Southern Baptist leader resigns amid rifts over sex abuse
NASHVILLE, TENN. >> A top Southern Baptist Convention administrator is resigning amid internal rifts over how to handle an investigation into the SBC’s response to sexual abuse, a decision that underscores the broader ongoing turmoil in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Ronnie Floyd, president and CEO of the SBC’s Executive Committee, announced his departure Thursday in a statement critical of recent decisions related to the third-party review that is getting underway. An investigative firm is looking into allegations the Executive Committee mishandled abuse reports and mistreated survivors.
“Due to my personal integrity and the leadership responsibility entrusted to me, I will not and cannot any longer fulfill the duties placed upon me as the leader of the executive, fiscal, and fiduciary entity of the SBC,” said Floyd, who is leaving at the end of the month.
Members of the divided Executive Committee voted Oct. 5 to waive attorney-client privilege, agreeing to turn over legally protected records to investigators. The vote was the result of multiple meetings and mounting pressure from across the convention in favor of the waiver.
Proponents of the waiver of attorney-client privilege said it was a key demand of the thousands of Southern Baptist delegates who set the third-party review
into motion. Opponents said it was financially risky and could jeopardize insurance policies.
Floyd’s statement said the Executive Committee was committed to the review, but it could have been done “without creating these potential risks relating to the Convention’s liability.”
Floyd, a longtime Arkansas pastor who became the Executive Committee president in 2019, is not the only recent departure. Several members of the Executive Committee have resigned their posts, and the committee’s longtime law firm cut ties with the body, citing the decision to waive privilege.
This is the latest tension point in the convention’s ongoing reckoning with a sex abuse scandal that was thrust into the spotlight by
a 2019 Houston Chronicle and San Antonio ExpressNews report that documented hundreds of cases of abuse in Southern Baptist churches, including several in which alleged perpetrators remained in ministry.
“The last several weeks have been trying and difficult for our convention,” said SBC President Ed Litton in a statement. “While I was grateful for the outcome of last week’s Executive Committee meeting, I regret that Dr. Floyd and other trustees feel that this has placed them in a position where they can no longer continue to serve in their current capacities.”
The response to sex abuse is one of several issues causing controversy in the conservative evangelical denomination, which has experienced years of
declining membership in addition to some high-profile departures. Tensions have flared in recent years over critical race theory, women’s leadership roles in the church and partisan politics.
“What we’re seeing in the Southern Baptist Convention is both a reflection and a magnification of the tumult in the culture,” said Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist and executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center.
“The SBC is perpetually at war with itself for as long as I’ve known it,” Stetzer said. In June, Litton was elected the new SBC president in a narrow vote, temporarily tamping down an effort to push the convention even further to the right but embittering critics who remain hostile to him.