The Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting will take place in Orlando, Florida on June 8-9. This denomination, considered the largest of American Evangelical and Protestant groups, with approximately 12.2 million members in 45,000 churches nationwide, has been dealing unsuccessfully with growing revelations of a clergy sexual abuse scandal that has been going on among its churches for quite some time. The scandal, exposed by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News in an expose called "Abuse of Faith" published in 2019, reached into the denomination's highest levels, including the discovery of multiple cover-ups of reports received by it's national Executive Committee.
When it was exposed, the scandal created an outrage among the membership of the churches. In response, the delegates elected by the churches to the annual meeting, known as "messengers," enraged by the revelations, began bypassing the cumbersome, deliberately slow denominational bureaucracy, to demand action directly from the floor of the convention. In spite of those demands, which resulted in the resignation of a dozen executive committee members and several personnel shake-ups at high levels, including the resignation of the executive director at the time, Frank Page, because of his own admission of marital infidelity, this convention body has been 100% ineffective at providing anything useful as a result.
To understand this ineffectiveness requires knowing that the SBC is a bureacracy deliberately designed to favor the wishes of a few elitists who control it, while ignoring any kind of input from the churches that might not agree with the set agenda. It appears to be democratic, with power invested in the messengers who show up to the annual meeting. In practice, as this whole scandal has revealed, even when the messengers directly instruct the bureacracy to do something, it doesn't get done and there aren't any consequences for that not happening.
One of the internal problems experienced when trying to get something done about this sexual abuse scandal has been the manner in which churches relate to the denomination. All of the churches are, theoretically, at least, independent and autonomous, and the denomination has no ecclesiastical authority over any church. Each church calls its own pastors, hires its own staff and preaches according to its own doctrinal and theological understanding. So technically, the denomination can't force any church to do anything about an abusive pastor in one of the pulpits.
But...If They Want to Exercise Ecclesiastical Authority, They Will
Local church autonomy is the excuse that works well for the SBC bureaucrats when they don't want to follow the directives of the messengers. But they are willing to throw it out the window when they want to force a narrow doctrinal perspective on the churches. For a denomination that claims it is not ecclesiastical in structure at all, and that each local church is its own authortity on all things, it uses the threat of removing a church's membership in the denomination if they are not in line theologically and doctrinally.
By directive of its bylaws defining what is meant by "voluntary cooperation," all churches that are part of the SBC must have theology and doctrinal positions that are "closely aligned" with the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the doctrinal statement of the SBC. That means, among other things, that they must affirm the SBC's interpretation of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, and all interpretations of the Bible controlled by that, including placing restrictions on women serving in the church position of pastor. And while there are some that say this only applies to the "senior," or "lead" pastor, others insist that women are restricted biblically from any pastoral role.
They can't seem to get anything done about the sexual abuse running rampant in their churches, especially by those who have the title "pastor," but they are willing to entertain yet another proposal to make a permanent change to their constitution and bylaws denying membership to any church that calls a woman as a pastor. One of the denomination's insider elitists, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, Dr. Al Mohler, who fancies himself as the SBC's "chief pontificator", will bring a motion to add this restriction at this year's meeting.
Making this kind of permanent change involves getting a full two thirds of the messenger vote total at two subsequent annual meetings. The last time this effort was made, it was approved in the first meeting, then failed to get the kind of majority required the second year. A lot of the success or failure of motions like this depends on how many people on the SBC payroll actually get elected as messengers from their church and go to the convention. When the bureaucrats and employees of the bureaucracies outnumber the regular people from the churches, these things tend to do well.
Ignoring Elephants in the Room
Membership declined by 390,000 in 2025. And aside from the typical excuse-making, and the celebration of tiny gains in weekly attendance and in baptisms, which don't come anywhere near making up the difference, it doesn't appear that this crisis, which has led to a decline of 4.1 million members in a decade, staggering losses that are larger than most denominations have in total membership, will get nearly the attention that the ongoing rage over women serving as pastors is going to generate. By contrast, no mainline Protestant denomination has lost that many members in a decade, not even the fractured and split United Methodists.
The denomination has already exercised, through its credentials comittee, the dismissal of churches with women in pastoral roles or leadership, including kicking out Saddleback Valley Community Church, the largest and most evangelistic church in the denomination, and in response to that, as many as a hundred other churches left in protest. Saddleback Valley alone accounted for 40,000 of those members lost, and Elevation Church, with 26,000 members, left the same week. That accounts for at least 66,000 of the 280,000 decline the SBC experienced in 2024.
But the failure to bring the denomination up to its own messenger's expectations on the sexual abuse issue is also a huge elephant in the room. Both of the men who are still revered by some as the "Architects" of the beloved "conservative resurgence" in the SBC were deeply involved in the scandal, and I still haven't heard any of the elitist leadership comment on it, or set the record straight. One enabled abusers and rapists on two seminary campuses, the other was involved in abuse himself, with victims of the same gender.
But then, giving this kind of deference to leaders who are deeply involved in licentious behavior seems to be an Evangelical characteristic these days. The rapidly falling membership of the SBC could be the result of this infection of political and religious hypocrisy that has infected most of American Evangelicalism, because it is losing members across the board just as rapidly as the SBC.
Will the Southern Baptist Convention Straighten It's Priorities, or Make Itself Irrelevant?
It took the Southern Baptist Convention 150 years to apologize for its historic stance on slavery, a divisive and unbiblical position it took when it was founded in 1845. That position, too, was based on belief in a literalist interpretation of the Bible, the same kind of fundamentalism that ignores and ridicules theological study and education and relies on a literal rendering of the King James translation. It's the same kind of interpretation that leads to the faulty conclusion that women are forever and always restricted from being pastors, or that caused the SBC to remove what was known as the "Jesus criteria" from the Baptist Faith and Message.
It appears that Dr. Al Mohler, who had a prior failed attempt at being elected President of the SBC, which he apparently considers his "due", will try to make himself relevant among the SBC elitists still left by codifying bad theology and denominational policy into its constitution and bylaws. Perhaps there are enough Southern Baptists interested in keeping their denomination out of the abyss into which it is falling, who have abandoned the literalist fundamentalism that took control in 1979.
It would be my guess, as a former Southern Baptists educated in two of the denomination's universities and seminaries, that there are not enough people left to get enough of a vote to keep this from eventually passing. The professors who didn't buy literalist fundamentalism when it started its creeping attempt to control the denomination saw the handwriting on the wall, and they got out, along with many of the universities and colleges where serious theological study, rather than indoctrination, was the norm.
The Southern Baptist Convention can't sustain the kind of loss it has experienced over the past decade and survive, and yet, it seems as ineffective at finding a way to arrest this decline and return to relevance as it has been in dealing with the sexual abuse crisis in its midst. The revenue stream of support from churches, called the "Cooperative Program," is rapidly drying up. The continued support it gives to corrupt secular politics, and its silence over the corruption of its own leadership speaks volumes about priorities. That's not surprising for a denomination that took 150 years to decide slavery war wrong.
