SBC 2025: Back where we started

Dallas | Messengers to the 2025 Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Dallas June 10-11 arrived at the probability that motions from the floor on women and the pastorate, financial transparency, and the fate of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission would dominate the discussion. In the business sessions, they did. But in the end, motions on all three issues failed, mostly as they did last year. And leaving Dallas, the SBC is right back where we started:

The constitutional language about pastors is unchanged.
Read Illinois Baptist coverage of the revived Law Amendment
SBC entities, including mission boards and seminaries, will not be required to submit to messengers a form like the IRS 990 detailing assets, leaders’ salaries, or the existence of any bonuses or “golden parachutes” or financial settlements when they depart.
Read Baptist and Reflector’s coverage of the 990 motion
And the ERLC lives to fight another day, as a motion to defund the SBC public policy voice is turned away by more than half the messengers.
Read the Illinois Baptist’s coverage of the ERLC vote

SBC President Clint Pressley likened the debate to a family wrestling over its issues. When they leave the room, they’re still family. “We’re all right having these conversations as long as we continue to keep our focus on why we actually meet together,” Pressley said at a news conference following the two-day convention.

Pressley presided over a meeting that coincided with the 100^th anniversaries of The Cooperative Program and the Baptist Faith and Message. The meeting’s expressed intent was to celebrate these “rails” on which the SBC’s mission runs, as Pressley put it in his President’s Address. And it did, along with the usual missions reports and missionary sending celebration. But women pastors, transparency, and the ERLC were neck-and-neck in terms of platform time and vocal debate.

“Although we had a lot of discussion about several things, there wasn’t a real sense of a contentious spirit in the room,” Pressley said afterward. That stands in stark contrast to two previous years of argument, particularly over women as pastors and the SBC’s language affirming men only as lead pastors.

A resolution on gender issues drew the most national attention, after the failure to further nail down male-only pastors with a constitutional amendment. Called “Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage and the Family,” the resolution was one of eight approved my messengers without objection.

A few secular news outlets focused on the call to end same-sex marriage by overturning Obergefell V. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized it a decade ago.

Illinois native Andrew Walker led the committee that brought the slate of resolutions. The most discussion was on sports betting, as one messenger wanted tweaks to allow for minor gambling that he contended was not sinful. His amendment failed.

Unplanned, pregnant moments

Two other significant motions related to sexual abuse were made, but both failed. One was a motion to order a countersuit against former pastor and North American Mission Board (NAMB) vice president Johnny Hunt, who himself has a defamation suit pending against the SBC Executive Committee. Hunt’s suit, that came out of claims of his sexual abuse of a pastor’s wife, was postponed from a trial date originally set next week. The SBC motion was ruled out of order.

The second was an attempt to bring to light claims of defamation involving a pastor and some hallway discussion about handling of abuse claims that he says were false. The messenger, Tom Buck of Lindale, Texas, wants an investigation to clear the pastor whose reputation, Buck said, has been damaged. But parliamentary limitations on what can be discussed in a public meeting that involves individuals and allegations made it almost impossible to tell messengers what they would be demanding from their own Executive Committee.

Counsel for the EC is already involved in such an investigation, involving hallway security camera video of the conversation. The first motion was ruled out of order, but messengers agreed to bring it for a vote. Then, that vote failed.

Significant, but unheralded action

Without floor debate, messengers passed a 2025-26 SBC operating budget of $190 million that allots $3 million for legal expenses. At the time it was proposed in February, there was much criticism about utilizing CP funds, implying missions dollars, for lawyers. But EC President and CEO Jeff Iorg said at the time there was no other way to pay for representation when the SBC is sued. “We are the defendants in these cases,” he said, not the litigants.

Iorg was even more direct in his report to messengers on the first day of the annual meeting. “As long as there are legal issues in the churches, there will be misplaced lawsuits naming denominational entities. And remember, in all these cases, we are defendants, not the initiators of these legal actions,” Iorg said.

“The good news, and it is good news, is we are making steady, incremental progress at resolving them,” Iorg said. “The bad news is the cost of completing the task is unpredictable.”

Iorg pointed out the Department of Justice investigation into EC handling of sex abuse claims was closed without DOJ action. But he laid the financial loss of $12 million to abuse claims and legal representation at the feet of his predecessors in leadership. The Convention is paying for bad decisions from just a few years ago, mostly tied to the waiving of attorney-client privilege in the early days of the Guidepost Solutions probe of abuse claims and how they were handled by SBC leaders, including then EC President and CEO Ronnie Floyd.

Iorg did not name names, but he was clear on the origins of the SBC’s current financial strain.

Downsizing the EC staff by one-third helped, Iorg reported. Again, he said that sale of the SBC Building in Nashville is one way out, but there are no offers on table for the pricey downtown offices. Budgeting for lawyers is another way out. Messengers voted for the budget without complaint.

For those looking for signs of unity in the SBC, nearly identical votes on key issues of theology and polity two years in a row may be a signal. Willingness to pay for legal help to put the troubles of the recent past behind us is another.

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