If you’ve read the first two installments in my Southern Baptist Reckoning series, thank you. If you haven’t, you can find them here and here—and thank you in advance. 

In the first entry, I pondered the deeper meaning behind Matthew Barrett’s departure from Southern Baptist life in search of “deeper” roots in the Great Tradition. I believe those roots were (are) still alive and can be found in the SBC, though they have been buried beneath the marketing gimmicks and the non-denominational trappings of the seeker-sensitive movement that has grown up in the SBC like kudzu. Barrett made a bad bet, but one does sympathize with the itch that led him to roll the dice, even if one does recognize that his desires won’t be so neatly fulfilled in the Anglican tradition.

Moving on from Barrett, in the second entry, I considered how the market forces of the seeker-sensitive movement, which is, at its core, a “friendly to the Left” movement (or winsome to Blue communities, hostile to Red ones), as promoted by men like Tim Keller and J.D. Greear have cost the SBC dearly. I suggested that the future of any SBC renewal likely hangs on the choices and prospects of two men in particular: Al Mohler and Willy Rice. 

Unsurprisingly, the liberal wing of the SBC was appalled that I was so blunt in my assessment of Danny Akin’s record and that I did, yes, I really did, say that we should do with “no more Akins” in SBC leadership just now. 

Many on the more conservative side of the SBC found my suggestion that Mohler could be a key factor in something that might amount to a “Second Conservative Resurgence” equally off-putting. Mohler has earned the respect of many in the broad center-right swath of the SBC, including mine. Others look at his record of now-woke proteges like Russell Moore and Matthew Hall, CRT-friendly professors like Jarvis Williams (current) and Curtis Woods (former), and his absence from major fights against the liberal incursion when he was the most well-positioned and likely most effective in a leading-from-the-front posture, and doubt he is the man for the moment.

I guess I’ve found my own “third way” here in SBC life, and it is one in which I make few happy. Yet I stand by my assessments of both men. The Akin experiment has failed. Mohler could be a stronger ally, a lion roused from slumber to roar one more time to protect the institution and denomination he helped claw back from the brink of theological destruction in his younger years. 

Willy Rice continues to impress me at every turn. The choice between Rice and Josh Powell, as nice a guy as Powell might be, as wonderful a pastor and evangelist as he may be, is really no choice at all. Rice, not Powell, saw how the Woke SBC sausage was being made. Rice’s forthcoming book, The Show: How an Obsession with Growth Corrupted the Mission of the Church, is a tour de force of trenchant diagnoses and prescriptions for what ails and what can heal what ails the SBC. He’s our man. Rice sees the issues with sharp clarity and has proposed real solutions. He is working tirelessly to mobilize whom he can across the southeast. If Rice can win in Orlando, there is yet hope.

Now, in part three, I want to argue how adopting the seeker-sensitive model in the SBC has led to widespread denominational disinterest. We were Baptists, once. And soldiers. We were men and women who could be mobilized to defend not just Christian teaching in general, but our Baptist way of life in particular. 

Now, we are everything, anything, and nothing. And men don’t fight for nothing. Messengers don’t come to an annual meeting by the tens of thousands for a “generic non-denominational evangelical convention.” 

If we are to save the Southern Baptist Convention, we must care about being Baptists again. We must even, perhaps, make Baptists great again. Make being Baptist great again.

And that means making Baptist mean something again. 

This is what it will take to rekindle the spark in grassroots Baptists to mobilize for real change—for both Orlando and beyond.

How Seeker Sensitivity Breeds Denominational Disinterest

The rescue of SBC-controlled institutions through Paige Patterson’s efforts enjoyed conditions conducive to mobilization for a high conservative turnout that no longer seems to prevail in 2026. But maybe those conditions can be changed. 

If they can, it will require a transformational leader who can help the grassroots overcome the widespread denominational disinterest that the seeker-sensitive movement has inculcated in the SBC.

Paige Patterson was a force of nature, utterly in touch with and sharing the biblical and theological sensibilities of most Southern Baptists in 1978. The focus of The Controversy was the nature and authority of the Bible, not the often more difficult-to-explain challenges contemporary SBC controversies involve. 

But the greatest impediment to redressing SBC compromises, corrupt practices, financial malfeasance, and footsie-play with evils churning within the Democrat Party is the difficulty of mobilization. 

Since the 1970s, the most consequential change in the ecclesial landscape Southern Baptists traverse is the same as for evangelicals writ large—the rise and dominance of seeker-sensitive strategies for church growth. Today, multiple generations of Southern Baptists have never experienced a non-seeker way of being Baptist. 

Recently, one of my 25-year-old Southern Baptist students confessed that she had never been in a church, Southern Baptist or otherwise, that was not obviously and overtly doing everything in its power to discern what pleases her and, if possible, to satisfy those preferences in order to reach and retain her in membership. Her Southern Baptist parents confessed to having the same experience. It had never occurred to either parent or child that any stigma should attach to church-hopping. Once upon a time, Baptist pastors and congregants alike frowned at what they called “sheep-stealing.” The seeker world encourages and valorizes church-hopping over commitment among believers in local churches, where love does not shop, but instead “love abides” (1 Corinthians 13).  

Now consider that Timothy Keller, though affirming the Westminster Confession, the doctrinal standard of his denomination (PCA), never dissociated himself from the seeker movement. Note also that Keller presented more as broadly evangelical than as a denomination-loyal defender of Presbyterianism. I have contended that the first iteration of the reformed resurgence among evangelicals identified with Mark Driscoll was not, or at least far less, seeker-sensitive in its approach, whereas the Keller iteration was and remains so.

Understandably, SBC entity heads, especially the seminary presidents, wanted to capitalize on Keller’s popularity. But that meant the pursuit of winsomeness to the Blue communities of Timothy Keller and Barack Obama, and others who perhaps our seminary presidents deemed to be on the “right side of history.” 

Winsomeness to those communities, at least in Keller’s mind, needed and deserved repeated and public display of unwinsomeness to Red communities, as I have shown here. Affirming the Democrats meant deploring the deplorables—because the Democrats demanded it. And Keller obliged. So have Greear, Litton, and Akin.  

Our seminary presidents need high schools and colleges to feed prospective students to the SBC colleges and seminaries to stay viable. They shoulder this burden in a nation moving left. Keller’s star rose too high for our “leaders” to resist, just as Kirk’s and TPUSA’s might. We can sympathize with these presidents’ plight and simultaneously disapprove of the fundamentally reactive, apologetic, seeker-sensitive model of gospel advance they’ve embraced, the dissing of their own base, and the indifference and even hostility displayed toward lost sinners who inhabit red communities their throwing in with Keller entailed.  

But Keller is conservative, right? Does not his affirmation of Westminster prove it? Were SBTS, SEBTS, and MBTS conservative prior to the conservative resurgence? Their professors signed conservative Baptist confessions, did they not? But those institutions were in fact run by liberals. How did Keller’s Westminster-affirming, pro-traditional marriage, and pro-life convictions assert themselves at Redeemer in Manhattan? They provided a safe place for pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion Kirsten Powers, who, only after years sitting under Timothy Keller’s preaching and his wife Kathy’s Bible study, discovered Redeemer’s formal stance on these issues—discovered accidentally and not from the Kellers. 

When winsomeness-to-Blue-community, third-wayism, triumph of the therapeutic finds “success” measured in buildings, bodies, and bucks in seeker world, controversial conservative moral and political convictions tend to disappear from ongoing branding, messaging, and platforming. How mobilizable would Kirsten Powers have been by Redeemer to attend an annual PCA assembly to defend its conservative moral stands? How interested would Redeemer be in ever mobilizing for such a purpose? 

Not much, I reckon. Because seeker-sensitivity and mobilization of conservatives are not friends. 

The seeker church posture has produced an increasingly homogenized, generic, “mere” Christianity, hesitant to take public moral stands or to preach repentance in which actual sins named in the Bible are named in sermons. Exceptions are select attitudes and behaviors condemned by the Democrat Party—thus, evangelical preachers receive “permission” from the Democrat Party to oppose racism and to never abandon “care” for the poor (which both Kellers said tends to result in voting Democrat). At the same time, Keller claimed to center the gospel of Jesus Christ, but without giving voice to Jesus’ politically incorrect teaching regarding divorce in Matthew 19. 

Seeker strategies are cousins to protestant liberalism—assessment of what potential audiences will find relevant, helpful, off-putting, or unjust exerts outsized influence over the place given to what the Bible teaches, including what Jesus himself taught. 

Seeker strategies have produced the Christian-consumer/winner-take-all dynamics that have produced more mega-churches but are ill-suited to both the cultivation of strong denominational identity and the advance of the gospel in America. Seeker world favors and rewards “mere Christian,” non-denominational sensibilities. A kind of spiritual Wal-Mart-ization that edges out Mom-and-Pop outfits. 

A Convention-in-Name-Only? If They Even Let Us Keep the Name…

Nowhere does non-denominationalism display its market cachet more potently than within the largest denomination in America. Southern Baptists have been running from their name and their history since the earliest days of non-denominationalism’s rise. 

If the Baptist name embarrasses us, how likely are congregants to lay out money and time to vote at the annual Southern Baptist Convention? Moves to exclude the name from the denomination itself occur with regularity. Is it just a matter of time? 

Denominationally unaffiliated baptistic congregations deploy their non-denominational status as a central component of their branding, while Southern Baptist congregations increasingly do what they can to hide their affiliated status. Messaging within evangelical churches reflects the conviction that denominational identity is a non-starter for those they wish to attract and retain. Not a recipe for a constituency’s fervor for expensive summer treks for the sake of the Baptist name.

Denominational education has collapsed in local churches, and increasing numbers of SBC seminary graduates exhibit little knowledge of or interest in the Baptist name, Baptist history, or the importance and mission of SBC institutions today. Theological students shopped for and purchased a theological product, and that’s about it. 

Facing an unavoidable demographic cliff, the SBC seminaries aim to make their schools as attractive to non-denominational students as possible. They need the dollars. And thanks to pastors’ embrace of seeker strategies, SBC-affiliated churches do as well. The contrast between the Southern Baptist rank-and-file in 2026 and those mobilized so effectively during The Controversy could hardly be more stark. 

How the Non-Denominational Ethos Disenfranchised True Baptist Believers

The millions of Southern Baptists today are beneficiaries of a proud legacy, a historically impressive denominational inheritance, and a unique potential for national and global influence about which more and more of them know less and less or nothing. 

The disenfranchisement is deep but unrecognized, and establishment elites who can turn out SBC employees to vote their paychecks are not likely to see a problem here. SBC’s entry into the seeker world ensured the disenfranchisement of politically conservative Southern Baptists as sure as the growth of the federal government ensured the bluing of the Commonwealth of Virginia. 

But nota bene, seeker sensitivity as a strategy for the advancement of the gospel has failed. It has not reversed the decline of Christianity in America or in the Southern Baptist Convention—rather, it has attended and arguably has facilitated that decline. But seeker world has “benefited”—measured in buildings, bodies, and bucks—those few congregations that manage to “win” in the Darwinian struggle to reach mega-church status and wield resources concomitant with that status—resources without which, increasingly, non-mega churches cannot compete. But knowing no other way to “do church” other than the seeker way, non-mega churches labor futilely to approximate what mega-churches provide as best they can as they decline.

The population of church goers, now affirmed in the seeker world as consumers of the spiritual products and services that suit them, hop around in great numbers from church to church and validate their acquaintances’ hopping as well. It’s all they’ve known. Pastors and pew-sitters alike prioritize as essential the novel mega-church experiences that both are conditioned to expect. All it takes for a medium- or small-sized church to lose a family is for little Johnny to tell Mommy he wants to go to his friend’s church, with the bigger, better, shinier, and more exciting “Christian” stuff.

Some mega-church pastors call this pattern of spiritual consumerism “kingdom advance.” Such reasoning buttressed J.D. Greear’s abortive attempt to infiltrate, subvert, and seize control of an independent Bible church in North Carolina. No Protestant tradition boasts a more biblical or more effective means of addressing the spiritual immaturity that church-hopping displays than Baptists do, namely, local church covenanting, a legacy Baptists must work to retrieve, a subject I’ll explore in an upcoming post. 

Surrounded by thousands of voices “lifting Him high” on a given Sunday seems to justify the worship team’s declaration that “God is doing a great work among us.” And perhaps He is. But a ten-thousand-foot view of all the shopping and hopping while the faith wanes in America suggests a blind and duped rearrangement of spiritual consumer deckchairs on a sinking ecclesial Titanic. 

The expectations bred by seeker strategies normalize mega-church appetites and produce an impressive but ultimately elusive mirage of effectiveness for a minority of winners and exhausting defeat for the “less fit.” Meanwhile, few agendas prove more alien to seeker soil than does the cultivation of the denominational esprit de corps necessary to render congregants mobilizable. 

The Mobilizable Baptists of Yesteryear 

Generations of mobilizable Southern Baptists, once animated by vital denominational identity, are dying off. As they pass from this world, their collective memory of Southern Baptist pride, investment, belonging, and responsibility fades to the vanishing point.

Once upon a time, a robust denominational esprit de corps coursed through the souls of millions of Southern Baptists gathered on the Lord’s day for worship. That esprit de corps left them poised for strategic convention voting when threats to what they treasured and knew was theirs arose.

No one has better captured the loyalty-producing confessional, programmatic, and organizational mechanisms that gave rise to the now-dying Southern Baptist world than did David S. Dockery, the current president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Sections of his 2008 Southern Baptist Consensus and Renewal: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Proposal evoke memories of a denomination spiritually armed and ready to change the world.

Prior to the failures of theological nerve exhibited by the SBC since the rise of Donald Trump and the death of George Floyd, Southern Baptists bellowed out in beautiful unison from memory every stanza of Onward Christian Soldiers. We did so not only with confidence and gusto, but with the unshakeable conviction that we were in fact engaged in a righteous conflict with our own sins and for the deliverance of sin-blind, sin-bound, spiritually dead souls at home and abroad. We knew both the world and God were watching, and that the best we could do for the world meant seeking to please Him rather than them.  

Dockery traces out the dimensions and dynamics of Southern Baptist formation that produced such soldiers. The “Million More in ’54” campaign brought “750,000 people” into Southern Baptist churches. It was “one of the most significant programmatic and pragmatic emphases in the history of American Christianity.” Dockery continues:

“It was fairly easy at that time to identify what it meant to be a Southern Baptist. We generally knew what was expected of us—on Sundays and throughout the week. Sundays included Sunday school, staying for church (sometimes called staying for preaching), afternoon choir practice and Bible drills, training union, less formal church services in the evening, and then and after church fellowship. It was a very busy day, Wednesdays included suppers, prayer meetings, teachers and officers meetings, Sunbeams, Royal ambassadors, Girls Auxiliary committee meetings and choir practice. 

During the week there were outreach visitation, WSU, brotherhood, and other activities sandwiched where you could fit them on the calendar—along with church softball games, Vacation Bible school, Backyard study courses, and the inevitable multi–week revivals each fall and spring. It was exhausting growing up as a Southern Baptist.”

Of course, it was exhausting! We were soldiers! 

I was born into and immersed in the Southern Baptist world Dockery describes, and I was aware that there were millions just like me across the fruited plain and millions who’d gone before me whose bequeathment I was responsible for preserving and passing on with the Lord’s help. 

We Were Baptists. We Were Family. 

As a white southern male, son of a railroad worker in the South Carolina foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I was carried in my mother’s womb into Hayne Baptist Church, pushed in a stroller there, led in by the hand as soon as I could barely walk, preached to, signed up for RAs (Royal Ambassadors) Camp, participant in every Vacation Bible School, Thursday evening visitation,  revival service, Bible drill, and channeled into Sunday School where I and millions of Southern Baptists from their earliest memories were confronted with what we took for granted as standard for Baptists serious about following of Jesus—The Envelope.

These envelopes were delivered to all members of the Sunday school classes. As children we inserted into them our tithes of pennies, nickels, and quarters and faced the weekly checking or not of the boxes printed on the The Envelope’s exterior, noting if we were (1) present, (2) Bible brought, (3) lesson studied, (4) offering (those nickels and quarters!), (5) contacts (had we contacted at least one person and invited them to Sunday School in the past week?), and (6) worship attendance.

When I missed a week of  Sunday School due to illness, my teacher came to my home when I was well to teach the Sunday School lesson to me on a porch swing so I could earn my “pin” indicating perfect attendance for the year. Annually, just as certain as the Super Bowl or the Fourth of July, our pastor, as part of his required duties, attended the Southern Baptist Convention and reported on it to the entire congregation upon his return. He also reported on the goings on at the South Carolina State Baptist Convention and the Spartanburg County Baptist Association. 

What fruit did the labors of those Southern Baptists produce? The largest protestant denomination in America—that’s what. A denomination devoid of any instinct to flee from its heritage or its name. 

But what about that “mere Christianity” ostensibly so unifying and attractive? Once again, must not the fact that Christianity is in decline and demonstrably fractious undermine any notion that “mere Christianity” provides a sufficient and effective foundation for the advance of the kingdom? We may and ought and must believe a mere Christianity, but we cannot live in mere Christianity. 

We must live with and live out our obedience to Jesus Christ in actual, gathered communities of faith that carry the “baggage” that comes with owning a history with those folks and bearing a name that identifies our familial ties in Jesus Christ. 

As much as I love C.S. Lewis’ book bearing the title, in those days, we Southern Baptists were not “mere” anything. The word “mere” would likely have evoked in us the ascended Lord Jesus’ reprimand to the church at Laodicea for being lukewarm (Revelation 3:16).

Roger Scruton was right to insist that there is a level of patriotism below which, if a nation’s citizens fall, neither moral cohesion nor defence of the nation is maintainable. Likewise, though an intense and ugly denominational pride and partisanship sometimes springs up where denominational identity is nurtured, there is a line below which, if love of our convention and our heritage falls, will take mutual love and missional effectiveness down with it.

Back when Southern Baptists were soldiers serving in Jesus Christ’s army, a formidable juggernaut of Baptist influence arose on this continent, detectable across a staggering swath of geography connecting the two great oceans of the Western Hemisphere. 

Baptist territory extended from somewhere in the northern and easternmost reaches of the South and even north of the Mason-Dixon line, west and south to somewhere in Arizona and even creeping up and extending its tentacles discernibly into Southern California, producing discreet pockets of Baptist vitality there. 

A Southern Baptist family could set out across that land mass between southern Maryland and southern California, stop on a Sunday at any one of thousands of SBC churches, and step into a remarkably predictable ecclesial culture confident of being enveloped with belonging among strangers—because we were Southern Baptists; we weren’t “non” anything. 

That traveling family could with great confidence anticipate the portion of the Bible to be covered in Sunday School, singing from the Broadman Hymnal—hymns they, their parents, and grandparents had sung their entire lives. They’d recognize the basic order of worship to be followed, the version of the Bible (KJV) preached from, and myriad other familiar features of Southern Baptist decorum, speech, shared values, mission focus, hopes, and concerns that only a historically rooted and growing family of faith provides. 

And they were mobilizable.  

Remember Who You Are, My Baptist Brethren 

Nostalgia? Yes, and without apology—but not “mere” nostalgia. Our plunge into the seeker world has failed. While living memory of an undeniably healthier and more effective way of being Baptists exists, we should tap it while we can, retrieve what commends itself, and leave the non-denominational seeker experiment behind us. 

We need to be somebody, not just anybody or nobody, for the sake of winsomeness. 

Because their influence reached culturally totalizing proportions, church historian Martin Marty once called Southern Baptists “the Catholics of the South.” For those with eyes to see, a detectable “Southern Baptist” imprint rested upon every dimension of Southern life. Such cultural power accounts for Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the birthplace of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), being called the most Baptist Presbyterian Church in the land.

I took up marijuana in 1973 at the age of 13, absented myself from Hayne Baptist Church, and, in the wake of my 36-year-old mother’s death at 16, experimented with LSD and turned to intravenous drug use. During those profligate years, no one from the Baptist world ever asked me to attend an annual SBC convention to vote for a candidate who believed the Bible in order to prevent the election of one who did not. Nor to vote against a candidate more concerned that “the world is watching” than that “the Lord is watching.” 

But I have precisely zero doubt that had such a request been made, I would have moved heaven and earth to comply. That’s how deep Southern Baptist loyalty formed who I was. After perusing the first Bible concordance I’d ever seen at age 9, I was confused that Lottie Moon’s name did not appear there. I do not think I am alone. The sense of Southern Baptist belonging, pride, and responsibility was just that inescapable and motivating for many. If you doubt this, especially if you are under 50, I don’t blame you. But it’s true. 

Do we want an SBC that settles for serving as a gigantic, market-reactive provider of generic, increasingly politically correct, “spiritual” products and services to as many Christian-identified consumers as possible? 

If not, we’ll need to find a way to form a generation of Southern Baptists who cannot not be concerned with the SBC they own. Otherwise, effective promptings for needed change in the SBC will have to come from that “watching world” James Merritt fears and called the convention to fear. Such a state of affairs ought not to be. 

Last Resort Measures for Orlando 

So, where does that leave us as the 2026 Annual Meeting in just two months away rapidly approaches? Can the change candidate, Willy Rice, win in Orlando? If, following the model set by Danny Akin who endorsed Ed Litton for president in 2022, Albert Mohler endorses Rice in 2026, that could help, but maybe not enough to bring victory. 

Effective mobilization by local pastors will prove vital if we are to push Rice over the top.

Absent yesterday’s Southern Baptist army full of ready soldiers, I encourage pastors to designate the meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in this and subsequent years as an annual mission trip. Contemporary Southern Baptists might cock their heads like confused Cocker Spaniels if their pastor all of a sudden starts rattling on about the SBC every Sunday—but they’re used to being recruited to take mission trips. 

Capitalize on that. Recruit the full slate of messengers allowed for your congregation, educate them on the stakes, and hit the road for Jesus Christ and Southern Baptists this June.