How might the SBC reshape itself next?

Calls for structural change are once again in the air among Southern Baptist Convention insiders, opening the door to possibilities that could significantly reshape the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Last summer, messengers to the SBC annual meeting took the unusual step of creating a task force to review the work of another task force that did its work in 2010. While that task force isn’t charged with recommending changes, its report is likely to open the door to proposed changes, as the current trajectory of the SBC is, by all accounts, unsustainable.

The original group was called the SBC Great Commission Resurgence Task Force — combining Jesus’ command to evangelize the whole world, known as the Great Commission, with the word “resurgence,” an echo of the so-called “conservative resurgence” in which conservatives took control of the denomination from 1979 to 2000.

The new task force — also named the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force — was created by a motion made last June at the annual meeting in New Orleans. The motion called for a review of the effectiveness of the Great Commission Resurgence as it relates to evangelism efforts in North America and relationships among SBC ministry partners. The task force “should represent all SBC partners serving from all regions of North America” and report on “any recommendations to enhance and unify our cooperative missions effort to penetrate darkness in North America,” the motion stated.

Why does this matter?

It is unusual in SBC life to create a task force to review the work of a previous task force. Part of the motivation appears to be to confirm or deny concerns that the 2010 task force created more problems than it solved and worked under a cloak of secrecy.

The 2010 task force report was the new conservative powerholders’ second attempt at denominational restructuring.

The 2010 task force report was the new conservative powerholders’ second attempt at denominational restructuring — following the more consequential “Covenant for a New Century” report adopted in 1995 and implemented in 1997. That task force recommended what Christianity Today called “the most comprehensive restructuring in the denomination’s 152-year history.”

The 1997 restructuring created the North American Mission Board through the merger of three former agencies: the Home Mission Board, Radio-Television Commission and Brotherhood Commission. It also shuttered three agencies: the Stewardship Commission, Historical Commission and Education Commission. And it renamed the Foreign Mission Board as the International Mission Board and the Christian Life Commission as the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

In 2009, Will Hall, then vice president for news service at the SBC Executive Committee, wrote a surprisingly candid analysis of the SBC’s condition.

He said when SBC data “is examined against research conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, it is evident that demographic changes in our country have been the major shaping force of our membership numbers, not outdated methodologies nor a generation gap in the leadership of our churches and institutions.

“The data show that membership and baptism figures are in large part the products of a declining birthrate among whites as well as the suburbanization of America. This is not to say such demographics hold sway over the power of the gospel. It does suggest that if we are to continue to grow, we need to shift our church planting strategy in order to give us the best chance of sharing the gospel with the lost.”

“If we are to continue to grow, we need to shift our church planting strategy in order to give us the best chance of sharing the gospel with the lost.”

All this set the stage for the 2010 task force, whose report included six components. The most consequential were these:

• Authorizing NAMB to “prioritize efforts to plant churches in North America and to reach our nation’s cities and clarify its role to lead and accomplish efforts to reach North America with the gospel.” NAMB had struggled with an identity crisis since its founding, and its first two presidents resigned under pressure for mismanagement and lack of accountability to trustees. The report said NAMB — then just three years old — needed to be “reinvented and released.” The main thing it was released from was decades-old “partnership agreements” with state Baptist conventions that defined shared strategies for missions and church planting. As a result, NAMB took back $50.6 million previously shared with the states.
• Authorized the IMB to “reach the unreached and under-served people groups without regard to any geographic limitations.” This meant the missions agency responsible for international outreach could work with internationals living in the United States.
• Moved primary responsibility for Cooperative Program unified budget promotion from the SBC Executive Committee to the state conventions. Previously, the Cooperative Program was seen as a national strategy that states supported.
• Moved the Cooperative Program from sacred cow status to preferred giving status. This gave local churches and pastors more discretion to fund (and not fund) the things they chose without penalty. Leaders of the “conservative resurgence” had been criticized frequently for not being faithful to the Cooperative Program.
• Took money from the Executive Committee and gave it to the IMB. Previously, international missions received 50% of all undesignated gifts; now it would receive 51%. That took $2 million from the Executive Committee and redirected it to the IMB. Adding $2 millions to the IMB budget was seen as a nice gesture, but $2 million against the IMB’s $250 million annual budget was a small increase, disproportionate to the loss from the Executive Committee’s $8 million budget.

Although the report was adopted, that did not happen without controversy. Even the president of the Executive Committee, Morris Chapman, publicly opposed it. Ironically, nine years later, the chairman of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force, Ronnie Floyd, would be elected president of the Executive Committee.

“Although the report was adopted, that did not happen without controversy.”

From 1995 to 2010, the net effect of restructuring in the SBC made its two mission agencies, the IMB and NAMB, more powerful and more richly funded — especially NAMB, which reaped a $50 million windfall.

Nevertheless, in 2015 and 2017, the IMB announced a need to dramatically reduce its missionary force, which happened primarily through voluntary separation agreements. The net result was 983 missionaries who left the field in a six-month period. In the same period, the IMB shed 149 employees from its headquarters staff in Richmond, Va., including elimination of most of the communications department that told Southern Baptists the stories of international missions. The IMB also sold off millions of dollars’ worth of properties worldwide. One explanation for the drastic reductions was that the previous administration had hugely overreached in its funding strategies and the right-sizing was needed for sustainability.

Meanwhile, NAMB took full advantage of its opportunity to redefine the way it worked with state conventions and cut them out of national church-planting strategies. That resulted in a strong backlash from more than a dozen state conventions which threatened to cut or eliminate their support of Cooperative Program funding. It was the first time in the denomination’s history the major funding channel had been challenged by its own state conventions.

NAMB’s new posture created as many enemies as friends. But flush with money, NAMB leaders began to buy friends and influence through everything from expensive swag to drawers full of gift cards and a program to pay pastors to be “ambassadors” for NAMB.

Did it work?

At the heart of the current review of the 2010 task force is a widely held concern that the changes made to advance the Great Commission haven’t succeeded.

At the time of the report’s adoption, Floyd said this would be “the moment that will define the future for generations to come and show that Southern Baptists are a unified people, Bible-based, Gospel-centered, and set on fire by the Holy Spirit, believing we must join together like never before in presenting the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every person in the world and to make disciples of all the nations.”

Then SBC President Johnny Hunt promised transparency, but Floyd and the task force seemingly ignored that pledge and did their work with no outside observers and little accountability. The records of its proceedings were sealed and are due to be made public in 2025.

On Friday, Feb. 2, Baptist Press — the denomination’s in-house news service — ran an article with the headline, “Great Commission Resurgence’s Beginning, Legacy Under Scrutiny.”

It explains the context for the previous task force’s work: “The spring of 2009 was a time of concern for Southern Baptists. After steady years of growth, membership had begun to decline after reaching 16.3 million in 2006. Baptisms had been in a freefall for 10 years. Worship and small group attendance remained relatively steady but were on the precipice of lagging as well.”

The article recalls how in April 2009, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Danny Akin gave a chapel sermon titled “Axioms for a Great Commission Resurgence.” In that sermon, he said, “We must recognize the need to rethink our convention structure and identity so that we maximize our energy and resources for the fulfilling of the Great Commission.”

Akin said Southern Baptist structure had become “bloated and bureaucratic.” He charged that “overlap and duplication in our associations, state and national conventions is strangling us.”

Whatever the intent of the Great Commission Resurgence, the statistics tell a different story than hoped for.

Whatever the intent of the Great Commission Resurgence, the statistics tell a different story than hoped for. Over the long term, key metrics — including church attendance, church membership, baptisms and church plants — have continued to decline. The primary thing that has gone up is giving, but now even that has plateaued and has failed to keep pace with inflation. Also, in the 1980s churches gave an average of 10.50% of their offerings to the Cooperative Program. Over the last five years, the average Cooperative Program gift from churches was 4.79% and currently stands at a record low 4.68%.

On top of all that, the two architects of the “conservative resurgence” have been shown to be lacking in personal ethics — Paige Patterson for living large off the income of the seminaries he led while mishandling sexual abuse cases, and Paul Pressler for allegedly abusing boys and young men for decades.

And the SBC is best known in America today for its own coverups of sexual abuse cases documented in the 2022 Guidepost independent investigation — the one Ronnie Floyd wanted to control and that forced him to resign abruptly when it became apparent he couldn’t control it.

Back at the 2010 adoption of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force report, Floyd had declared: “We know our greatest need is for a mighty spiritual revival to sweep through our churches across this nation. We must repent of our sins and return to God in order to see this great movement of God. As we near the coming of our Lord Jesus, we want all of our strategies to position us to be a part of this coming great gospel harvest.”

What’s next?

Whatever happens next in the SBC, you can bet safely it will continue to be couched in terms of the Great Commission and revival. That is fundamental language intended to motivate Southern Baptists.

Whatever happens next in the SBC, you can bet safely it will continue to be couched in terms of the Great Commission and revival.

However, the potential for major shakeups seems especially high, in light of the confluence of events affecting and afflicting the denomination. Here are some ideas — not yet actual proposals — that are circulating among some denominational leaders and insiders:

Dissolve the Executive Committee. While this sounds preposterous to anyone who understands the inner workings of the SBC, this is a real idea being talked about. The reasons are multiple: Other agency heads want more control and less oversight; the reputational stain on the Executive Committee because of the sexual abuse coverups; a possible way of deflecting legal liabilities.

However, the reasons not to do this are compelling: Who would plan the annual meeting that is essential to the SBC’s bylaws? Who would receive offering money and distribute it? Who would be the official spokesperson for the denomination? What would it take to untangle the multitudinous legal documents that mention the Executive Committee?

Move away from the Cooperative Program. Of all the ideas being discussed, this is the most shocking to old-timers. Next year, the Cooperative Program will celebrate its centennial. Born in 1925 as a way to even out the inequities of the old “society system” of funding, the Cooperative Program works like United Way, which was founded in 1887. Previously, churches and associations were flooded with individual appeals from every seminary or agency connected to the denomination.

The motivation for eliminating or perhaps downplaying the Cooperative Program today is to allow churches and individuals to give freely to the Southern Baptist organizations they like and not give to the ones they don’t like. What’s old is new again.

This idea could play out several ways, from formalizing more flexibility within the Cooperative Program to a complete return to the society method.

If any of this were to happen, the winners would be the two mission boards. The losers would be the six seminaries and the ERLC.

Make the six seminaries independent. There was a time in the past when then-existing Southern Baptist seminaries all did their own fundraising directly with churches. The Cooperative Program lessened that need — although it did not eliminate it — by creating a shared funding formula, which modulated as the convention added seminaries.

All six seminaries fundraise beyond what they get from the Cooperative Program even though the Cooperative Program’s founding documents state that agencies accepting Cooperative Program funds would cease direct fundraising with churches.

Again, there are multiple other ways this could be handled. One alternative would be to provide education vouchers for members of SBC churches who seek theological education. Another would be to create a regional system of support, with churches and state conventions in certain regions directly supporting the seminary closest to them. Yet another would be to adjust the current funding formula that the larger seminaries sometimes find inequitable.

A variation on this idea — which has been discussed for years — is to consolidate the seminaries from six to four or even to three. Proponents argue this would create cost savings similar to the creation of NAMB in 1997.

One idea unlikely to happen is to merge NAMB and the IMB into one giant missions agency. This idea has been proposed and studied in the recent past and has been soundly rejected. However, times are changing, and we never should say never.

What will come from the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force this summer? We really don’t know because that group also is working under a cone of silence. But given the conditions of the present moment and the arc of history, it could be time for something entirely new.

Megachurch influence

One other factor has changed considerably since the “conservative resurgence,” which happened by rallying members of smaller churches nationwide to show up at annual meetings and vote for well-known pastors of larger churches to become SBC president.

From Adrian Rogers (1979) to Charles Stanley (1984) to Ed Young (1992) to Jack Graham (2002) and Ronnie Floyd (2014), the succession of men elected SBC president drew almost exclusively from pastors of the largest churches in the denomination. The last two presidents — Ed Litton (2021) and Bart Barber (2022) — signaled a shift in that trend, both coming from more average churches.

Megachurch pastors still wield tremendous influence behind the scenes.

However, the megachurch pastors still wield tremendous influence behind the scenes.

There is a fraternal network of pastors of the largest churches in the SBC that has the power and influence to shape things to their liking. For example, NAMB’s church planting efforts are built upon a model that favors partnerships with megachurches, mainly in urban areas.

This was not such a phenomenon in the 1970s. In fact, the term “megachurch” first appeared in the common vocabulary in the 1980s. By some academic reports, there were only 50 megachurches nationwide in 1970 and 150 in 1980.

Today, among all Christian churches nationwide, there are an estimated 1,546 churches with 2,000 or more in average attendance, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. And 271 of those megachurches are Southern Baptist.

Megachurch is defined as “sustained average weekly attendance of 2,000 persons or more in its worship services, counting all adults and children at all its worship locations.”

While most churches in America are small, most Americans who go to church are in congregations of more than 1,000 people.

According to the National Congregations Study: “The largest 9% of congregations contain about half of all churchgoers. Most denominations, even the largest ones, could comfortably gather the pastors of congregations representing more than half of their people in a medium-to-large hotel ballroom. And it is not just people who are concentrated in this way. Money and staff also are concentrated in the largest congregations.”

One of the findings of that study is that “pastors of the largest churches wield political power inside denominations disproportionate to a one-congregation, one-vote point of view.”

From its founding in 1845, the SBC was a large network of small churches. The denominational structures created to serve that context have evolved as churches have grown and as Baptists gained influence in their communities. Today, the majority of people who attend Southern Baptist churches attend churches that don’t need denominational structures. Often, their churches are large enough to be a kind of denominational network themselves. The evolution of the SBC’s structure has been influenced by that reality and likely will be in the future as well.