San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Who will lead the Southern Baptists forward?
Since 2018, the Southern Baptist Convention has lost a series of high-profile leaders whose tenures ended due to controversy or misconduct.
The latest to depart is Ronnie Floyd, a former megachurch pastor who resigned as president of the SBC’s Nashville-based Executive Committee in midOctober, saying in his resignation letter that further association with the committee put “personal integrity, reputation, and leadership” at risk.
“What was desired to be leveraged for the advancement of the Gospel by those who called me here, I will not jeopardize any longer because of serving in this role.”
Floyd had been embroiled in weeks of bitter debate over an investigation into how Baptist leaders treated survivors of sexual abuse and their allegations, but his departure came over issues not of personal blame but of how much access investigators would have to records of past conversations and other communications.
He follows former SBC President Paige Patterson, who was fired for mishandling a sexual assault at a seminary he led; Frank Page, former president of the Executive Committee, who resigned after a “personal failing;” David Platt, former president of the SBC’s International Mission Board, who resigned after a troubled tenure that included the loss of nearly 1,000 missionaries due to budget cuts; and Russell Moore, former president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, a critic of former President Donald Trump who had forced unwelcome discussions on sexual abuse.
The leadership drain has come at a difficult time for the SBC, which has lost more than 2 million members since 2006. The number of baptisms has declined for years as well. As they try to stem these losses, denominational leaders have feuded, often in
public, over their responsibility to address systemic racism, over the role of women in leadership and over support for Trump. The national debate over critical race theory has also divided Southern Baptists and led a number of Black pastors to leave the convention.
The leadership drain also comes amid growing secularization of the United States, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and a depletion of trust in religious leaders even among the faithful.
“I do believe that SBC is
at a crossroads in many ways,” said James Merritt, pastor of Cross Pointe Church in Duluth, Ga., and former SBC president.
“We are going to have to make some very strategic and difficult decisions on how we are going to engage America and the world with the gospel in a postCOVID and postmodern age, where being a pastor of a church, or the leader of a denomination, does not carry anywhere the cultural cache or influence that it once did.”
The debate over the sex abuse investigation that led to Floyd’s resignation is part of a larger reckoning among Southern Baptists prompted in part by a 2019
report by the Houston Chronicle documenting hundreds of cases of abuse at SBC churches, which led the SBC to hold a public lament at its annual meeting and to change its bylaws to allow the banishment of churches that mishandle abuse.
When local church delegates, called messengers, were told at the SBC annual meeting in Nashville,
Tenn., in June that Floyd and the Executive Committee planned to oversee a third-party firm’s review of the committee’s handling of sexual abuse, they wrested control of the investigation away from the Executive Committee in a vote from the meeting floor.
Molly Worthen, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, said the controversy exposed a tension faced by Southern Baptists and other evangelicals: On one hand, she said, those groups are often fiercely democratic — believing that decisions should be made by the people in the pews.
“On the other hand, there’s the tendency of
evangelical culture to produce pastor-warlords who are used to operating with no particular checks and balances and create their own systems with very little accountability,” said Worthen. “Those are both equally powerful cultural strains and here we see them clashing in a very visible way.”
The rise of social media has also challenged Southern Baptist leaders, said the Rev. Brian Kaylor, president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way, a publication for Southern Baptists in Missouri. In the past, Kaylor said, disputes at the top
were largely kept private. Now, feuds are out in the open.
“Things can’t happen behind closed doors anymore,” he said.
Floyd’s successor will be tasked with rebuilding trust between Southern Baptists and their national leaders.
The Southern Baptist Convention, which has no bishops or hierarchical structure, has been bound together instead by a shared mission, a fierce devotion to the Bible and a wildly successful fundraising venture known as the Cooperative Program since 1925.