Southern Baptists set for pivotal annual meeting in Indianapolis: The key issues to watch

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The Southern Baptist Convention faces yet another crisis of identity at its upcoming annual meeting.

Anticipation ahead of the 2022 and 2023 SBC annual meetings was one of existential angst, principally over whether the denomination would support abuse reform and move beyond a dark cloud over its reputation. But with weeks until the Nashville-based SBC’s legislative assembly in Indianapolis this year, another debate related to the status of women pastors has taken center stage.

A proposed measure seeking to enshrine a ban on women pastors has spurred deeper reflection and disagreement about how those within the nation's largest Protestant denomination cooperate with one another.

The convention's latest annual census reported there were 12.9 million members, continuing a decline, and 46,906 churches in the SBC. Meanwhile, unlike the past couple years when policy positions divided along two main coalitions, a more fragmented array of voting blocs this year makes it harder to predict how certain groups of delegates, called messengers, will vote.

There are currently six candidates vying to be the next SBC president. Some represent a more rightwing platform, for example, while others are leading with support for abuse reform as a top priority instead of the debate over women pastors.

Here’s what to know about the defining issues, major players, and the stakes of this pivotal event.

The big decisions: 'Law Amendment,' abuse reform, president

The measure to enshrine a ban on women pastors, often called the “Law Amendment” — bearing the namesake of its original petitioner Virginia Pastor Mike Law — is the most energizing issue headed into Indianapolis.

Even those who oppose the measure find themselves discussing the Law Amendment frequently, often by responding to criticism that opposition to the measure is synonymous with a non-traditional view on the roles of men and women. Southern Baptists are complementarian, referring to a belief that men and women have certain assigned roles in church leadership and at home.

Including the Law Amendment, here are the top three decisions facing the messengers:

• Law Amendment: Set for a second and final vote, the Law Amendment aspires to strengthen enforcement of a belief in the SBC’s doctrinal statement, called the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, by amending the convention’s constitution. If passed, the measure enhances grounds for the SBC to disfellowship churches in which women serve as pastors. But opponents, of whom there are well-known and stanchly conservative Southern Baptist statesmen, worry the measure is overly exclusionary and sets a precedent for future attempts to whittle down standards of affiliation between churches and the SBC. Messengers approved the Law Amendment on first reading at the 2023 SBC annual meeting in New Orleans, when the convention also overwhelmingly upheld the ouster of two churches — Southern California megachurch Saddleback Church and Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville — in which women serve as pastors.
• Abuse reform: The biggest question for abuse reform this year is money, specifically funding for a recently announced nonprofit to take on abuse reform over the long-term. Major SBC-affiliated agencies, called entities, haven’t volunteered that seed money as the nonprofit’s backers hoped. It potentially leaves the current SBC Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force to ask the convention directly for support from the Cooperative Program, a denomination-wide budget that receives income from church giving and benefits most Southern Baptist entities. But longtime skeptics of abuse reform are leveraging this uncertainty to allay other doubts, such as the increasingly burdensome legal costs to the SBC Executive Committee to fight abuse-related lawsuits.
• Presidential election: There are multiple candidates for SBC president that fall into the two major camps of Southern Baptist electoral politics — mainstream conservatives and opposition conservatives, the latter of which hopes to pull the denomination further to the right. Then, within each of those camps, there’s at least one candidate who more represents the establishment due to their many years of service in SBC political life. Other candidates in each camp bill themselves or receive backing from newer groups that assert a reformation-style zeal. Those smaller camps will likely form broader alliances after the first round of voting when the presidential election heads to a runoff, which is all but guaranteed given the current number of presidential candidates. The six candidates are North Carolina pastors Clint Pressley and Bruce Frank, Tennessee pastors Jared Moore and Dan Spencer, Oklahoma pastor Mike Keahbone, and Texas-based seminary professor David Allen.

The players: Same sides, new expressions

At the 2022 and 2023 SBC annual meetings, different groups of opposition conservatives formed an alliance to back a single candidate for SBC president and support other policy positions that sought to pull the convention further to the right.

But this year, the opposition conservative lobby has branched off some. One of those branches is new and has billed itself as more of an insurgency willing to employ bare-knuckle political tactics and frenzied social media activity to overwhelm opponents. Associated with a new think tank called the Center for Baptist Leadership, the group’s leadership includes far-right political activists such as former Trump administration staffer William Wolfe and Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers. The group has made it clear in material published by the Center for Baptist Leadership — a subsidiary of the rightwing Christian publication the American Reformer — it isn’t playing nice.

“My brothers, this is a war. This is a battle,” said Florida Pastor Ethan Jago in a column for the think tank, voicing support for the Law Amendment. “We all need to rally together under the banner of truth, to fight against the drift, to purge the false ideologies that have invaded our lines, and to make the soil uninhabitable for continuing compromise.”

As a sort of counter-narrative, a group of emergent SBC leaders and policy commentators launched a publication called The Baptist Review to promote the ideals of partnership and dialogue. “If the Convention is going to become healthy again, its conversation must leave the toxic confines of social media, but also must resist becoming yet another piece of institutional PR,” said the group, most of whom are associated with the mainstream conservative camp, in a post about The Baptist Review.

Related: What state-level ousters of SBC churches say about the national debate about women pastors

The stakes: Cooperation versus ‘biblical fidelity’

Perhaps the biggest decision facing Southern Baptists at this annual meeting is a choice between two virtues: cooperation versus “biblical fidelity.”

Many in the mainstream conservative camp believe the two ideals aren’t mutually exclusive, and that the SBC’s current constitutional standards and doctrinal statement are sufficiently conservative.

“While I personally disagree with the interpretation of those offering the Law Amendment, I am willing to cooperate with pastors and churches who hold to such an interpretation,” Texas Pastor Steve Bezner said in a column for The Baptist Review, voicing opposition to the Law Amendment. “Perhaps it is not too late. I, for one, hope we will choose once again to cooperate instead of cannibalize.”

But opposition conservatives, especially more militant factions such as The Center for Baptist Leadership, argue cooperation is compromise and the harbinger of liberal drift.

“We can compromise for a false unity that will lead to our demise, or we can stand for true unity on our existing convictions,” Texas Pastor Marc Minter said in a column for The Center for Baptist Leadership voicing support for the Law Amendment.

The feud is shaping up in such a way that whichever side wins out — through votes on the Law Amendment and SBC president, among others — will dictate the terms of the spirit of cooperation in the SBC going forward.

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on social media @liamsadams.