Pastor Willy Rice addressed the Executive Committee this week for the first time as the President of the Southern Baptist Convention. His speech was a clarion call for renewal in our Convention, calling Southern Baptists to stand firm on our doctrinal convictions and make every effort to reach the world for Christ. 

You can watch his entire message beginning at 40:42 mark in the video below. If you care about the future of the SBC, his remarks are well worth your time.

He devoted part of his speech focusing on SBC renewal to the issue of organizational transparency. Among his remarks, Rice said the following:

“The issue of organizational transparency continues to be raised across our Convention and I have heard about it from many people. It’s really, though, an issue of trust. Many things in the last few years have served to erode trust in some quarters and the trajectory of the Cooperative Program is a trend we cannot ignore. I have said repeatedly when trust is low transparency should be high.”

“I know of few organizations anywhere that resist calls for transparency that are moving in the right direction at the same time.”

“Our entity leaders must welcome and encourage a robust level of oversight and our trustees have the responsibility to insist on it. Such calls for financial transparency are going to continue. They will not go away. We can either ignore them and increase the tension and erode the trust or lean into the issue and make sure that our Baptist people have the confidence they need to know that our institutions represent the best stewardship of funds toward the advancement of God’s kingdom.”

I first want to thank Pastor Willy for including this section in his speech. It is refreshing and encouraging to have a leader who will address the trust crisis in the SBC and engage in a conversation about fixing it, rather than just dismissing the question altogether. His remarks were forthright, fair, and honest, and I believe Southern Baptists of good will should join him in a search for solutions. 

He invited such collaboration, telling the Executive Committee, “I want to work with you and with every one of our leaders to strengthen and, in some cases, restore the great trust in our cooperative work. Without it the rope of sand that is the Cooperative Program will dissolve.”

I’ve spent the last three and a half years advocating for increased financial transparency in the SBC. The central aim of those efforts has been to restore trust so that the SBC can be effective in our Great Commission work. 

The fact that this conversation has been sustained for over three years demonstrates it is a real, critical issue for our churches. The fact that the sitting Southern Baptist Convention president made organizational transparency a significant part of his first Executive Committee speech demonstrates that it is an issue that is not going away, but rather gaining momentum.

However, over these years, messengers at the annual meeting have not shown an appetite for adopting my preferred mechanism for transparency, which utilizes the IRS Form 990 to give messengers what I called “990-level transparency.” While the Form 990 is the baseline standard for nonprofit financial disclosure, the fact that it uses a federal government form proved unappealing to messengers. I painstakingly tried to make the case that my motions would not have required filing anything with the federal government and therefore would pose no legal ramifications. However, messengers were unwilling to use it.

But this effort has never been about a particular mechanism. While I think the 990 would have been the most prudent tool to use, I accept the fact that messengers do not currently want to make use of it. And that’s okay. 

This effort has always primarily been about restoring trust in the Convention. The very first article I wrote after the 2023 Annual Meeting in New Orleans was centered on the idea that we have a trust crisis in our Convention and that we need to restore it. I thought 990-level transparency was the best way to do it, but seeing that others do not agree, I’m willing to move beyond it as a matter of messaging and framing for the debate.

I don’t care so much about being right as much as I do about restoring trust. I want to be a part of a Southern Baptist Convention where churches like mine can write their check to the Cooperative Program willingly, gladly, and without reservations. I lament that, under current conditions in our Convention, so many churches feel the need to disengage from the Cooperative Program, designate giving to specific entities, or give their missions dollars to other organizations outside of the Convention that they believe they can trust more than the SBC. 

Willy Rice was correct in his speech to the EC. The issue of organizational transparency is not going away. I don’t intend to let it go away. Rather, I want to lead us toward a solution where everybody wins. I want to lead us toward a solution where churches trust our institutions, and where churches gladly fund our institutions so that they can carry out their Great Commission tasks with maximal effectiveness.

Too often, these discussions have turned adversarial. Us vs. them, David vs. Goliath, Churches vs. institutions, and messengers vs. entity heads. Part of this adversarial posture has been due to the dismissiveness of our entities toward the concerns of churches and messengers. The perceived attitude has been that churches ought to send their money but not ask questions.

But if I’m honest with myself, I have also contributed to the adversarial character of this debate at times. I’ve picked up my slingshot and hurled stones to rally messengers to vote for my proposed amendments.

But I believe there is a better way. And that way is to work not against one another, but with one another to build consensus and find a workable solution.

Toward that end, I want to do two things.

First, I want to propose a small suite of common sense transparency initiatives that, I believe, would be broadly supported within the SBC and would go a long way towards rebuilding trust. Here are a few examples:

• Every trustee should be informed (and not have to request) the total compensation of their entity’s CEO, and the full board should approve that total compensation package with full knowledge of the number. Entities should be required to attest in the annual Accountability Letter that each trustee was informed of the total compensation package and that the board approved the compensation by majority vote.
• Restore the language of the previous business and financial plan to include Convention approval for outside funding and reporting to the Convention of the same. This reporting does not need to include private individual donors, but should include funding from governments, foundations, and other private organizations.

More could be offered. Stay tuned in the days to come for additional suggestions and proposals. But these two would go a long way to begin fixing the transparency problem and trust deficit.

Second, I want to invite entity collaboration in finding a workable solution. Too much of this debate has occurred indirectly. We talk about one another, but not to one another. Grassroots transparency advocates like me write about the issues online, while those in the institutions talk amongst themselves. 

I think we would make a lot more progress if we sat down together and worked through the issues. It’s easy to assume that I am just a discontented dissident who only steps up to the microphone at the Annual Meeting to cause trouble or that I’m just envious of large salaries. It would be just as it is easy for me to assume that an entity head is only acting in pure self-interest. I want to be done with assumptions and work towards solutions. 

I believe Baptists are at their best when they’re talking about issues over a plate of BBQ, rather than talking past each other online or dismissing a legitimate question from the Annual Meeting platform.

Therefore, I want to extend an invitation to any entity head willing to have a conversation with me to work towards a solution. I will travel to you at my own expense. Or, I will host you here in Travelers Rest and find a way for you to minister to our church and community while you are here. Or, I am willing to travel at my own expense and meet with you as a group at the next meeting of the Great Commission Council. Or, I will get on a Zoom call with you (but you’d have to provide your own BBQ in that instance).

In other words, I will accommodate you in any way I can to be able to get together to work together toward a commonsense solution so that we can begin building back the trust that fuels our Great Commission work.

This need not be an issue where either I win or the entities win. Rather, it must be an issue where Southern Baptists win, where our shared gospel mission wins. Because in the end, this issue isn’t about any of us. It’s about discipling the nations for the glory of King Jesus.

I believe we can all work together toward that end.

But it takes trust. The question is not whether we have a trust problem or not. The question is whether we will work together to solve it.