Seeking a Convention That Is Not Southern Baptist In Name Only: How to Regain Trust, Rebuild the Trustee System, and Avoid an Impending Exodus of Vocal Conservatives

I “entered” the Southern Baptist Convention in 2002, when I moved to Tennessee and took up membership in a large church in Chattanooga.¹ While I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, home of the International Mission Board, and occasionally visited a Southern Baptist church that has since joined the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, it wasn’t until high school in Michigan that the Lord called me to himself. And there in that state, I attended a variety of independent Baptist churches, before graduating college and heading South.

1. I put “entered” in quotes because technically churches enter into the convention, not individuals.

Discipled by some faithful brothers in Campus Crusade for Christ, I had one leader who told me to consider Southern Seminary as I made plans to attend an SBC church. With a mix of humor and truth, he said that Southern had collected some of the best professors from his seminary (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), and that by attending an SBC church, I would receive a significant discount at Southern. At the time, I didn’t know anything about the Cooperative Program or how the Southern Baptist Convention could cover half the cost of its seminarians. But I would soon learn.

In my own theological pilgrimage, I was still trying to figure church membership and something called congregationalism. In fact, it would not be for another two years before a Sunday lunch taught me the difference between elder-led Congregationalism and elder-ruled Presbyterianism. Those were things that my college ministry didn’t teach me.

Just the same, convention life was not something I learned in Chattanooga. For when I arrived in Tennessee and became a janitor at my large SBC church, I soon learned that the church supported over 100 missionaries, while the International Mission Board was never (that I recall) mentioned. Instead, I met missionaries from all over the world as the church foyer was covered with pictures of Bible translators, indigenous pastors, and theological educators. Still, for all the ways that missions was supported, I never once heard of Lottie Moon or Annie Armstrong.

As it was later reported to me, this emphasis on missions was not accidental. The convention was fighting for biblical fidelity in the 1980s (what we call the Conservative Resurgence). This local church, who loved the Word and world missions, decided to wait and see what would happen before investing in the convention.

As it turned out, this church grew by leaps and bounds at the same time the convention restored biblical inerrancy to its institutions. Yet, instead of investing its massive budget in the convention, the church continued to enlarge its missions giving until it gave around fifty percent of its budget to missions in 2002! As I would go on to learn, while some SBC churches give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the convention, this church gave the same amount to missionaries who would show up every few years at our annual missions conference.

At the time I lived in Chattanooga, this church held three morning services with a regular attendance of a couple thousand committed saints. In short, it was a thriving SBC church that was almost entirely disconnected from the SBC. In a word, this church was able to do what most churches in the convention could never do—and were never intended to do!

Since 1845 (when the Southern Baptist Convention formed) and since 1925 (when the Cooperative Program began), the convention known as Southern Baptist has committed itself to funding missions and education together. Along the way, various cultural elements made Southern Baptist churches Southern Baptisty, but always the convention was committed to pooling its resources for Great Commission purposes.²

2. This is why in 2012 the SBC officially adopted the name “Great Commission Baptists,” a phrase that saw renewed advocacy around 2020 when SBC leaders like J.D. Greear and Josh Powell began supporting the use of this alternate moniker.

Yet, for reasons that we have covered in the last few years, female pastors,³ confessional disagreements,⁴ and misguided entities⁵ have threatened that mission. Likewise, as this entire month has shown, there are questions about the way cooperating churches can trust the North American Mission Board,⁶ the convention’s financial transparency,⁷ and the convention-wide trustee system.⁸ At the same time, there are questions related to the way the SBC is driven by disordered affections,⁹ an outsized commitment to platforming female leaders,¹⁰ and an annual convention that makes change difficult, if not impossible.

Put all of that together, and it is not accidental that the SBC is losing conservative churches, Cooperative Program dollars are declining (significantly!¹¹), and other churches are looking for new ways to partner for missions and church planting (e.g., through Pillar, ACME, Reaching and Teaching, Radius, etc.), even as they remain Southern Baptist. Indeed, many churches are considering the strategy of my previous church: to be SBC in name only.

Yet, as any self-respecting Southern Baptist knows, pursuing Great Commission work outside of the SBC cuts at the very heart of our cooperation. And therefore, as Baptists prepare for Orlando, it is worth asking: Can the Center Hold? And just as importantly, Who Holds the Center?

Who Will Hold the Center?

This month, Christ Over All has published articles, essays, and podcasts that have attempted to answer this question: Will the Center Hold?¹² And in various and independent ways, everything we’ve published has considered this matter. But now, in what follows, I will attempt to bring these threads together. And my hope is to provide something of constructive vision of what it will take for the SBC to hold together and not fall apart.

Indeed, the SBC will—in one way of another—move forward. Forty-seven thousand churches do not simply disappear. But the question becomes, How will the largest Protestant denomination in America move forward together? Will it fracture, deflate, or drift, as doctrinally conservative churches wait and see what will happen? Or to put it more positively, will those who lead the SBC find a way to hold the center, such that SBC churches continue to walk together?

12. “Can the Center Hold? The Southern Baptist Convention in the 21st Century,” Christ Over All, March 2026.

Assuming that is the desire, we who make up the Southern Baptist Convention will need more than a history of Cooperative Program giving and the legacy of the Conservative Resurgence. Both initiatives play a central part in our story, but if we will move forward together, it will require fresh initiatives that regain trust across the whole convention.

In what follows, I want to offer three changes that are both imminent and necessary, if Southern Baptists will continue to hold the center together. These changes move from small and immediate (recognizing leaders who are humble enough to admit error and brave enough to re-enfranchise vocal conservatives), to medium and ongoing (recruiting better trustees and improving our trustee system), to all-encompassing and forward-looking (reorganizing the whole convention).

In some ways, each of these proposals can be pursued independent of the other. And equally, if the smaller changes are made well, it follows that the larger changes will be more plausible and possible, not to mention desirable. Yet, if we do not have a significant change in leadership and a sizeable redirection with our trustee system, then the last change will come regardless. And if that reorganization comes because of attrition, departure, and financial loss, then the future reorganization that will be forced upon the SBC will be worse than any version we might pursue by means of a fresh vision for cooperation in the twenty-first century.

Thus, with gratitude to God for the SBC as it has been and with hope for a better SBC in the future, I offer three changes in denominational life.

The First Change: Recognizing Leaders Whose Humility Regains Trust

Above all else, trust within the SBC must be regained. This is not denied by those leading the convention. Clint Pressley, Joshua Powell, and Willy Rice all said as much in our interviews with them.¹³ But what is more controversial is what will be required to regain trust in the men who have led the convention through the last decade or more. In a word, what the common, conservative pastor is looking for in the leaders of the SBC is a willingness to admit error and to confess ways that they made mistakes.

13. “5.14 Clint Pressley, David Schrock, and Stephen Wellum: ‘The SBC: A Presidential Perspective with Clint Pressley’,” Christ Over All, March 11, 2026; “5.16 Josh Powell, David Schrock, and Stephen Wellum: ‘Getting to Know SBC Presidential Candidate Josh Powell’,” Christ Over All, March 18, 2026; “5.17 Willy Rice, David Schrock, and Stephen Wellum: ‘Getting to Know SBC Presidential Candidate Willy Rice’,” Christ Over All, March 23, 2026.

And here is why this is so important. While many SBC leaders have pointed fingers at Southern Baptist keyboard warriors,¹⁴ few leaders have willingly taken stock of the way their support for Critical Race Theory¹⁵ and the Sex Abuse Task Force¹⁶ made countless Southern Baptists reassess their long-trusted leaders.¹⁷ Misled by Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement, and then pressurized by COVID and a series of leadership problems in the SBC, too many leaders did not stand up to worldly influences.¹⁸ Instead, touting lines like “The World is Watching,” they gave time and money—indeed, millions of tithe dollars(!)—to pursue social justice initiatives.¹⁹

And in this context, instead of admitting error, many leaders have doubled down and shifted blame, all the while alienating pastors like Allen Nelson, who is an illustrative microcosm of a larger trend of churches leaving the SBC. Here’s what he wrote when his congregation stopped cooperating as an SBC church.

On Sunday, we officially voted to leave the Southern Baptist Convention. This has been years in the making. It’s not so much we didn’t want them, but their continued actions revealed they didn’t really want us. We leave with resolve to be the church Christ wld have us to be.

We hold no ill will to the remaining faithful men and churches in the convention. In fact, I wish for there to be a massive revival of reformed baptist ecclesiology. The brothers and sisters left should fight for that. But it’s no longer our concern. For years I have said:

You can either stay in and fight or leave. But you can’t just keep pumping the machine full of money. We chose to leave. There are some good things the SBC does. Also, much bad. But it’s not our focus any more. I tried for years, cost me much. All in on the local church.²⁰

While it is always tempting to dismiss the hard words of departing members, SBC leaders need to come to grips with the way their actions have impacted local churches. If the “Real SBC” is one that does the work of local ministry, the real impact of leaders who dismiss the concerns of vocal conservative pastors is that those pastors will take their churches elsewhere.

Pastor Allen personally shared with me his rationale for leading his church to stop giving to the convention. It was a combination of “Danny Akin’s interaction with me in 2022 from the stage where he refused to take ownership for SEBTS giving women MDivs in pastoral ministry; [it was] the lack of real care among leadership about Ed Litton’s plagiarism; [it was] the disdain for godly men like Tom Ascol . . . [and it was] the way Mike Stone was treated in 2021.”²¹

Indeed, for all the ways that messengers have heard the appeal that the “world is watching,” it seems that some leaders have forgotten that “the messengers are watching, too.” And what vocal conservatives have seen is that leaders have placated socially liberal causes, all the while alienating socially conservative churches. Tragically, a cocktail of ingratiationism, pragmatism, and feminism has steered SBC leaders away from being overtly conservative and has made them regularly dismissive of those who make a fuss online.²²

22. For ingratiationism, see Mark Coppenger, “Stewardship of Our SBC Land,” Christ Over All, March 6, 2026; for pragmatism, see David Schrock, “We Don’t Like Theology, Do We? Three Reflections from the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention,” Via Emmaus, June 18, 2021; for feminism, see Doug Ponder, “One Sacred Effeminacy: The Cooperative Longhouse and the Great Feminization of the SBC,” Christ Over All, March 23, 2026; “The SBC Isn’t Drifting—It’s Being Steered: A Sober-Minded Response to Emotional Sabotage,” Christ Over All, June 5, 2025.

At this hour then, there is a massive breach in trust between those on the platform and those coming to the mics who call for woke entities to be abolished, churches with female pastors to be disfellowshipped, and financial transactions to be transparent. And if the convention is going to move forward together, it will need to find leaders who will stop being cheerleaders for the latest thing and start being Churchills who are able to lead the troops into battle. In other words, the convention needs men who will stop papering over the problems in our convention, but instead will address them humbly, honestly, hopefully, and most of all, biblically!

To be most clear, for the convention to go forward with renewed trust, we need leaders who will acknowledge the many ways the SBC has erred. Or, to put it more constructively, we need leaders who will genuinely listen to the concerns of faithful pastors, actively support the initiatives that conservative pastors are bringing to the convention floor, and earnestly work against the oligarchy that has made Billy Baptist feel like an outsider in his own convention.²³ For without such overtures, a growing number of churches will take the path of my previous church in Chattanooga. They will be SBC, but in name only.

23. Oligarchy is a strong word, but Joshua Abbotoy has argued convincingly that this is what many pastors are up against in the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Medium Change: Recruiting Trustees Who Will Hold Entities Accountable

If convention leaders must regain trust by humbly admitting errors, they must also work to correct weaknesses in our association. And one of those areas of improvement concerns the current state of affairs with our trustee system. If our leaders are telling the convention to “trust the trustees,” then our ability to trust the works that the convention is doing rises or falls on the work of these men and women. Which raises the question: Where do trustees come from? What are they called to do? And how much training do they receive?

To reverse the order of these questions, I would suggest that if trust is going to be found in the convention, then we need to improve three things in the trustee system: (1) the training of trustees, (2) the accountability of the trustees, and most importantly (3) the selection of the trustees. Let me outline each.

Trustee Training

In Jon Whitehead’s essay on the trustee system, he rightly offers three duties that every trustee must fulfill. Trustees have (1) a duty of care, (2) a duty of loyalty, and (3) a duty of candor.²⁴ That is to say, trustees have a legal responsibility to oversee the organization (care); they have a personal obligation to advance the mission given by churches (loyalty); and they have an ethical duty to raise concerns or inform higher-level decision-makers when things appear out of line (candor).

24. Jon Whitehead, “What’s Trusty About SBC Trustees: Does Trustee Training Fix Ailing Entities or Institutionalize Passivity?,” Christ Over All, March 18, 2026.

In his essay, which reviews our current trustee training, Whitehead shows how each of these areas are lacking. But specifically, he draws the difference between trustees who face incentives to be mere cheerleaders for the organization and trustees who understand their fiduciary responsibility. Clearly, trustees must be trained to understand their duty, if they are to stand firm against bad incentives; we can hope that will happen more and more, as trustee training is made stronger. Indeed, while adding training is good, it is only as good as the training itself. And, as Jon Whitehead reported in his article, this current training looks to make only minimal improvements.²⁵

25. For a full evaluation of our current training, read Whitehead, “What’s Trusty About SBC Trustees.”

Trustee Accountability

Relatedly, however the training is given, it must equip trustees to hold the organization and its leaders accountable. As it stands, there are (at least) conflicting reports that are coming out from trustees. Some say they have enough information to render a verdict on the fidelity of financial and leadership decisions; others do not. If we can’t formally adjudicate those disputes, we can at least say an organization with so many longstanding, disparate reports is the antithesis of a trustworthy system.

Even if only some trustees are dissuaded from asking hard questions, and other boards do not receive even the normal, “990-level” understanding of financial data, an observer might rightly wonder if accountability is really a priority of this system. Consequently, trust in the trustee system is low, and regaining this trust requires an overhaul of the system and a commitment to accountability, rather than public relations, as the trustees’ primary goal.

Trustee Selection

Revising our trustee system could come in many ways. Providing training is a kind of revision. And so is calling upon trustees to actually exercise their fiduciary responsibilities. But these are only band-aid solutions. If we are going to see real and lasting change—change that can carry the convention for the next generation, more is needed. And that is why selection standards must be improved.

It is an open secret that J. D. Greear nominated individuals for committees for reasons other than merit.²⁶ And as we have experienced over the last few years with the credentials committee in particular, basic doctrinal questions related to female pastors (or the office of pastor in general) have been a stumbling block for members on the committee. And when pastors hear that committees make decisions that do not reflect the teaching of the BFM2000, it has required motions like the Law Amendment to direct the credentials committee.

26. Brent Hobbs, “Greear Announces Most Diverse Ever Committee on Committees,” SBC Voices, February 12, 2019.

I voted three times in favor of the Law Amendment (which would have upheld the Bible’s teaching that only qualified men can be pastors), and Christ Over All worked to push for that constitutional change, too. But ironically, when we step back and look at the need for that change, it comes from the fact that there is a lack of trust in the credentials committee, the committee that makes the verdict on whether a reported SBC church has a faith and practice in line with the SBC. Again, trust is lacking in the selection of those committees. And the same is true for trustee boards.

So, if we are going to regain trust in the convention, we must have confidence in those selected to sit on the boards. And that begins by making sure that the committees who fill these boards are choosing trustees on the basis of their commitment to the Baptist Faith and Message, without any other criterion for diversity, inclusion, or equity. But that is just the first step.

The second step for better boards is filling them with people who know what they are doing. That is to say, if accountability was really the aim of board members, we would establish boards where businessmen with financial knowledge would get oversight to the financial aspects of a given entity. Likewise, trained pastors and theologians would give oversight to the curriculum being published by LifeWay, and the same would be true for faculty oversight at the seminaries. This is how boards once operated, especially when people in the convention had greater personal knowledge of those whom they selected. But today, a sprawling SBC is built without such personal knowledge. And this is a recipe for disaster, not to mention distrust.

As it stands, our trustee selections are based upon geographic representation. And, I suppose, a case could be made for that. But this will always mean that novices in finance are called to listen to financial reports and theologically untrained men and women will be called to oversee faculty committees. Equally, as the number of boards across the convention require hundreds of seats to be filled, the committees who are called to fill those positions are at some point just looking for bodies to fill seats. To counter this lack of knowledge, some boards may withhold information or reserve decision-making to an inner circle. But this practice is one more way that trustee systems ensure a lack of real accountability and a temptation for trustees to go along to get along. In other words, these practices incentivize board conformity, minimize genuine candor, and reduce the goal of real accountability.

On the whole, we would like to assume our SBC leaders are always right and righteous. But this is a flawed assumption, and one that has been proven wrong repeatedly over the last decade. And so what is needed to regain trust is to find a way to select trustees who are (1) committed Southern Baptists and (2) competent in their area of oversight.

Understandably, such a change might require a change in the ways our trustee boards are filled. Maybe it would require changing their size and makeup. Maybe it would mean assigning trustees regionally to our six seminaries or other institutions. But whatever it would mean, it is worth considering how we find board members who will serve the convention well and provide genuine accountability.

Today, the trust of the SBC is fracturing in a myriad of ways, and if it is going to be restored, we must find a system of trustees that works to solidify our convention. And honestly, the best presidential candidates and convention leaders will be the ones who are most able and willing to reunite the entity leaders with the conservative local pastors. And the place to do that is in the trustee system, but right now that system is a source of concern, not confidence. And that is why I am suggesting the need for a new selection process, as well as a new way to envision our conventional unity in the midst of fractured age.

The Big Change: Reorganizing the Convention to Magnify Trust

In his book, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (2016), Yuval Levin lists and laments the current divisions in our political life. He argues that Americans are divided by two competing nostalgias. Considered roughly, liberals want to return to Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s, while conservatives want to return to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Sidestepping his analysis of the history and this division, he is undeniably right that the fracturing of our culture is something that cannot be resolved by a nostalgic return to the past. Rather, we must make a path forward.

And in his estimation, the best path forward is not to deny the differences but to let those fractures actually reduce the size of various organizations to the lowest effective level. Arguing for subsidiarity, he suggests that the way to go forward is to emphasize the mediating institutions of family, church, civic groups, and local markets. In an age of ongoing individualism and ballooning government, the path forward, says Levin, is not to deny fractures or pretend that we can overcome them. Rather, he suggests, that it might be possible to embrace them as a smaller network of mediating institutions reorganizes society. Again, without pressing the merits or the demerits of the book for political life in America, Levin’s concept is fruitful for the future of the SBC, because it points forward to something Baptists once did with great skill—organize themselves with genuine associationalism.

If we can be honest, the SBC has not only lost trust between the platform and floor, but it has also fractured in countless directions. In some ways those fractures have always been there, as I recall my first encounter with the SBC in 2006. Walking to a hotel lobby miles removed from the Coliseum, the hallway was standing room only, as traditional Arminians and upstart Calvinists brushed past each other to hear Paige Patterson and Albert Mohler debate. In the years between then and now (as well as before, too), Southern Baptists have wrestled with theological divisions. But it seems that for all the ways that Traditional Baptists and Calvinists split over the doctrines of grace, there is even more division today—and I am not referring to the social and political divides. Rather, I am referring to the countless organizations like Pillar, Founders, ACME, and Vance Pitman’s new consulting enterprise that are found within the SBC, but are not of the SBC.

With the change in the giving strategies that came after the “Great Commission Task Force” (2010), Southern Baptists were able to designate their giving to any entity they chose. Debates arose at that time as to whether this change would ruin the Cooperative Program or revitalize it.²⁷ Today, with more than fifteen years of data behind us, we can see that Cooperative Program giving was not spared by encouraging people to give to the SBC work of the choice, instead of giving to the general cooperative effort that once funded all SBC entities.

27. Trevin Wax, “The Great Commission Resurgence Debate,” Christianity Today, June 15, 2010.

Determining whether that decline is correlative or causative would require more work, but the point I want to make is that the encouragement to give directly to SBC entities and evangelistic ministries while remaining Southern Baptist has (1) invited churches into the SBC that do not have Lottie Moon deep down in their heart and (2) changed the nature of our cooperation.

Yes, education, church planting, and international missions are still our big three, but now many Southern Baptist churches are doing those outside of the Cooperative Program-funded entities. And with many new organizations starting up with tighter associations and confessional commitments, it seems like something has to change. Because, in fact, things have changed.

Therefore, if the SBC is going to move forward together, we must do so humbly, wisely, and strategically. Thus far, I have stressed the need for humble leaders who are willing to admit where the SBC has gone wrong and who are willing to work to rebuild trust. Likewise, I argued that we need reliable trustee boards who will actually hold entities accountable. But now, to bring this essay to a close, I want to argue for a strategy that leans into the divisions that are in our convention.

Joshua Abbotoy rightly argues that SBC leadership structures have taken on the form of an oligarchy.²⁸ Complementing this, I want to offer a way forward that deals honestly with the divisions in our convention by recruiting those very divisions to solve the problem created by a massive convention that is run by a small number of high-powered leaders.

28. Joshua Abbotoy, “New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy and the SBC,” Christ Over All, March 25, 2026.

Here’s what I mean. One of the biggest challenges to being Southern Baptist today is that such an association means that every individual pastor is identified with 47,000 other churches and millions of other people. And that means—whether for the two days we meet in June or at any other time of the year—that we are either encouraged by or frustrated with people we don’t actually know. And that means that because there is so much relational distance between local pastors (and churches) and national spokesman (and entities), it makes the stakes very high—and very public—when the only real-time vehicle for communications is social media.

Yes, the Trustee system is supposed to hold the convention in check and serve as a mediating voice between the messengers and the oligarchs but for reasons noted above, that system needs revitalization. And part of the revitalization that I am proposing here is finding ways to make the convention smaller. Or at least to feel smaller, where people in the convention actually spend most of their time listening to, working with, and cooperating alongside people they actually know—and like.

In other words, because the SBC is a political organization that includes millions of people, it will always require massive managerial support and a small collection of influence people who run things when everyone goes home. But I wonder if the pride we take in being so big is one of the greatest causes of our current crisis. And further, I wonder what it would take to implement measures of subsidiarity into the SBC.

Historically, the SBC was well-served by active local associations and state conventions. More recently, with the advent of the Internet and the freedom to travel across the country, pastoral networks, theological conferences, and missional agencies have begun to do the same work and fill the same gap. As a result, the mediating institutions that once fostered real relationships among Southern Baptists at a national level have been replaced by a host of other organizations and the relationships that come with them. In outlining these changes, I am not offering any judgment on affinity groups replacing regional ones, but I am suggesting that these sociological changes have had a negative effect on Southern Baptist funding and fellowship.

Too often today, more than a few Baptists see their fellow Baptists as enemies to conquer, not friends to cherish. And in more than a few occasions, we have discovered that enemies have snuck into the camp. As a result, our personal trust has worn thin, and this makes the relationship between the key leaders and the masses all the more difficult. Platform charisma and massive org charts can only go so far. And that is why something smaller is needed.

As I noted in my essay on the challenges of online speech,²⁹ many conservative pastors feel as though their interests are not being protected or promoted in the SBC, and when they try to communicate with national leaders, it seems like nothing happens. But honestly, the problem is not just that the leaders are dismissive, it is that the systems these men operate in are unable to meet the needs of hundreds and thousands of voices. Indeed, when have ten million people ever walked together (Amos 3:3)? Not even the exodus out of Egypt approached the numbers of the SBC.

29. David Schrock, “What Is the Cause of Our Divisions? Social Media and Other Strategies for Effecting Positive Change in the SBC,” Christ Over All, March 24, 2026.

To make a historical comparison, when the SBC was more culturally homogeneous, it might have been possible to walk together. But even then, theological liberalism ripped through our convention. So let us remember, there has never been a time when perfect unity was preserved. But in those times, the SBC was smaller. Or at least, it operated with stronger relational ties. Yes, 1985 had 50,000 Southern Baptists show up in Dallas, but how did that grassroots movement emerge? It wasn’t by social media, but by natural relationships, where pastors called upon pastors to come and stand for biblical inerrancy.

In many ways, the SBC would do well to go back to a form of associationalism that was built on smaller units of confessional unity, evangelistic strategy, and close proximity. In other words, instead of attempting to rid ourselves of all vestiges of tribalism, I wonder if smaller tribes (taken in the best form of the term) are actually what is needed to foster a plethora of smaller, tighter ministerial units that can actually build trust internally and then share trust with others.

Indeed, if trust is lacking at the largest level today—and, it is!— why not return to the place where trust is found. And then from those smaller, healthier building blocks, Southern Baptists can have honest conversations about cooperating for the next one hundred years.

Now, in suggesting this, it may sound like such a reorganization would shake the foundations of our international missions and church-planting efforts. And it just might. But so will an ongoing decline in Cooperative Program giving or any of the other maladies highlighted this month at Christ Over All.

Therefore, while there is still time, I am suggesting that the SBC take a serious look at reorganizing its smaller units of ministry. This would include the historic ministries of local, state, and national association. But it would also need to include newer pastoral networks and adjacent church planting and missions efforts. From one perspective these doctrinal and missional endeavors are the very thing that is undermining the Cooperative Program, but from another they might just be the way in which the SBC walks together going forward—not as one monolithic SBC, but as a myriad of cooperating churches and church networks that share the same history, mission, and desire—to bring Christ to a lost and dying world.

Again, this revision of the SBC will not look or feel the same as the century-old Cooperative Program, but have you noticed?—the world in 2026 is not the same as 1925! Indeed, instead of hanging on to the old form of the SBC, with entities fighting for ways to get funds from sources outside the SBC, what could a new vision for cooperation look like? What would it look like to truly organize a way of ministry that would last the next century?

Even if the specifics of this proposal are lacking—because, honestly, I don’t want to prophecy or predict too much of the future—such a reorganizing must be the future aim, because it is the present need.

Holding the Center

All in all, for the SBC to go where it needs to go will require humble leadership, genuine accountability, and fresh ways of thinking. For without it, I fear many Southern Baptist churches will simply direct their giving away from the Cooperative Program and toward their own personal interests. And as a result, they will be Southern Baptist in name only. Indeed, in the 1980s, that was exactly what my former church in Chattanooga did, and for all of the ways it continued to be faithful in its local ministries and international outreach, it effectively cut itself off from the SBC. And in time, when its bushels were less full, its independence would have been served well by a tighter association with the SBC.

All in all, as I reflect on the history of one church among the many who participated in the Conservative Resurgence, I am grateful to God there were multitudes who worked together to fight for the convention. For as a result, great good was accomplished for the seminaries, the churches, the missionaries sent out by the Southern Baptist Convention, and the souls of those who were saved by their cooperative labors. Today, however, I fear that many churches are tempted to follow the path of departure or disengagement. And I am writing this essay in hopes that there is another path that Southern Baptists can take together.

To revisit Levin’s book title, we live in a fractured republic, and we minister at a time where our convention has both divided ministerially and sociologically, but also in ways that have come by way of leadership that has harmed the convention. In my estimation, the divisions we see do not have to spell the end of the SBC, but they do require an honest assessment and a plan for renewal. The current SBC trend of offering Lego Movie type speeches where “Everything is awesome” will not do. It will only ensure that conservative pastors and missions-minded churches are more disheartened and ready to do something new.

And therefore, I am urging Southern Baptists to take seriously these three changes. We need to recognize humble leaders who will admit error and re-enfranchise conservative pastors; we need to recruit competent trustees who are committed to the Southern Baptist cause and who will hold entities accountable; and we need to consider ways of reorganizing our associations so that smaller circles of faithful men and women can work together and rebuild trust. As I noted before, 47,000 churches are not going away any time soon, but our convention’s size should not give us any reason for confidence. Instead, it should motivate us to pray and work and look for ways to walk together in this day and in the days come.

Again, the question that remains: Will the center hold? And who will hold the center?

In the SBC, the members of the churches, under the Lordship of Christ, must hold the center, but critically, our leaders need to help good and godly pastors find ways to put their hands on the work. For too long, too many leaders have boxed out vocally conservative pastors from having a place in the convention, and they have done so with systems that make genuine accountability all but impossible. And so, going forward our convention is in need of some real organizational change.

To that end, it is my hope and prayer that this essay and all the other articles published at Christ Over All this month would help many to see that the problems in our convention are real, but so is the hope of walking together with a spirit of cooperation, so long as we can do so with love, justice, and a genuine humility granted by God. For wonderfully, that is how Southern Baptists have cooperated for more than 180 years. And by God’s grace, our Lord will grant us a fresh spirit of repentance and renewal, so that our cooperation, in whatever form it takes, will continue for generations to come.