This story was updated Feb. 19 to include a clarification on staff compensation at the SBC Executive Committee.
The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee cannot meet its financial obligations this year and needs $3 million in “priority funding” from church offerings to cover its legal expenses.
This request for special funding to help pay the legal expenses of the SBC’s sexual abuse claims is a first in the denomination. To this point, the Executive Committee has burned through $13 million in its own reserves to cover investigations and legal bills.
This year’s anticipated legal expenses will be $3 million, Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg told trustees. “We really don’t know what our future legal expenses are going to be. This is an estimated solution for next year’s budget.”
To address that shortfall, Executive Committee trustees meeting in Nashville, Tenn., Feb. 17-18 approved a recommended 2025-26 Cooperative Program budget with a $3 million “priority allocation.”
An earlier version of this article reported that amid this financial distress, staff members of the Executive Committee would get nearly 3% raises, a peculiar action for a nonprofit unable to pay its expenses. That was based on a statement published by Baptist Press, which is part of the Executive Committee, that said trustees approved “an increase in the salary structure for EC staff by 2.9%.”
Executive Committee spokesman Jon Wilke told BNG that doesn’t mean actual salary increases, only an increase in the salary schedule. In other words, the published pay scale will be increased but no salary increases will be given, he said.
In 2023, the Executive Committee eliminated 20% of its staff positions in a cost-cutting move. The organization’s website currently lists 22 employees. That was only the beginning admission of the entity’s financial problems.
This is the dichotomous world of the SBC Executive Committee, where things often don’t add up. The central organizing agency has borne the brunt of the sexual abuse investigations and payouts that have plagued the denomination the last four years. As BNG previously reported, some presidents of other SBC agencies actually want the Executive Committee to shutter and have been accused of starving it to death financially.
In recent years, the millions of dollars in legal expenses have, at times, placed the viability of the Executive Committee in peril.
The Executive Committee building in downtown Nashville is for sale but that sale likely will not happen in time to pay this year’s bills, Iorg said. Thus, the Executive Committee is working to secure a $3 million loan to meet financial obligations.
Jeff Iorg
“Decisions were made by the messengers in 2021. Those decisions have consequences. Those consequences have costs. And those bills must be paid,” Iorg said.
Faced with that reality, auditors have “rightly insisted” presenting “a viable funding plan to avoid serious auditing and legal repercussions,” he added.
The priority allocation drew extensive discussion among trustees at their meeting in Nashville.
Iorg admitted the recommendation is “controversial and difficult” and said, “No mission-centered Southern Baptist wants to take this action. I don’t. You don’t. None of us do.”
Every year, the Executive Committee recommends to messengers at the upcoming SBC annual meeting a Cooperative Program unified budget goal for the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. This year’s recommended budget of $190 million — a $250,000 decrease from the current year — would take $3 million off the top for legal expenses before distributing offerings to mission boards and seminaries and other ministries.
Giving to the Cooperative Program has been relatively flat for at least a decade, with offerings not keeping pace with inflation. Amid these challenges, denominational leaders have insisted on maintaining or increasing funding for the two mission boards — neither of which is transparent about its finances.
“While struggling financially, the Executive Committee has held itself to a higher standard of transparency than any other entity funded by Cooperative Program gifts.”
While struggling financially, the Executive Committee has held itself to a higher standard of transparency than any other entity funded by Cooperative Program gifts. Messengers to annual meetings have repeatedly called for greater transparency from all SBC entities and have been met with stonewalling from agency heads.
At this week’s Executive Committee meeting, an updated Business and Financial Plan was adopted that advocates say will increase transparency. However, when asked to explain just how that is true, Iorg told reporters he couldn’t single out any examples.
“It’s hard to identify specifics because we really rewrote the entire document,” he said Feb. 18. “I did highlight 15 areas last night where the new plan calls for specific reporting from the boards of trustees to the Southern Baptist Convention and a heightened level of accountability and transparency based on the new plan.”
Most of the criticism — but not all — has been aimed at the North American Mission Board, which in the last decade has clawed back tens of millions of dollars in former partnership projects with state Baptist conventions while producing fewer results in key areas such as church planting.
SBC entities are required to provide their annual audits but are not required to provide the same level of detail as most U.S. nonprofits that file Form 990 with the Internal Revenue Service. Because all SBC entities are classified as churches by the IRS, they are not required by the government to disclose such details.
Trustees also got a report from Jeff Dalrymple, recently named director of Sexual Abuse Prevention and Response at the Executive Committee. Put simply, Dalrymple was hired to attempt to address what existing and former staff and trustees could not.
Part of the report from him and Iorg was about the results achieved by the controversial sexual abuse hotline launched in May 2022.
In two and a half years, the hotline has received 1,008 contacts — including 334 requests for information, expressions of opinions or spam. The remaining 674 calls alleged abuse at SBC churches and other non-SBC churches. Most of those calls came during the first four months the hotline was open.
“As a result of hotline calls, seven churches have been expelled from the convention.”
As a result of hotline calls, seven churches have been expelled from the convention, and some of those — as BNG previously reported — believe they were denied due process.
While saying sexual abuse is “a serious and real problem,” Iorg told trustees: “Abuse is not frequently being reported in Southern Baptist churches. We have widely publicized this issue for the past five years and encouraged people to come forward with information and allegations. … We reject the false narrative Southern Baptist churches are dangerous places for children. That Southern Baptists are protecting predators. And that Southern Baptists are uncaring in responding to survivors.”
One of the promises made in the beginning of the sexual abuse reform work was to create a public database of known clergy sex offenders and credibly accused abusers in SBC churches. That never has happened.
Abuse survivor advocates no doubt will quibble with Iorg’s description of “seven rare exceptions” to the blamelessness of SBC churches on sexual abuse.
The Executive Committee also declined to close a particular loophole in eligibility for service as a trustee of the various SBC entities. At last summer’s annual meeting, a messenger proposed an amendment to the SBC Constitution to disallow service on trustee boards by anyone “employed by” an SBC entity. Currently, individuals who are on the payroll of one SBC entity may serve — and do serve — as trustees of other SBC entities.
Critics say this is a form of nepotism that should not be allowed.
The official statement from the Executive Committee on declining to advance this limitation is “because the phrase ‘employed by’ could be broadly interpreted and would make the proposed amendment difficult to enforce.”