Former Southern Baptist Convention leader Morris Chapman died in Nashville Oct. 20 at age 84 after a brief illness.
Chapman led the SBC Executive Committee from 1992 through 2010 and was the first leader of that agency installed by the so-called “conservative resurgence.” He succeeded Harold Bennett, who in his last years as Executive Committee president got caught in the crossfire between conservatives and moderates battling for control of the denomination.
Chapman became a stabilizing force in the denomination undergoing massive transformation. The Executive Committee is the central organizing entity of the denomination whose primary tasks are coordination, receiving and disbursing offerings and planning the annual meeting. Even as moderate and liberal segments of the convention left to form new bodies, Chapman continued to preach cooperation.
Daniel Vestal (right) congratulating Morris Chapman, who defeated him in the race for SBC president in 1990. (Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives)
Although widely respected by both sides in the Battle for the Bible, Chapman later drew scrutiny for the role one of his vice presidents, Augie Boto, played in denying there was a sexual abuse crisis in the SBC while secretly keeping a list of known clergy sex offenders. Abuse survivors and advocates say Chapman should have done more to address the issue when he had a chance.
Organizationally, Chapman sought to keep the peace as all six SBC seminaries and two mission boards and other entities flipped from control of moderates to conservatives and installed new leadership and agendas. He also presided over a massive restructuring of the denomination in 1995.
After leaving office in 2010, Chapman was not a fan of some of his successors and other SBC leaders who took a more confrontational approach. The stability he worked to maintain at the Executive Committee largely fell apart a decade later, resulting in other agency heads calling for the agency’s dissolution.
In 2024, Chapman offered to return to the Executive Committee as interim president in hopes of righting the ship he believed had gone off course.
“I believe we’re very close to the whole matter of cooperative funding and the cooperative nature of the SBC collapsing in front of our eyes,” he warned then.
Although more conservative than his predecessors in the role, Chapman was, like them, an institutional loyalist. He believed in and preached cooperation.
In some of his last comments to Executive Committee trustees before retirement, Chapman warned about what has come to be reality today: “I believe deeply that if the Cooperative Program is ever tossed aside to be replaced by a strong promotion of societal giving or if both undesignated and designated funds from our churches are counted as Cooperative Program gifts, we will have abandoned the greatest vehicle for supporting missions and theological education in the history of Christendom.”
Benjamin Cole, who tweets as The Baptist Blogger and is co-host of BNG’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” podcast, is a close friend of the Chapman family.
Morris Chapman “never saw himself as the commanding officer nor the Executive Committee as the flagship of the Southern Baptist Convention,” he said. “Neither did he serve as a denominational battleship forever stirring waters of strife among his brethren. He will be fondly remembered by honest churchmen as a trustworthy ballast during seasons of theological retrieval and institutional realignment. He was a source of unimpeachable personal integrity and administrative stability when it was most needed among his brethren. And unlike too many of his contemporaries, the closer I got to him the more I saw that looked like Jesus. I will miss him greatly.”
Chapman was pastor of First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls, Texas, before coming to the Executive Committee in 1992. He also was serving his second one-year term as SBC president when he was elected to the staff role.
A native of Jackson, Miss., Chapman began his ministry in 1959 as a minister of youth. He served seven churches in New Mexico and Texas, each marked by emphasis on personal evangelism and mission support.
He is survived by his wife, Jodi, who recently was a guest on the BNG podcast “Stuck in the Middle with You,” where she talked about their journey and announced publicly for the first time that her husband had been diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia. He also is survived by his son and daughter-in-law Chris and Renee Chapman, his daughter and son-in-law Stephanie and Scott Evans, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.