Attending the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention is, in a word, exhausting. Why any Baptist — pastor or layman — would take several days of vacation time, travel at significant expense, read all the printed reports, participate in…
BNG podcasts feature each SBC presidential candidate
In less than a week, about 12,000 messengers are expected to arrive in Orlando for the 168th annual session of the Southern Baptist Convention. Leading the concerns facing church representatives are the election of a new convention president and a…
Why did it take 15 years to implement greater funding for IMB?
Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a multi-part analysis BNG will publish over the coming weeks about the work of the SBC Executive Committee. After resisting messenger directives for more than 15 years, the 86-member Southern Baptist…
On way out the door, Mandrell airs grievances with Lifeway trustees
In January 2025, then Lifeway CEO Ben Mandrell called his trustees into an executive session to address ongoing conflicts he faced while seeking to lead the $300-million-a-year publishing enterprise. Those particular conflicts, which have not been previously reported, centered not…
What happened to the SBC’s Vision 2025 and its $1.25 million?
Southern Baptists arrived in Dallas this week to consider how they will finance mounting legal bills after a spate of lawsuits were filed in the wake of a 288-page report published in 2022. That report detailed at length how key convention…
‘As God is my witness,’ Mohler has changed his tune on ERLC
R. Albert Mohler Jr. has declared another holy war in the Southern Baptist Convention, as if the nation’s largest Protestant denomination needed more side skirmishes among its institutional leaders. In a recent wide-ranging and low-impact interview on the “Baptist21” podcast,…
A conservative Baptist’s prayerful appreciation for Pope Francis
“Pope Francis has died.” Those words were the first banner I saw on my iPhone when I woke up Easter Monday. The Supreme Pontiff and Bishop of Rome (yes, it’s hard for a Baptist to type those words) died at 7:35…
Remembering Jack Pogue, faithful friend to W.A. Criswell
Tuesday evening, March 18, we received word from a mutual friend that Jack Pogue, the faithful Baptist layman, Dallas-area real estate developer and quiet denominational benefactor, had passed at age 90. At the time of his death, untold scores of millions…
Matt Queen, we hardly knew ye
There’s an old Irish drinking song that was repopularized in the 1960s about a young soldier who ran off to South Asia to join the British armies fighting the Kandian War in modern day Sri Lanka. The lyrics capture the…
Here’s what’s wrong with the SBC’s trustee system
Every problem facing the Southern Baptist Convention, every new crisis and scandal and reported financial irregularity, can be reduced to a single and seemingly insoluble root cause: a bloated trustee system that is outdated, inefficient, unmanageable and hopelessly beset by…
A cautionary tale of celebrity pastors and family empires
Late last month, Liberty University and its former president, Jerry Falwell Jr., settled for an undisclosed amount to end a multi-year, sprawling set of multi-million dollar lawsuits brought by Falwell against the Lynchburg, Va.-based school. For the world’s “largest evangelical university,” the…
Pressler’s death brings overwhelming sadness
The formal death notice of Herman Paul Pressler III, a former Texas state appellate judge and the chief strategist behind a now 45-year rightward shift in the 14 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, hit me like a brick. For months, I…