We Don’t Need Better Arguments, We Need Better Numbers at the Annual Meeting. Here’s How We Get Them.
Much has already been said about the 2025 Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas, Texas. Rather than recap what happened, I will instead discuss where the SBC Reformers should go from here.
If you want to read a detailed analysis of the Annual Meeting, including an insightful description of the four major factions in the SBC, I suggest reading Michael Clary’s excellent piece, “The Status Quo Convention: Six Takeaways from Dallas” (and you should, since I will be using his analysis of the “Platform, Loyalists, Reformers, and Normies”).
Where Do We Go From Here?
For those of us who recognize deep-rooted issues within the Southern Baptist Convention, the voting results in Dallas were disappointing. So, where do we go from here? Do we throw in the towel and give up on the Convention? Or do we regroup, refocus, and try again next year?
The SBC remains the largest and most conservative Protestant denomination in America, a powerhouse for the Kingdom of God through its institutions and cultural influence. If we abandoned it now, we would be ceding it to those who will drive it into the ground. This is not the first time the SBC has gone through major turmoil, and it won’t be the last. Institutions often suffer from weak leaders and mission drift. What’s needed now is a remnant of courageous churches willing to stay, labor, and lead the charge to recover our Baptist distinctives and reform the Convention for good.
Although the Annual Meeting was disappointing in many ways, we can take solace in the fact that momentum is on our side. For example, despite the ERLC’s best efforts to manipulate the vote, a whopping 43% of Southern Baptists were dissatisfied enough with the ERLC to vote for its abolishment. In the wake of that vote, Brent Leatherwood resigned. That’s a win for the Reformers and gives us hope for a better future at the ERLC.
Increasingly, Southern Baptists are awakening to the reality of poor governance and theological drift within the Convention. But continuing to pursue the same strategies that have failed in recent years would be insanity. As Rhett Burns just warned, with yet another Platform-led effort to perpetuate a staggering lack of financial transparency, the Cooperative Program continues on a steep decline and has possibly even entered a death spiral.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer a few reflections on what true reform will require—and what practical next steps could look like for those prepared to engage in this hard yet necessary work.
The Key to Reform
The most straightforward path for any faction to reshape the SBC, intentionally or otherwise, is to win the SBC presidency for several consecutive years. This was the successful strategy of the Conservative Resurgence in the 1980s. It has also contributed, in more recent years, to many of the Convention’s current issues after six years of the Greear, Litton, and Barber presidencies. If it took the liberal wing of the SBC (at least) six years to get us into this mess, it will take us at least six years to get out of it. If the first year of Pressley’s presidency was “year one,” we just officially entered year two. Which means there is still a lot of work to be done.
But how exactly does this work?
The SBC president appoints the Committee on Committees, which nominates the Committee on Nominations, which in turn selects trustees for SBC entities. These trustees ultimately choose entity presidents, leaders who serve without term limits. Therefore, the most viable path to new leadership is to secure a critical mass of appointments on the boards of trustees who will be willing to hold their entities and entity heads accountable to the mission of the SBC, and even remove and replace entity heads if necessary.
Through this chain of appointments, the SBC presidency offers a powerful lever to reshape SBC leadership and institutional culture within a decade.
For example, how did the ERLC come to be led by such problematic presidents as Russell Moore and Brent Leatherwood for the last decade? It’s because the board of trustees at the ERLC allowed it. To ensure that doesn’t happen again, we need to elect SBC presidents who will select nominees for the crucial committees that trickle down through the SBC structure, resulting in more and more Jon Whiteheads on the ERLC board over time.
And this applies to every entity in the SBC. We need years of rock-solid, reform-minded SBC presidents going forward who will fundamentally change the composition of boards overseeing the SBC entities that are out of step with the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, compromising with wokeness, egalitarianism, and other worldly ideologies, and resisting common-sense measures like increased financial transparency.
The Keys to the Key: Education and Mobilization
If winning the presidency for consecutive years is the key to reforming the SBC, the “keys” to the key are 1) education and 2) mobilization of messengers.
First, we need to find the best ways to educate Southern Baptists on the problems besetting the Convention and why returning to our Baptist distinctives is the best way forward. Education can be broken down into two main components: content and reach. Fortunately, numerous groups are providing high-quality content to Southern Baptists, including Founders Ministries, Christ Over All, and, of course, the Center for Baptist Leadership.
However, content alone isn’t enough. We also need greater reach. Many Reformers attending the SBC are on Twitter or connected with someone who is. But how do we reach pastors and laymen who aren’t online? It’s time to tap into our associational meetings, local networks, and more traditional methods of communication that were harnessed during the Conservative Resurgence.
The Reformers also need to build bridges with the Loyalists to drive change. If the Reformers are going to win the vote for the presidency, we need to forge a strong partnership with those who have decades of credibility in the SBC. Reformers often have fresh eyes to see the problems, but could benefit from the Loyalists’ knowledge and relationships. A Reformer-Loyalist alliance would provide a wonderful opportunity for SBC statesmen, such as Albert Mohler, to cement their conservative legacy, and for others to help the SBC course correct before they find themselves on the wrong side when it is too late.
Second, we must mobilize our side. When given time and opportunity to make our case, Reformers win over rank-and-file Southern Baptists nine times out of ten. However, the difficulty in executing SBC reform lies in the home-field advantage of the SBC Establishment. Many who work for the SBC entities are required to attend the convention or can have their trip paid for, which makes it much easier for the Platform to mobilize its base. In 2021, the Washington Post reported that NAMB mobilized as many as 150 church planters to support Ed Litton’s candidacy (whose wife worked for NAMB). When you factor in SBC employees, their families, and their affiliated churches, you could easily account for several thousand loyal Platform voters. With attendance hovering around 10,000 in recent years, even a built-in advantage of 3,000 votes becomes a major impediment to enacting large-scale changes, especially when votes require a two-thirds majority.
Despite the Establishment’s built-in advantage, the Reformers came incredibly close to enacting our preferred changes. If you analyze the two major motions with a ballot count that fell short this year, you can see we only needed to mobilize a few hundred more people from our side to win those votes.
For the vote to abolish the ERLC, we only needed to mobilize 925 additional messengers.
And for the Law-Sanchez Amendment, 961 additional messengers.
Even more encouraging: Fewer than 10% of SBC churches are currently sending messengers to the Annual Meeting, and most churches don’t fill their full allotment. That means there’s enormous untapped potential.
That raises the question: How do we get more messengers to the Convention? How can we modify the incentive structure to encourage church members to attend the convention? Although much work remains to be done on this question, I would like to present two ideas here.
1) Tap into Local Association meetings.
Reform-minded Southern Baptists should prioritize attending local associational meetings and networking with the associations in the state hosting the next Convention. Focusing on educating the pastors and lay leaders of these churches will be the best use of our time, as churches within driving distance of the convention are far more likely to attend. At the 2025 SBC meeting in Dallas, messengers from Texas accounted for 29.4% of attendees.
The 2026 Southern Baptist Convention will be held in Orlando, Florida. Florida alone boasts over 2,500 Southern Baptist churches and more than 40 associations. If the Reformers only need about 900 extra messengers mobilized to the Convention, what better place to start than with these Florida Baptist Associations, whose churches likely agree with us on the issues? Again, fewer than 10% of churches are sending messengers, and most churches are not sending as many messengers as they are eligible to send.
On a recent Zoom call with SBC pastors, the Center for Baptist Leadership asked them to ask themselves, “Who’s Your 10?” That is, who are the 10 pastors that you can connect with over the next six months who haven’t been coming to the Annual Meeting that you can convince to go to Orlando?
If even 100 SBC pastors across the southeast committed to recruiting 10 more churches to send messengers, for a total of 1,000 previously unrepresented churches sending approximately 2,000 new messengers, all dedicated to voting for real change, the Reformers could carry just about every major vote and certainly be the driving force behind electing a next SBC president who will push hard to address real problems.
Which brings me to a second idea.
2) Launch a “Cooperative Program Stewardship Fund” at your local church.
Beyond a lack of education about the SBC, many pastors and laypeople can’t afford to attend the annual meeting. Flights, hotels, and meals can easily push the cost above $500 per person. But what if churches decided to allocate some of the money they give to the Cooperative Program as a travel stipend for their members to serve as messengers at the Convention? Even modest financial support could dramatically increase the number of messengers a church sends.
A Cooperative Program Stewardship Fund is easy to implement because it does not require your church to bring in any additional money; it simply requires allocating it differently. This approach is effective for two main reasons. First, it ensures your church uses its voice to influence how CP dollars are being used. Second, it applies soft pressure for messengers to enact reforms as total CP giving is tied to stewardship concerns. If churches are not comfortable decreasing their CP giving, they could raise special funds for messengers or commit to covering particular costs such as travel or lodging.
Conclusion
Much more can and should be said about how best to reach and mobilize Southern Baptists for Convention reform. The trek ahead of us is long and difficult, but we trust in the One who is in control of all things. He calls us to listen to His voice and trust Him. But He also calls us to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3) and to be good stewards of that which He has entrusted to us (Matthew 25:14-30). And if you’re in the SBC, you have a responsibility before both God and your church to do the work of stewarding the direction of America’s largest Protestant denomination.
So, let us be faithful in contending for a better SBC, put in the work to educate and mobilize more messengers, and trust the Lord with the outcome.
Editor’s Note: This is an edited version of an article originally published on Dustin DeVito’s Substack.
