The credibility of the Southern Baptist Convention rides on its trustees.
The SBC was founded because trustees of the Triennial Convention had broken faith with its churches. The whole point of the Convention was to make sure that never happened again.[1]
1. Anthony L. Chute, “Baptist Progress and Setbacks,” in The Baptist Story: From English Sect to Global Movement, by Anthony L. Chute, Nathan A. Finn, and Michael A. G. Haykin (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2015), 151–62.
For over 180 years, churches have invested in this promise, building the largest missionary force in history and some of America’s largest seminaries. But there are signs that the promise has frayed. The primary evidence for this is the gradual decline in Cooperative Program giving. Churches are losing faith that the allocation of SBC budgets reflect their priorities. The reasons for this loss of trust are not hard to find; here are a few:
2. Mark Wingfield, “How Southwestern Seminary Is Bouncing Back from Financial Catastrophe,” Baptist News Global, March 11, 2025.
- Long-term deficits at some institutions, such as SWBTS.[2]
- The never-entirely-explained dalliance with Critical Theory beginning around 2015.[3]
3. Jared Longshore, “Getting Our Bearings in the SBC on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality,” Founders Ministries, November 18, 2019.
- The “abuse crisis” imbroglio since 2019.[4]
- The refusal of ERLC trustees to hold their entity accountable to its ministry assignment.[5]
4. Michael Carlino, “The SBC Isn’t Drifting, It’s Being Steered: A Sober-Minded Response to Emotional Sabotage,” Christ Over All, June 5, 2024
- The extraordinary steps of denominational leaders to frustrate the Law Amendment and the majority of churches that supported it.[6]
5. David Schrock, “What Do We Do with the ERLC? An Open Letter to Southern Baptists,” Christ Over All, March 3, 2025.
Each of these failures traces back to trustees who did not hold their piece of the Convention “in trust” for the churches.
6. “Jeff Iorg’s First Order of Business: Transparency and Accountability for the 2024 Book of Reports Fiasco,” Center for Baptist Leadership, May 13, 2024; David Schrock, “February Intermission: From Theology Proper to Denominational Stewardship,” Christ Over All, March 4, 2026.
Others in the Convention are thinking about trustees too. In February of 2026, the Executive Committee released a new online “Trustee Training” — the first SBC-level training made publicly available. That is a welcome step, and it deserves praise.[7]
The content, however, confirms that the Convention’s instructions to trustees are confusing at best, and wrong at worst. To understand why Trustees must be given a more forceful assignment, we need to examine what trustees are for, and then measure the training against three duties the law has long demanded of fiduciaries.
7. Scott Barkley, “Trustee Training Course Free, Available for Anyone,” Baptist Press, February 18, 2026.
1. What Trustees Do
The principle behind trustees is simple: they are a response to a problem. The problem is an aspect of human nature, and it arises whenever someone must depend on others to work for them.
When you do your own work, you decide how much time, effort, and money is good enough. But what happens when you can’t? Humans are sinful and selfish—tempted to do what is easy for themselves, or to advance their own goals. How do you ensure your goals are pursued faithfully, without waste or drift, when someone else is doing the work?
Jesus highlights the problem in the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30). A wealthy man, planning a journey, entrusts his property to three servants. These are not gifts; servants are supposed to do what the master would want, not what they themselves prefer. After a long absence, the Master returns and settles up. Two servants had multiplied what was entrusted to them. The third merely preserved it—burying the gift while spending his time on his own interests. The Master called that servant “worthless” and condemned him to “outer darkness,” where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The moment the Master appeared to leave, temptation grew. It is always easier to be selfish when we think no one will find out. The Master’s journey was necessary, but it left his faithless servant more time to err—and the longer the absence, the greater the possible damage. Not every servant yielded; two of three were faithful. But we know sin resides in everyone, tempting them to deal faithlessly with that which is entrusted to them. We “inherit a nature and an environment inclined toward sin,” says the Baptist Faith and Message.
Over generations, reasonable people have learned to limit this risk. One step is assigning responsibility to a trustworthy group, people who can watch, assess, and account for what is happening. People are less swayed by temptation when they know someone will eventually find out. In their simplest form, that is what trustees are: the Baptists entrusted by local churches to provide oversight and accountability over a particular entity.
At Harvard Law School, I studied under experts in American corporate governance—the advisors to Fortune 500 boards on what it means to be a fiduciary. I learned that high-functioning boards are not meddlesome or nitpicky. They understand that experienced managers should be paid fairly and treated with respect. But they are not passive consumers of razzle-dazzle. Their normal mode is to set goals, measure results, and assess performance frankly. Directors are taught that vigorous oversight is not an intrusion. Rather, it is an ethical obligation to those who sent them.
This, in a nutshell, is the task of SBC trustees. The churches have trusted them with funds and a mission. The trustees must hire the work to be done, adopt policies to prevent secret selfishness, and hold people accountable by receiving information, asking hard questions, and by not looking the other way.
2. The Duty of Care—But Careful about What?
The law classifies trustees as “fiduciaries”—people others trust to perform work on their behalf. Unlike an arm’s-length deal with a mechanic or a carpenter, a fiduciary must put the interests of someone else ahead of his own.
Most courts recognize two core duties: care and loyalty. Care and loyalty in turn generate subsidiary obligations, including the duty of candor—the duty to tell or warn the person being served.
How do courts measure care? By whether a trustee has used at least as much diligence as a reasonably prudent person would in managing entrusted affairs. A careful trustee actively supervises management, asks hard questions, and ensures the people running the institution are doing so competently and faithfully. A trustee who sits passively while the entity drifts violates his duty.
You might expect the SBC’s new training to emphasize diligent management, but it does not.
The idea of “Trustee management” appears favorably only once—Dr. Jeff Iorg helpfully notes that the original SBC constitution called for “Boards of Managers,” a designation now replaced by “Trustees.” But from the opening lesson onward, prospective trustees are warned that proactive oversight is dangerously close to violating the rules:
- “Fiduciary responsibility includes oversight—not execution—of legal and financial matters.”
- “Governance requires ‘changing hats’ from leader to overseer.”
- “Trustees govern, set policy, and ensure accountability—rather than managing day-to-day operations.”
- “The president is the only employee of the board; management flows through the president.”
- “Trustees are results-focused evaluators, not operational supervisors.”
So, trustees do not manage. They do not execute. They do not lead. They do not concern themselves with employees below the CEO. They do not supervise operations. One might reasonably ask, “What is left for them to do?”
The recent press releases from SBC entity board meetings seem to answer the question.[8] Consider the verbs: “Lifeway trustees hear of past blessings, future plans.” “NAMB trustees gain a frontline view of Navy chaplaincy” during a San Diego trip. “Southwestern Seminary trustees celebrate ‘renewed hopefulness.'” “In Montreal, NAMB trustees “see [the] city’s beauty and its lostness.” “Southeastern trustees received institutional updates and participated in Southeastern’s 75th anniversary celebrations.” The newsworthy work of trustees, as their institutions describe it, is to hear, celebrate, see a city’s beauty, receive updates, and attend more celebrations.
8. Aaron Earls, “Lifeway Trustees Hear of Past Blessings, Future Plans,” Baptist Press, February 26, 2026; “Southwestern Seminary Notes God’s Faithfulness, Celebrates ‘Southwesterner’ Identity in 2025,” Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, December 10, 2025; Mike Ebert, “NAMB Trustees Gain Frontline View of Navy Chaplaincy during San Diego Board Gathering,” Baptist Press, February 6, 2026; Mike Ebert, “In Montreal, NAMB Trustees See City’s Beauty and Its Lostness,” Baptist Press, October 14, 2025; Mary Asta Mountain/SEBTS, “Southeastern Trustees Celebrate School’s 75th Anniversary, Akin Announces Retirement,” Baptist Press, October 15, 2025.
But the corporation law of most states has a different view.
Statutes governing charitable corporations typically charge directors with managing all the affairs of the corporation. In discouraging most management, the current SBC training leaves trustees without a full understanding of their legal duties—and at its worst, flatly contradicts those duties.
The Manufactured Gap Between “Governance” and “Management”
Why does the SBC spend so much time warning against “management,” when both law and history say trustees are responsible for managing?
This rhetoric has a history, but it is shorter than most people realize.
Academics began theorizing the separation of policy and administration in the late nineteenth century, and mid-century management theorists like Peter Drucker described board-level management as distinct in kind from operational management. But those academics were careful to frame the board’s role as managing the managers—not abstaining from management altogether. The board’s job was to select, supervise, and hold accountable the people doing the day-to-day work. Even if the board’s own “management” could be partly delegated, its responsibility for the results could not be.
The rhetorical severance of governance and management did not develop until a single word went viral: “micromanagement.”
In 1987, Admiral John Poindexter testified before Congress on the Iran-Contra affair. Asked why he didn’t know what his subordinate Oliver North had been doing in Nicaragua, Poindexter framed his ignorance as a virtue: “I did not micromanage Oliver North.” The hearings were widely broadcast, and the term caught on in a viral way. In a contemporaneous Chicago Tribune piece, editor Linda Witt tried to track down the term’s origin, calling professors at Stanford’s business school and leading corporate consultants. None of them had heard of it.[9]
9. Linda Witt, “A Verbal Fig Leaf to Hide a Naked Truth,” Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1987, sec. Perspective, p. 11, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, doc. no. 291054505.
Three years later, John Carver released Boards That Make a Difference (1990), describing his “Policy Governance” method. Carver argued that boards should act primarily by setting high-level “ends” policies, leaving executives room to determine the “means” within those policies. His attempt to steer boards toward high-value work—rather than second-guessing middle managers on technical details—was a genuine contribution
But Carver carefully preserved board accountability: “[T]he board is accountable for everything . . . accordingly, it must exercise control over both ends and means, so having the ends/means distinction does not in itself relieve boards from any responsibility.”[10]
10. See John Carver and Miriam Carver, “Carver’s Policy Governance Model in Nonprofit Organizations,” Lead Together, July 9, 2015. This online resource draws from John Carver, Boards That Make a Difference (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990).
Regardless, “micromanagement” was a powerful buzzword, and nobody wants to be labeled a meddlesome micromanager. Tired directors, harried managers, and frazzled faculty found in a bowdlerized Carver a rule that justified passive boards. Just as Admiral Poindexter had done, they could frame looking away as a virtue. When a board pressed into operational failures, they were accused of micromanaging the means. But trustees should press into how failures occur. That is precisely the right tool when an entity is failing, deceiving, or drifting from its mission. At the moment a board can prevent catastrophe, a struggling leader’s invocation of “micromanagement” is a demand that they look away.
We see, then, that the SBC’s new training borrows its vocabulary and emphasis from a poor reading of Carver. It is a practical reality that boards cannot serve as day-to-day supervisors because that would be inefficient and a waste of their highest uses. But they are the ultimate supervisors of an entity’s operations.
If the SBC trustee training had spent one minute warning against micromanagement and fifty-nine minutes empowering trustees to manage the managers, the cautions wouldn’t be worth mentioning. Almost every board training now carries some reference to “micromanagement.” But when thirty minutes of a sixty minutes of video warn against “managing” and “supervising”—without offering clear, positive examples of active oversight—trustees will be too frightened to use reasonable care.
Trustees have a legal duty to carefully manage the day-to-day managers. If micromanagement is wrong, good training must make clear that passive mismanagement is an equal or greater sin.
3. The Duty of Loyalty—and the Executive Committee Problem
The other core duty of trustees, after care, is loyalty.
Loyalty requires trustees to place their own interests below the interests of those trusting them. SBC trustees are dual fiduciaries. They must act for the best interests of their entity as well as for the best interests of the Convention and its churches. When the two conflict, they cannot move forward without instructions from the churches.
Loyalty, of course, means a trustee cannot personally profit from his role. But it also forbids the subtler betrayal of subordinating one’s independent judgment to the preferences of the officers or employees around him, trading his accountability for insider status.. Loyalty to the institution’s actual principles and his appointing authority (the Convention) is a fiduciary obligation; personal loyalty to friends is not. When the two conflict, the law is clear: the institution’s interests must win.
A common mechanism for encouraging trustee passivity is to declare that a few trustees are more equal than the rest. This typically manifests as a small “executive committee” or cluster of “officers” who act for the full board between meetings.
The allure of this organizational structure is efficiency. And “board unity” is often invoked—as though the ideal trustee meeting involves no disagreement. But the Convention’s instructions call for board judgment. It is a disloyal, false efficiency to give the board’s core responsibilities away. There is no reason to pay for trustees to witness the work if their judgment is never exercised.
Committees, properly understood, assist the whole board. They deliberate informally, investigate, and bring recommendations forward. But a committee should never substitute for the board. The full body of trustees bears legal responsibility for everything that happens on their watch. Trustees may delegate work, but they cannot delegate accountability for results. Today, when electronic meetings are routine, there is little justification for empowering an executive committee to act as a substitute for the full board.
I saw this firsthand on the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) board. Its executive committee had developed a habit of acting for the full board even on matters that the bylaws reserved to the full body. After I raised this problem repeatedly, the board convened a work group in 2022 to ratify the overreach. It recommended new bylaws granting the small executive committee plenary authority between meetings. With the right three votes, the executive committee could displace the board entirely and even contradict its prior decisions.
Under the ERLC’s current bylaws, most trustees must vote on only two matters in a normal year: officer elections and approval of a high-level annual budget. There are four other items requiring a full vote, but they are irregular.[11]
11. For example, one of these items is the decision to dissolve the corporation.
I proposed an amendment that would at least allow the full board to cabin the executive committee through adopted policies. It was soundly rejected. The majority happily surrendered any work they could surrender. The chairman of the bylaw committee was placed on the fast track to the chairmanship.
In practice, three members of the ERLC board can now run the entire entity. Instead of requiring the independent judgment of eighteen trustees (a board majority), it takes only three friendly officers. This passivity makes it “easier” for the board, who can hardly be held responsible for actions they never took. It makes it “easier” for the CEO, who need only manage a few members of the executive committee. But passive deference to officers makes it impossible for the board to loyally and carefully oversee the entity for the Convention.
The consequences came quickly. In 2024, the ERLC chairman attempted to terminate then-CEO Brent Leatherwood, believing he had officer consensus. He needed only two allies, but failed to obtain a formal vote. When the other officers denied any consensus, the firing was declared invalid.[12] At the next meeting, trustees demanded amendments stripping the committee of power to remove the CEO, yet they still wanted the board’s officers to review the CEO’s performance for them, and set his pay. Those are the very tasks that define managing a chief executive.
12. Sam Webb, “A Broken System Exposed: What Happened with Leatherwood and the ERLC Trustees,” Center for Baptist Leadership, August 1, 2024.
This centralization is not unique to the ERLC. Other entity trustees have told me their officers hold even greater power—including control over what may appear on the board agenda. A trustee seeking to raise a reform proposal would need either officer approval or a full-board vote to override the officers’ recommended agenda. Both paths are effectively blocked. Voting against officers signals disloyalty, and the surest way to guarantee you will never become an officer is to be seen opposing the ones who are.
The duty of loyalty runs to the Convention and its churches, not to the officers, and not to the CEO. A structure that makes meaningful dissent career-ending for trustees is a structure designed to defeat that duty.
4. The Duty of Candor—and the Silence Imposed in Its Place
We have discussed the duties of care and loyalty. Courts and scholars recognize additional subsidiary duties—good faith, oversight, and others—as applications of care and loyalty in specific situations. The duty of candid disclosure is the duty most urgently in need of resurrection among SBC trustees.
When some trustees hold information that their authority needs in order to exercise its own legal role (i.e., to vote, to deliberate, or to hold others accountable), silence is not neutral. It is a form of control. Lawyers must be fully candid with clients. Doctors must obtain informed consent. A trustee who knows something material to the Convention’s role and says nothing has made a choice to keep that power for himself, or for the institution, rather than returning it to the churches it belongs to. That is the precise wrong that the duty of candor exists to prevent.
This does not mean everything must be disclosed. Information that could endanger overseas missionaries should not be shared casually. Settlement terms covered by confidentiality agreements bind the trustees who agreed to them. The principle is not that trustees should speak indiscriminately, but that they should use information in the best interest of the Convention and the entity. Sometimes this means disclosure, and at other times it means silence.
Nor must the disclosure always be broadcast. In some cases, the appropriate channel is the SBC Executive Committee, which is supposed to represent the Convention’s interests between annual meetings. But if that channel fails to handle the information for the Convention, the trustees’ duty runs to the messengers directly.
The work of the Convention, of course, is to judge the work of the entities and their trustees. It would be a breach of trust for a trustee to sit quietly while the Convention acts on incomplete information.
Unfortunately, SBC entities have increasingly moved to discourage, silence, or manage disclosures of all kinds. That effort has become easier as Baptists’ mental model of the SBC has shifted toward a “consumer” or “donor” model, and away from older ideas drawn from military or government service—where citizens expect the right to inquire. Gradually, information rights have been restricted away from messengers and churches.
But the absence of a specific right to demand information does not change the trustee’s duty to disclose what is material to the Convention’s work.
The SBC’s new Trustee Training does give instructions on the handling of information. The training identifies four categories of information: proprietary, confidential, privileged, and public. Dr. Iorg warns that nothing is more discouraging to leadership or disruptive to operations than improper disclosure of proprietary, confidential, and privileged information.
What overrides the presumption of secrecy? The only exception offered is “illegal, immoral, or unethical” conduct, this being framed in terms of reporting to “governing authorities.” It is unclear whether this means mandatory reporting of abuse to civil authorities, or proper disclosure to the Convention. Perhaps “unethical” is broad enough to encompass the withholding of material information from the churches, but a positive duty of candor to the Convention is never addressed.
The training also encourages the “regular” use of executive sessions, so that when an executive session is truly necessary, it does not signal an emergency. There are sometimes good reasons for executive sessions—meetings of trustees that are utterly confidential and are restricted to board members only—but it is bizarre to encourage trustees to use them in a way that hides emergencies from the Convention. If the default were meetings that were open to interested SBC laypeople, trustees would not need to ask whether the Convention had been appropriately informed about a matter.
The training concludes with a warning against speaking to the media or anyone with a social media account, which happens to be most people on the planet. The best course, Iorg advises, is to defer to entity spokespeople.
Conclusion
In the Parable of the Talents, even the faithless servant understood that the master was owed a full reckoning. The law agrees.
The SBC has instead built a system that discourages full reckonings at every turn. Board officers are warned against micromanaging the CEOs. The boards are encouraged to defer to their officers. The SBC Executive Committee does not particularly want to hear about problems at the other entities. Everyone in the system seems to agree messengers should not hear bad news, unless it is a required financial report or a statement spun by an entity spokesperson.
And messengers have resisted imposing disclosure themselves. It takes a majority to request information from entities, and such requests are routinely denied—with SBC parliamentarians confirming that messengers ordinarily cannot compel disclosures from entities. But if messengers won’t hold boards to account for the churches, the entire basis of the Convention vanishes. The proverbial “rope of sand” blows away if no one want to hold the rope.[13]
13. James L. Sullivan, Rope of Sand with Strength of Steel: How Southern Baptists Function and Why (Nashville: Convention Press, 1974).
Demanding that messengers guess what trustees know but cannot say is not “holding in trust.” It is broken trust. Revival of the duty of candor is essential if trustees are to serve the churches that sent them. Instead of putting the onus on churches to pry new information out of their trustees, we need trustees emboldened to tell the churches everything relevant to their role as “the Convention’s headquarters.”
The SBC’s trustee system was designed to ensure that cooperative ministry serves the churches rather than itself. A new Trustee Training is a welcome step, and its public availability is itself a form of accountability.
But the course confirms what many have suspected. A training that warns trustees away from managing, concentrates authority in small officer groups, and says nothing about the duty of candor does not raise the floor. It institutionalizes the failure.
The Convention’s promise to its churches has always been accountability.
Three things are needed to reinvigorate the SBC’s promise: trustees willing to manage the managers, not merely observe them; renewed belief that the best decisions are made by full boards informed of dissenting views; and a clear-eyed commitment to telling the churches what they need to know.
Unfortunately, the SBC’s training doesn’t teach or preach those messages. But the trustees can still choose to live up to their fiduciary obligations—if only they have the courage to begin.
