Dallas, Texas | The schedule for the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting seems a bit streamlined this year, especially after the extra business session was added in 2024 to handle multiple reports from task forces and a record number of motions from the floor. But considering the possible issues elbowing into the lineup, this round-up may not be so quick and easy after all.
In fact, it could be down and dirty.
The advertised events for the Dallas gathering June 10-11 are the celebration of the SBC theological and missional pillars, the Baptist Faith and Message and the Cooperative Program. Both turn 100 this year. They were created by messengers herded into in a sweltering exhibition hall in Memphis in the summer of 1925.
The original Baptist Faith and Message was a biblical response to the theological arguments of the day, mostly rising liberalism in the mainline denominations and the threat of cultural ideologies such as evolution. The Cooperative Program was an answer to endless ringing of doorbells by missionaries on furlough and pulpit appeals for missions support, by creating a unified system of funding with a steady stream from cooperating Southern Baptist Churches. Their commitment to percentage giving from their weekly offerings would keep missionaries on the field and global evangelism moving forward.
These achievements across a century are certainly worth celebrating. SBC President Clint Pressley, in his first one-year term, has championed the twin centennial observances. But one or more issues from last year could wrangle attention from the golden moments.
“If the SBC is a train, it runs on the two rails of the Cooperative Program and our confession of faith,” Pressley said in a Baptist Press interview in February. “Both have played a large part in building my own identity as a Southern Baptist pastor.”
Pressley called the BF&M a “concise explanation of the important doctrines that we are talking about” which has provided for “a fellowship of churches that have existed this long and have stayed conservative this long.” Pressley believes the statement should be interpreted as “tightly” as possible, which may account for his support of the Law Amendment last year.
Long arm of the ‘Law’
The Law Amendment to strengthen language defining the pastorate to men only failed to get a two-thirds majority on its second vote by messengers in Indianapolis in 2024. An amendment to the BF&M was approved, but the constitution was untouched. Opponents of the amendment proposed by Virginia pastor Mike Law said the language around “pastor” was clear.
Now backers of the Law Amendment are calling for another run at passage. In March seven pastors issued an “Open Letter to our Southern Baptist Family” citing a recent decision by the SBC Credentials Committee which did not require a church with a woman serving as teaching pastor to be brought for dismissal from the denomination.
“Because we have already debated this language at the last two conventions, we do not believe that we need to spend another year waiting for the Executive Committee to decide whether to put the amendment before the convention for a vote,” they wrote in the letter.
The letter outlines a parliamentary procedure for bypassing standing rule 6 in the constitution, which requires a motion for constitutional revision be made and followed by votes in two successive years. Their plan would suspend rule 6 on a simple majority vote, then proceed with a vote in Dallas and a second vote in Orlando next year. Those two votes would each require a two-thirds supermajority.
In an interview with the Illinois Baptist, SBC Executive Committee President and CEO Jeff Iorg said male-only pastors issue isn’t finished after all, even though messengers failed to approve the amendment and the EC withheld its support for amending the constitution. But he doesn’t think that issue, or others, will overshadow the work of the convention already on the agenda.
“We have some serious issues that we’re working through. Those are very well publicized and no need to say they’re not there. We’ve got to work on them,” Iorg told the Christian Index as part of a series of interviews with Baptist editors.
“But on the other side of it, when we come together in Dallas, while we’ll deal with these issues in the business sessions, we’ll also be celebrating record numbers of missionaries in the missionary pipeline, record numbers of church plants. We’ll be celebrating significant, if not record enrollments at our seminaries,” Iorg said.
Abuse and attorneys
With Iorg’s leadership, the Executive Committee is proposing a $3 million allocation for legal fees ahead of trials involving the SBC EC’s handling of sexual abuse allegations. Messengers will vote on the budget proposal in Dallas. Objections and alternatives were raised after the February report on the EC’s proposed 2025-26 budget, and that debate may spill over on the floor of the convention. (See our interview with Iorg on page 10.)
The EC also reported that it is not pursuing development of the Ministry Check database to track credible claims of sexual abuse in SBC churches. That responsibility was first given to the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF), which surrendered it back to the EC, but they ran into insurance issues. So did the EC.
Whether abuse survivors and those invested in abuse prevention will voice objections to the apparent end of the abuse tracking plan will be seen in Dallas. But a report in The Tennessean said they are not likely to continue the battle. “It’s time to stop fighting…and put that energy elsewhere,” Megan Lively told the newspaper. Lively was among survivors who worked with the convention in its response to abuse claims over the past three years.
As is the case whenever Southern Baptists meet, given our anyone-can-make-a-motion polity, the real action at the Dallas convention is more likely to be on the floor than on the agenda.
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