The Midwest pastor elected president of next year’s SBC Pastors’ Conference has pledged the lineup will represent small and medium-sized Southern Baptist churches.
“I am both excited and I’m terrified. Brutally terrified,” Dave Miller posted on the SBC Voices blog following the election. “The budget of this two-day event is pretty much the annual budget of my church. The logistics are a little bit more complicated than putting together a church potluck back home. But we are in this together and we are going to be looking to expand our circle. I believe we can do something that will be different. And in a good way.”
Miller was elected president of the Pastors’ Conference with just over 55% of the vote. John Avant, pastor of First Baptist Church Concord in Knoxville, Tenn., also ran for the post.
Miller, who is pastor of Southern Hills Baptist Church in Sioux City, Iowa, and edits SBC Voices, had written about a proposed new direction for the 2017 meeting in Phoenix prior to this year’s conference:
- All conference speakers will lead Southern Baptist churches that are active in SBC work and affirm the Baptist Faith and Message (2000).
- No one who has spoken at the conference in the last five years will speak at the 2017 meeting.
- Speakers will represent a diversity of geography, age, ethnicity, preaching style and perspective.
- There will be a focus on inviting pastors to speak who lead churches of 500 or fewer, Miller blogged in April, possibly up to 750.
- He also said speakers will preach verse-by-verse through a shorter book of the Bible, or a segment of a longer book.
The 2017 SBC Pastors’ Conference is June 11-12 in Phoenix.