together?” he asked. “That’s a real concern for me.”
That blends into concerns over the Cooperative Program.
“It’s still the best method by which to fund our cooperative work,” said Powell. “But it’s been declining. [Trust issues] are part of it, but … I think it’s more complicated than we want to say. We need to tell the story of why we do this together.”
Avoiding that brings division among Southern Baptists.
“… I have real concerns over how many of us in different segments talk to each other. The secret sauce of Southern Baptists is relationships. Whenever we start driving wedges in those relationships, that brings division, and that’s why we have a hard time fixing the challenges that lie before us.”
Watch the interview on YouTube.
Willy Rice
Willy Rice says there are good things happening in the Southern Baptist Convention, things to celebrate.
But he also contends that recent issues of debate in the SBC have siphoned the trust needed for healthy participation among churches and support of the Cooperative Program. That factored heavily in his decision to accept an announced nomination to serve as SBC president at the upcoming Annual Meeting in Orlando.
Rice, pastor for the last 22 years of Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater, Fla., put forward his thoughts on what’s needed in the SBC at BaptistRenewal.org, a site launched shortly after his candidacy was announced last fall. There, he lists seven “pillars” for renewal.
He peppered his comments in a recent interview with Baptist Press with the first pillar – convictional clarity.
“We’re living in an age where I just think that is so important,” he said. “I’m looking for people who really have that kind of convictional grounding … people who are willing to lean in and engage. We need people who are willing to speak up, ask tough questions and are excited about … the opportunity to serve … [to] see it as an opportunity to be engaged in the process.”
Task force to address the office of pastor
In the interview, Rice addressed attempts at the last three annual meetings to clarify the role of pastor as being solely for men. Rice supported the efforts to amend the SBC Constitution, and though a majority of messengers agreed, the number did not reach the two-thirds threshold required.
“It’s obviously an issue [and] it’s not going away,” he said. “… We’re at an impasse.
“People say it’s not a problem, [but] then we see that every year. There seem to be at least some churches for which it is an issue.”
Rather than address it through another procedural vote, Rice has proposed that the issue be studied through a task force appointed by the next SBC president.
[The] task force can write a report; it can make a statement,” he said. “I’ve talked to a lot of people … who didn’t vote for the Law Amendment. And … I usually ask them why.”Their responses usually begin by stating their belief in complementarianism and the Baptist Faith and Message, he said. Their reasons for voting against the amendment, Rice added, are that it “would be enforced in a draconian fashion and that there was an agenda behind it, [that] it was going to be unnecessarily and harshly enforced to punish all women who are serving in some aspect of ministry.
“That’s certainly not my position,” he added. “… I haven’t really heard anybody saying that, and I’m certainly not saying that.”
A task force report, Rice continued, provides the opportunity to expound on the issue to a level that rewording a document cannot.
“I’m for appropriate amendments when they’re necessary, but you are still going to argue over words if you don’t have convictional consensus,” he said. “I really believe the overwhelming majority of Baptist people would be united [through] a clearly written report that says, this is what Baptist people think, this is what we believe, this is what the New Testament says, and these are appropriate recommendations coming out of that.”
He compared the proposed task force’s potential impact to that of the Peace Committee during the mid-1980s.
“It was passed overwhelmingly, and it really was very instrumental in helping Southern Baptist people move through the conflict and beyond the conflict of that time,” Rice said. “I think this is one [that] Baptist people would rally around. I think it would get us through this impasse so that we’re not arguing about this year after year after year.”
He further blamed “sloppy ecclesiology” for when the title “pastor” is applied in different ways, saying some are “using the same vocabulary in a different dictionary.”
That also applies to churches that have a man holding the title of pastor who is scripturally unfit to do so. Rice compared it to the way inflation affects currency.
“We started using that word (pastor) everywhere. I noticed it,” he said “[Churches] would hire a young male staff member and [say] ‘That’s a pastor.’ He’s not a pastor. He could be one day, but he’s not a pastor yet. He hasn’t met the qualifications for pastor-elder-overseer.
“That [title is] not shorthand for ‘staff member.’ That’s not shorthand for ‘I have a job at the church.’”
Denominational accountability
That’s not the only task force Rice proposes. A slew of meet-ups he’s attended at churches this year to discuss issues within the SBC have settled on a few topics of particular interest. One of those is transparency, which has led to his proposal for a Denominational Accountability Task Force.
He pointed to the 2007-2008 fiscal year, when churches sent $548 million through CP to their state conventions. That figure dropped to $446 million by FY 2023-2024.
Despite that, churches are giving in record numbers to designated offerings, he said.
“It’s not that we’re poor; it’s not that people are running away from cooperative missions, but we’ve got to have some serious questions about why Southern Baptist people and Southern Baptist churches are getting a little more reticent about just releasing their funds into the Cooperative Program,” he said.
It circles back to a fundamental matter of trust, he said. Items he thinks need more clarity include SBC entities’ use of outside funding sources, and trustee awareness of an entity leader’s salary.
At the 2025 SBC Annual Meeting, messengers approved a new Business and Financial Plan for the Convention. A motion to amend the plan to require each entity to publish information as detailed as what’s required on the IRS Form 990 failed.
“I don’t know that a 990 is the answer,” Rice said in the interview. “I don’t know what the exact answer is, but I want us to have the question.”
He said he hears about transparency “everywhere I go.”
“We need to quit shutting them down … quit dismissing them,” Rice said. “We need to quit saying that’s a non-starter and say, ‘Brother, how can I get you the information you want?’
“I think a lot of leaders have been dismissing those questions, and I think we need to take ’em seriously.”
Presidential responsibilities
If elected, Rice says he would choose people to serve on the Committee on Committees who “who understand the moment, who understand the need of convictional clarity in this age.” He also wants committee members who value “meaningful cooperation” which leads them to be “very focused on our mission.”
Another presidential responsibility is choosing the Resolutions Committee. “You want resolutions that state something prophetically to the culture,” he said.
He says committee members should be able to speak to those issues in ways that are “biblically grounded” and “in a way that informs and draws Southern Baptists together.”
“Everyone remembers Resolution 9 from 2019, the infamous resolution on critical race theory,” he said, “I think a lot of people were voting on things they didn’t understand.”
A significant responsibility of every president is to lead the annual meeting.
Rice says he appreciates times of singing and inspiration in the meeting, but “I think there’s sometimes a frustration of messengers. … You get to important matters of debate, and you seem to run out of time.”
He says he would want messengers to say, “he bent over backwards to give us plenty of time to speak to those issues and to help people, even if they were struggling with what to say or how to say it.”
Another role the president often fills is that of spokesman for the convention. Rice says he would look to avoid “unnecessary division” and “unnecessary consternation”.
“I think the SBC president understands, and I think Baptist people understand the SBC president doesn’t get to speak for all Baptist people,” he said. “Our polity is such that we believe in local churches. We believe in the autonomy of the local church.
“I would want to ask, ‘Does this represent the vast majority of Southern Baptist people?’ Does this represent our clearly held and clearly expressed convictions?’ Am I going out in front of them or around them, or have we, through resolutions or other mechanisms clearly spoken about these issues so that I could speak with confidence?’”
Watch the interview on YouTube.
Originally published at BaptistPress.com – Baptist Press interviews Josh Powell, Baptist Press interviews Willy Rice