Ask Southern Baptists their favorite part of their annual meeting, and nearly everyone will tell you: the missionary-sending presentation. Couples and individuals getting ready to serve abroad introduce themselves from the convention stage, with those bound for sensitive countries hidden in silhouette, and the crowd prays for them.
They represent what leaders see as the heart of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC): autonomous churches coming together to fund missions and ministry work as they have since the launch of the SBC’s Cooperative Program 100 years ago.
“The genius of the Cooperative Program has proved itself over a century,” said Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, last month. But “it has never been uncomplicated. It’s never easy.”
As Southern Baptists celebrate the anniversary of their cooperation, they must also confront the current challenges of working together, with major votes expected around expenditures and the future of their public policy entity as they gather in Dallas this week.
In discussions ahead of the annual meeting, leaders referenced a sense of strain in their fellowship. Southern Baptist voices questioned whether the entities are stewarding budgets well, whether convention leaders represent their beliefs, and whether the SBC is doing enough to ensure cooperating churches hold to Baptist doctrine.
On the agenda, Southern Baptists will decide whether to allot $3 million in giving to cover mounting legal expenses related to abuse cases, which have cost the SBC $13 million so far.
Messengers are also expected to vote again on proposals to require additional financial disclosures and to do away with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). Both came up at previous meetings, but the issues have grabbed more attention this time.
Shaken confidence in the business of the convention corresponds with Americans’ declining trust in institutions across the board, including in churches. The concerns took on more momentum this year as some called for a DOGE-like push toward greater transparency and accountability.
Some pastors, including South Carolina pastor Rhett Burns, have called for the disclosure of financial details like the salaries of executives heading convention entities.
“This is something that has been building for years. The awareness for greater financial transparency is greater than it’s ever been,” said Burns.
Burns evoked a famous 1985 sermon from W. A. Criswell when he laid out what he believed were the choices facing the SBC in the conservative resurgence. Today, Burns said the question is “not ‘Whether We Live or Die’ but whether we DOGE or die.”
Entity leaders and others, meanwhile, have opposed the disclosure of the kind of information a nonprofit would include on a 990 form and have defended the trustee system. They have asked Southern Baptists to approve an updated version of the convention’s financial plan.
Sarah Merkle, a professional parliamentarian who specializes in the work of denominations and ministries, said many organizations are facing “more scrutiny of trustees and board directors.”
She warns people, though, that, “accountability and transparency aren’t ends in themselves” and the push for a DOGE-style gutting of SBC bureaucracy may not have the intended effect. “It’s not a fail-safe way to ensure the work of the gospel goes forth,” she told CT.
Debates about disclosures only scratch the surface of underlying tensions in the convention, though. The SBC—which includes 46,876 independent churches—navigated political divides around President Donald Trump and contradictory views of the abuse crisis and the SBC’s response.
“God has given us much to celebrate in our confession and our cooperation,” Executive Committee president Jeff Iorg told a packed ballroom on Monday, a day before the full annual meeting sessions begin. “We also acknowledge the business we must do and the competing voices.”
In February, the Executive Committee—which oversees SBC business outside the annual meeting—approved a budget for $190 million in Cooperative Program funds, including $3 million to cover anticipated fees from abuse lawsuits. The convention will vote on whether to approve the allocation for the legal costs.
Since 1925, the Cooperative Program has collected $20 billion for sending missionaries, planting churches, training leaders, and doing other SBC ministry work. Until now, the Executive Committee has avoided using Southern Baptist giving to pay the legal costs, but it’s depleted reserves to the point that the convention has put its headquarters in Nashville up for sale.
Committee members recognize that churches want their dollars to go to the missionaries on the stage, not the lawyers behind the scenes, but bills also need to be paid. The SBC continues to fight a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by former president Johnny Hunt, and Iorg anticipates the SBC could continue to be named in future lawsuits against local churches.
Rob Collingsworth, a leader with Criswell College, expects the disagreements over the abuse response in the first place—whether the convention has done enough or too much—will factor in to the vote over the allocation.
“It’s not just $3 million,” he said on the Baptist Review podcast. “It’s not just some fees. It’s $3 million related to some stuff that’s very visceral to both people who sexual abuse happened to them or happened to someone close to them, or they felt like the way the convention approached it was wrong.”
After years of stalled reform efforts, several outspoken survivors involved in earlier efforts to address the abuse crisis opted not to attend this year’s meeting. The public legal cases costing the SBC millions come from former leaders suing for defamation.
Hunt’s 2023 lawsuit has also come up in the recent push for financial transparency. In seeking damages from the SBC, he claimed $610,000 in annual salary and employment benefits. His immediate past position was vice president at the North American Mission Board.
The SBC may also consider a motion to defund or abolish the convention’s public policy arm, the ERLC. Messengers who say that the entity no longer adequately represents Southern Baptist interests in Washington and doesn’t work closely enough with the Trump administration have pushed to abolish or defund the ERLC in three previous conventions.
Last year’s raised-ballot vote against the ERLC didn’t pass, but many predict that the issue could go to a written vote this year. It takes majority votes at two meetings in a row to abolish an entity. Another proposal recommends reforming the entity by limiting the scope of its advocacy rather than threatening its existence.
It’s been a tumultuous year for the ERLC. Its president, Brent Leatherwood, faced backlash from Southern Baptists for a remark commenting on President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race. Then the former ERLC board chair erroneously said Leatherwood was fired in July, only for the entity to retract the statement the next day.
Former ERLC president Richard Land has urged the denomination to hold on to the ERLC, as have a group of former SBC presidents who say the agency “forged a path forward fighting abortion, helping pave the way to see Roe v. Wade overturned and now Planned Parenthood defunded. They are continuing to battle transgender ideology and pornography and to promote biblical values regarding marriage, family, and sexuality.”
The SBC is also expected to once again vote on whether to amend its constitution to require affiliated churches to appoint only men as pastors, reflecting the Southern Baptist position in its statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message, which also turns 100 this year.
At the 2024 annual meeting, the proposal—called the Law Amendment—did not reach a two-thirds majority, with some believing the move would be unnecessary or redundant. This year, more Southern Baptists see the need to make their position clear after learning that the SBC’s credentials committee failed to remove a church with a woman serving as a teaching pastor.
The church, NewSpring in South Carolina, opted to leave on its own after being questioned. In previous years, Southern Baptists have voted down churches, including Saddleback, that opted to appeal when the committee found them “not in friendly cooperation” with the convention.
Some advocates of the Law Amendment say it will reduce needless and repeated controversy at future meetings.
“Instead of challenging the credentials of churches with women pastors at every annual meeting, the Law Amendment would allow messengers to instruct the Credentials Committee and the convention on what cooperative compliance with the Bible and the Baptist Faith and Message should look like,” wrote Colin J. Smothers, a Kansas pastor and the executive director for the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
Messengers know that the business of the convention, even with its controversies and debates, remains important. But it ultimately matters to them because the cooperation is what allows them to fund missionaries and ministry.
Leading up to the annual meeting, Nate Akin, director of the network Baptist21, referred to the trellis and vine, symbols of how the SBC needs a certain amount of structure to effectively support Great Commission work.
Andrew Hébert, a pastor from Longview, Texas, who has chaired the SBC’s committee that helps run the annual meeting and served on its sexual abuse task force, prays for unity around the mission to overcome divisions.
“I hope that Southern Baptists are reminded about why we cooperate in the first place. It’s easy to get mired in the weeds,” said Hébert.
“This is a good year to do it. We’re reminded of how much God has done over the past 100 years.”
This story has been updated to correct Rhett Burns’s name and to link a statement from NAMB.
