The Annual Meeting is a Business Meeting. Baptists Would Do Well to Remember That.
Last week, I received an email kicking off “The Road to Dallas,” in which Jonathan Howe, spokesman for the SBC Executive Committee, invited all Southern Baptists to gather in Dallas for the 2025 Southern Baptist Convention’s Annual Meeting.
In this first part of a two-part series, I want to echo his general call to come to Dallas. Specifically, I want to urge Southern Baptists (and especially pastors) who care about the doctrine and mission of the Convention to view attending the Southern Baptist Convention’s Annual Meeting as a “mission trip” for the good of over 45,000 churches, 13,471 seminary students, 3,566 IMB missionaries, and 6,300 NAMB missionaries and chaplains.
In what follows here (Part 1), I will answer two simple questions about the SBC. First, what is the Southern Baptist Convention’s Annual Meeting? Second, why should you prioritize attending the Annual Meetings in general?
In Part 2, I will give five reasons why you should go to Dallas this year. These reasons will include an emphasis on the goodness of the Southern Baptist Convention when properly understood, the necessity for conservative Southern Baptists to attend the Convention yearly, and the urgency of going to Dallas this year to attend to several critical matters in SBC life.
When it comes to Southern Baptist attendance and engagement at the Annual Meeting, I fear we are in a similar position as the Green Bay Packers on that first day of training camp in 1961, when Coach Vince Lombardi held up a football and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football!”
We need to return to the fundamentals. We need to go back to “page one of the playbook” on what our Convention is and why we gather for business once a year.
So, gentlemen, this is the Southern Baptist Convention’s Annual Meeting.
What Is the Annual Meeting?
Before I attended my first SBC, I was told by a friend, the son of an “SBC-lifer,” that the SBC Annual Meeting is part business meeting, part revival, and part circus. At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of that comment. However, upon attending my first Annual Meeting, I quickly discovered his assessment was correct.
On the first day of the 2006 Convention, amid the hotels and coliseum of Greensboro, North Carolina, I watched Paige Patterson and Albert Mohler square off to talk about Calvinism. That was something of a circus. On the second day, I saw the election of Frank Paige as SBC president. That “business” decision, for those who remember, was both unexpected and somewhat controversial. And on the third day, with the smell of popcorn in the arena, there was a convention sermon by Fred Luther that was deeply edifying.
In all, the Southern Baptist Convention really was part revival, part business meeting, part circus. And for anyone who is in the Southern Baptist Convention, this two-day assembly is something that everyone should attend—but not just once for the “experience.” For, in fact, the purpose of the Convention is not merely worship or fellowship; it is the way thousands of Southern Baptists work together to do more good than they could do on their own.
That’s right. It’s a time to work. The Annual Meeting is not a vacation. It should not be a circus. It should not be primarily viewed as a time of “spiritual revival.” That might offend some Southern Baptist sensibilities, but it’s true.
Why? Because the Annual Meeting is, first and foremost, a business meeting.
It is a profound act of stewardship that directs the eleven entities of the Convention on how to do business in accordance with our statement of faith and the will of the messengers for the rest of the year. By means of reports, motions, resolutions, and the various elections of officers, the messengers of the Convention communicate their will through a (usually) well-ordered give and take between the platform and the floor.
While there are always challenges with this process and ways to improve it, this is the way the Convention directs its affairs. For anyone who is Southern Baptist, this meeting is not an inconsequential part of the cooperation; it is a vital part of directing missions, missionaries, seminaries, and other agencies to do the will of the Convention, which we pray is the will of God.
Truly, anyone who is a Southern Baptist should have a growing understanding of how the SBC (co)operates. And so, like immersive language training, there is no better way to learn the ways of the Convention than to go to the Convention’s Annual Meeting.
So, don’t just come for a vacation or to see friends (though you will). Come to do business before the Lord for the health and fidelity of the SBC.
Why Should You Attend the SBC Annual Meeting?
As mentioned above, the purpose of the Annual Meeting of the SBC is to do business and exercise stewardship; as with any organization, it is one that needs good stewards. As the history of the Convention proves, there have been many times when the lavish resources of the SBC have been used to promote heresy (e.g., in the 1980s, three of the six NT professors at SBTS denied the bodily resurrection of Christ) or champion sin (e.g., the 1971 resolution calling for the legalization of abortion).
Christian organizations do not automatically remain Christian. Every generation must embrace the fight for faithfulness. Only when the members of a denomination or Christian institution proactively work to retain their founding principles of biblical fidelity and fight the winds of false doctrine will an organization resist succumbing to theological liberalism and Conquest’s Second Law of Politics.
Conquest’s Second Law of Politics states simply that “any organization that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time.” In its original context, Conquest’s Law applied to political organizations. However, it can be more broadly applied to any organization in which a large group of people must make decisions about what they are for and what they are against. Spiritually speaking, unless the life-giving Word of Christ is proclaimed and error is rejected (Titus 1:9), the organization will trend toward death (i.e.,the Left). This is what W. A. Criswell so powerfully warned about in his famous Convention sermon, “Whether We Live Or Die.“
This is what happened in the SBC throughout the twentieth century. The SBC’s liberalization required the Conservative Resurgence. Despite the protestations of Convention leaders who deny any drift in the SBC today, it will happen again unless Bible-believing Southern Baptists take seriously their responsibility of correcting mission drift through informed, active, and regular attendance at the Annual Meeting.
That is why, if the Lord provides the means to go to Dallas, you should go to the Southern Baptist Convention in June.
This burden of stewardship could be further enlarged if we look more carefully at what it entails for our nation. For consideration, last year, when many were rightly discouraged by the failure of the Law Amendment, I argued that because the SBC remains the largest Protestant convention in America, there continues to be a need to improve its condition. Therefore, whether or not an evangelical church is a part of the SBC, it will be impacted by the proceedings of the Convention, both for good and for ill.
Just as all the ships in the harbor must account for the largest ship, so too the rest of evangelicalism must account for the happenings at the SBC. This is a great responsibility and one that we should not take lightly.
However, all Southern Baptists, and especially SBC pastors, have a responsibility to maintain and improve the faithfulness of the SBC for the SBC. And the relationship between the SBC and its local churches—your local church—matters. The only way a pastor can rightly interpret the events of the Convention is by being there, by hearing the speeches from the floor, seeing the vote of the messengers, and discerning the encouragement or condescension of the speakers. I am not citing examples here, but I could because I have been “in the room” when votes were taken, when messengers pleaded from floor mics for righteousness to be upheld, and when Convention speakers heaped scorn on those concerned with progressive tendencies in the SBC.
Finally, for general reasons, pastors who seek the best for their churches and world Christianity should also seek the good of the Convention when attending the Annual Meeting. Indeed, general attendance informs messengers of what is going on so they can pray for God to bless the work of the SBC and relay such news to their churches.
But even better than general (or passive) attendees are messengers who attend the SBC “on mission.” That is to say, instead of simply attending to learn, messengers should, over time, begin to see trips to Dallas (2025), Orlando (2026), or Salt Lake City (2027) as mission trips to do business so that seminaries and missionaries can preserve and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ without compromise or Leftward drift.
Indeed, for the Convention to uphold its mission of proclaiming the truth of God’s Word, it must have messengers who vote for conservative officers, biblical resolutions, and faithful motions. Yet, as with all votes, participation and persuasion are required to get the needed results. Last year, more than half (approximately 62%) of the convention voted for the Law Amendment, but it still failed because it did not receive a two-thirds majority (66%). The biggest reason was not, as has been claimed, because its opponents rejected complementarianism but because they thought the present system of credentialing churches was sufficient.
Maybe, but that awaits to be seen.
Still, this illustrates the point. The SBC has more than 1,800 female pastors, a clear aberration from God’s teaching on the pastoral office. All is not well in the state of Nashville. For the convention to avoid continuing down a Leftward path (which is the result of intentional steering far more than mere “drift”), it requires the ongoing work of conservative pastors to make arguments, write articles, email friends, persuade detractors, and allocate funds for traveling to the Annual Meeting.
In a word, therefore, all it takes for the Convention to fall into the death spiral of liberalism is for potential messengers to read this article and do nothing.
Conclusion: Make Preparations for Dallas Now
As I will detail in Part 2, there is undeniable (almost overwhelming) evidence of theological and ethical drift in the SBC today. Thus, this refresher on conventional life is not simply for “academic consideration.” It is a call to action. It is a call for Southern Baptists to be mission-minded faithful stewards who come to the Annual Meeting to do business.
If you are giving money to the SBC, encouraging students to attend its schools and seminaries, sending missionaries through NAMB or IMB, or trusting the ERLC to represent you in Washington, D.C., then you have every right and reason to come to Dallas “on mission.”
But no one “accidentally” ends up at the Annual Meeting. The time to plan for the road to Dallas begins now. And on Monday, I’ll tell you why it’s so important to be there this year.
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David Schrock is the pastor for preaching and theology at Occoquan Bible Church in Woodbridge, Virginia. David is a two-time graduate of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and has a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology. He is a founding faculty member and professor of theology at Indianapolis Theology Seminary and the Editor-in-Chief at Christ Over All. He is also the author of Royal Priesthood and Glory of God and Brothers, We Are Not Plagiarists along with many journal articles and online essays.