When I worked for the Indiana Convention in the late 1980s, I got better acquainted with the work of the “Hoosier Poet,” James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), whose poem, “Little Orphant Annie,” came to mind as I reflected on our recent SBC gathering in Dallas.  It tells the story of a girl who came to help a family with their housekeeping. After the “supper things” were done, she’d tell the kids “witch tales” around the kitchen fire.

It runs four verses, the second of which sketches the plight of a naughty kid:

Onc’t they was a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,—
So when he went to bed at night, away up stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wasn’t there at all!
An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,
An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found was thist his pants an’ roundabout–
An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you
             Ef you
                Don’t
                   Watch
                      Out!

Of course, at every Annual Meeting, disputes arise over a wide range of denominational concerns, and the parties all say, in effect, “You’d better not go down that road” or “I’d rethink that if I were you”— whether the topic is a budget, a bylaw, a policy, or a plan. Indeed, there are grave consequences in play on a number of issues, but many are like my wife’s kind admonition to avoid fried or baked goods after 8:00 p.m.—a heartburn alert. 

On the other hand, sometimes the warning is over the top, a boogeyman tale that plays on emotion more than reason.

The Sanchez Bylaw

Case in point: When a sizable majority once again was ready to vote on the Law/Sanchez motion to amend the bylaws to exclude churches that designated women staffers as pastors, Executive Committee President and CEO Jeff Iorg stepped to the platform mic to raise the specter of legal backlash if we did this. 

He argued that, because the Credentials Committee was being sued for a judgment call they made on one issue (re: the question of defamation over a sex-abuse claim), they could be sued over their calls where the evidence was as clear-cut as posted staff positions on a church website. So, as we gathered at his feet around the fire, he warned us we’d better not trifle with those lawyer goblins! They might snatch us up, leaving only our pants and roundabouts.

In the following days, Denny Burk was quick to remind us that we’d already passed such bylaws regarding churches that affirmed homosexuality and practiced racism, and that we’d not been damaged legally. And, as Juan Sanchez reminded us, anticipating the Iorg maneuver, “We are not a people governed by attorneys. We are a people who are ruled by a book.”

Through it all, I couldn’t grasp Iorg’s logic. Was he saying, analogously, that the highway department should fear litigation over the color of their dividing lines because they were sued over a bridge collapse? Does this mean that if you’ve ever been sued for anything, then you should be paralyzed with fear that you could be sued for everything else?

But haven’t the courts decided that, on theological matters, they’d leave things to the churches? Do we really think they might rule that we had to accommodate women pastors? Naw. And if they did, what a great opportunity to make a righteous ruckus over it and press the courts to make a First Amendment stand, to the delight of Bible believers across the land, many of them in denominations who’ve gone wobbly on this matter.

To be sure, somebody could bring suit. That’s trivially true. We’re used to all sorts of whack-a-mole legal action. It’s like infant baptism: “Do I believe in it? Heck, I’ve seen it.” And boy, have we seen it and it and it. And any claim that such might be coming down the pike reminds me of vacuous horoscope predictions such as “You will find an opportunity this week,” or the sort of thing you get from nightclub mentalists and TV religious hucksters: “Wait! I’m sensing there’s someone out there who has hip pain. Am I right? Yes!” 

Back in 2024, CEO Iorg conjured up a legal goblin, along with nine other goblins, in his privileged screed against the amendment (privileged in that it went out with a Baptist Press imprimatur). Along with others, I ventured a popgun response from the sidelines, and I was pleased to see the amendment’s good showing in Indianapolis. Yes, it fell just short of the two-thirds needed for a by-law adjustment, but I think it would have done better if not for the zealous and in-the-early-days-more-trusted lobbying of the new CEO, as well as the pleas of some other denominational heavyweights, including my own state executive director. 

Why in the world did Iorg spend so much capital on this unpopular position? 

Relax. We Got This.

At the Dallas convention, I watched him chide the majority for their bylaw enthusiasm and saw him swat away serious calls for financial transparency.  Before long, it began to occur to me that, in their eyes, the real goblins were not the lawyers, but rather us, the messengers.

Our time to talk was scattered among generous program allotments for the entities, which told us how wonderful they were.  One way or the other, we were encouraged to believe that we should keep our paws off their business, as in “We got this!”

But I think that train has left the station. If recent history is any witness, they don’t really “got” this.

Trustees brought us the likes of the litigious Adam Greenway and Johnny Hunt, who sicced attorneys on us when they lost their jobs for bad behavior; who put us in the financial trick bag over the Houston Chronicle’s slanderous hustle, waiving attorney-client privilege and doling out absurd millions for a sketchy report and a specious huff-and-puff over a Baptist Press story; who, at NAMB, used the “Great Commission Resurgence” to dismantle the venerable national-state-associational cooperative agreements that daily generated three mutually-established, church plants across the land; and who sat pat while recent ERLC heads went their merry way beyond, below, and against the messengers’ preferences. 

The ERLC

Speaking of the ERLC, I picked up on another messengers-as-goblins warning: “Don’t you knuckleheads dare pull the plug on this vital entity. This would leave the SBC bereft of a national voice. You can forget any future impact on the great causes of our day?”

Three things in response.

First, had Willy Rice’s motion passed, the ERLC would have had a year to get its act together. Under current leadership, serious renewal (as opposed to what we called “eyewash” in the army) is not a given. But, as Rice explained, there would have been a chance.  

Second, if the shut-down-the-ERLC motion were to carry two years in a row, the Convention could reestablish it not long down the road, with new directives and new management. It would give us all the time to catch our breath and retool for a fresh start.

Third, motions (and resolutions) alone have great power. When I got back to Nashville, I saw a front-page, above-the-fold headline in The Tennessean declaring that we’d come out against gay marriage. (And kudos to President Pressley for appointing a Walker-led Resolutions Committee that gave us good ones this year.) Religion writers across the land watch us like a hawk, ready to cover our votes, whether up or down. When I was VP for Convention Relations for the Executive Committee back in the early 1990s, I’d start getting calls from the papers in April, asking what was cooking that year. (Most religion writers had limited travel budgets, so they were interested in going to the denominational gatherings with the greatest stir, but they’d still follow from afar.) 

On top of this, we used a clippings service that provided us upwards of two dozen items a day, showing how USN&WR, Orange County Register, Orlando Sentinel, or AP had talked about us. And I’d get calls during the year, wondering whether we’d ever spoken through resolutions on such things as the disinterment of Native American bones to make way for construction. 

I’m just saying that our resolutions and other actions make a big splash, even without the ERLC. A majority vote for the Rice motion would not have been the impact killer we might think. That goblin wouldn’t snatch us up if we took a break.

Albert McClellan’s EC History

When I joined the Executive Committee staff in 1991, I read Albert McClellan’s history of the EC (1917-1984), its narrative covering the Convention itself: 

From the very beginning, its annual sessions were democratically oriented business meetings, conducted in strict parliamentary fashion. It was popularly perceived as a deliberative body, and most of its work was done in five or six days. . . The limited agenda and the small size of the annual meetings made extensive deliberations possible. . . Leisurely paced meetings lasting almost a week allowed more time for group involvement in problem solving . . . For nearly four decades, the Convention continued as a fully deliberative body, devoting most of its time to business, and debating every question, many of them at great length. As the years passed and Convention attendance increased, it became very difficult to maintain the early deliberative character. During the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century, some leaders frantically tried to keep the meetings as fully deliberative as they had been at the beginning. But overwhelmed by huge crowds and mammoth meeting rooms, the Convention abandoned its former ways and surrendered to more modern methods. It did not, however, abandon its parliamentary character.

Sure enough, things got unwieldy as numbers grew and special committees (each bringing reports) proliferated, including those for Temperance, Mountain Schools, and Papal Missions. Back then, fundraising was sort of a Wild West enterprise, and there were shortfalls in SBC efforts to gather money for their cooperative work. Those were the days of the 1928 Carnes Defalcation, when a Home Mission Board employee embezzled nearly a million dollars (when a million dollars was a staggering sum). 1933 marked a low point in mission giving, and enthusiasm for the Executive Committee, founded in 1917, was so weak that the first president, Austin Crouch, would take his resignation letter to the Convention each year so he could take the fall if necessary. And the murmuring went public, e.g., in a 1940 issue of the Western Recorder (Kentucky Baptists’ state paper), Victor I. Masters wrote, “Free discussion of S. B. C. messengers is not wanted. It is practically destroyed.”

Look, I agree our gatherings are too large and the items of concern too plentiful to give each one a full hearing with thoughtful give and take, especially in our two-day gathering. (I remember when those of us on the 1989 Resolutions Committee decided to not bring forward a messenger’s proposal that we support NASA to keep alive the possibility of evangelizing outer space). And, yes, it’s good to hear and see updates from our entities. I’ve given some myself. But the ratio of platform talk to messenger input is more than five to one. The point is that there are rocks on both sides, and it seems to me that we’ve steered too close to the treacherous shores of meekness before officious schedulings and pronouncements.

On the current model, if we make suggestions or raise concerns in three-minute snippets, we do so in the face of hours of warm PR from the platform, generously marinated in what I’ll call LOZCELCOOP— “Language of Zion, Celebration, Cooperation” (cf. the reporters’ term for Nelson Rockefeller’s, 1960s, political habit of filling his speeches with BOMFOG, “Brotherhood of Man, Family of God”). Good stuff, but it can slide into vain, camouflaging repetition.

Burns’s Financial Transparency Motion

Speaking of rhetorical strategies, I think I see an old debater’s ploy in Dr. Iorg’s deliverances: Flood the zone with dubious claims, confident that there’s no time or place for the opponent to respond to them, thereby giving the illusion of victory. Witness, above, his 10-point, anti-bylaw “sermon” through Baptist Press in May of 2024.

Witness this June his 8-point barrage against Rhett Burns’s transparency motion. In the hall, it struck me as confusing, frequently vacuous, and, in places, self-contradictory. I’ve gone back and played the tape a couple of times (at live.sbcannualmeeting.net), and it doesn’t get any better. 

The best I can tell, he says that:

1. In a decades-old case, SWBTS admirably fought off this sort of reporting (Form 990) because it would signal subjection to the government. But don’t articles of incorporation, adherence to fire codes, respect for E-Verify standards in employment, completion of FICA box on the W-2, etc. “signal” subjection? And maybe, back then, SWBTS got worked up over nothing.

2. Trustees are beholden to state standards (e.g., SBTS to KY), and these might conflict with the duty to SBC standards, or something. Huh? And didn’t you say we shouldn’t be signaling subjection to the government? I’m lost.

3. You’re asking for information that the messengers can’t change. The request would go back to the trustees, so you would gain nothing. Say what? Wouldn’t it count for something that the trustees felt fresh pressure to get things right?

4. It raises concerns over salary inflation. What do you mean? If somebody sees somebody else getting more, then they’d complain until they got more? It’s not a problem in the US Armed Forces, which publishes salary scales, from the lowest, newly enlisted private, to the four-star general with decades in service. There are a lot of lost people in the military, and if they can handle it, our redeemed employees should be able to cope. And, besides, maybe it would produce deflation, in that some embarrassment could help moderate some high salaries.

5. These concerns are based on “myths” that some salaries are inflated? But there’s nothing like transparency to deflate myths.

6. There’s no outcry from trustees, so things are cool. This is like buying a second copy of the same paper to see if what the first copy said was true. When the issue is proper trustee oversight, you don’t settle it by asking the trustees if they are doing a good job. And many of us who’ve served as trustees—I in the late 1980s at SBTS—can report that the boards’ executive committees typically run things with assent expected from the vast majority of their fellow board members, who’ve been conditioned to listen and learn while enjoying the goodies that go along with the position and avoiding the stigma that comes with dissent. On this model, trustees can serve more as entity staff than deeply informed overseers.

 7. The boards of most non-profit organizations are self-selecting, but we’re different, so you’re comparing apples with oranges. Here in Tennessee, the formerly-Baptist Belmont trustees select their own; not so at Union and Carson-Newman, schools with boards elected by the state convention. Both kinds submit 990s. You find the same mix in the profit-seeking world; for example, Ford Motor Company is not self-selecting; the shareholders are in charge. What’s your point?

8. SBC transparency is “more robust” than what you find outside? So, outsiders don’t use Form 990 either? How vague can you get?

So, this is the sort of stuff fed to us from the platform. It’s delivered with snap, crackle, and pop. Yes, indeed, it can produce a sugar rush, but the nutrition is doubtful. Or, to save time, the platform could also toss out a flashbang grenade to stun a goblin.

On Tuesday morning, I moved that “the messengers direct the newly elected president of the Convention to appoint a task to study the issue of financial transparency among our entities and the Executive Committee.” The next morning, we were told that it was out of order since the Medes & Persians, Bogomils & Albigensians, or somebody had determined that the motion somehow directed something or other for the entity boards to do, or whatever. We heard something about “unanimous opinion,” “legal counsel,” and “parliamentarians” (termed “the professionals”). Wow! Maybe they’d all spied out the high-handed implication that entities would need to cooperate with the task force and thus lose their mojo (clearly a matter of raw contempt for Bylaw 26.b). Apparently, the SBC just dodged a bullet. 

I’ve been speaking English most of my life, and I still can’t understand how instructions to the president equal instructions to entities. But that’s just me. 

Not Our Daddy

In 1951, Porter Routh [whose wife was Ruth Routh] became head of the Executive Committee and served until 1979. His nine “personal principles for administration” included, “I will speak only when the Convention has spoken, and I will not establish myself as the voice of all Southern Baptists.” Unlike Porter Routh, who (with a journalistic background) served as our reporter, Iorg has chosen to lecture us, pastor us (as with his church in the Northwest), shepherd us (as he did at a seminary), or perhaps act as our umpire (a field in which he’s done some work). But no, on the contrary, he’s not supposed to be our daddy in any of these ways.

To be fair, perhaps Brother Iorg is not our Orphant Annie after all. Maybe he’s one of us kids seated at her feet. The real Annies, the attorneys, have him quaking in his pjs right along with the rest of us.  If so, a word from Herschel Hobbs is in order. As he told it, a man was asked why he whistled furiously as he walked through the graveyard at night. Was he afraid that the dead would hurt him? “No,” he replied, “I’m afraid they’ll make me hurt myself.” 

Problem is, if Jeff gets the willies, then we all get hurt.