During the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), a group called 9Marks held a “State of the SBC” panel presentation. During this presentation, their five speakers aired a number of concerns about their denomination. As the SBC lurches ever-closer to schism, it was a banger of a presentation! It reveals the hardliner faction’s biggest weaknesses—and their ambitions for the future.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 6/24/2025. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: 9Marks has diagnosed what’s wrong with the SBC!
9Marks, a hardline Calvinist pastors’ group, held a panel during the SBC’s recent Annual Meeting—as they have every year since 2016. The men onstage for it were familiar names within the denomination. Generally, they seem to be regulars for this yearly panel. And notably, these regulars are all vocal members of its hardliner faction. The only panelist who isn’t fully Old Guard this year is Clint Pressley, the denomination’s current president.
During their panel, called “The State of the SBC,” these brave men worked out what’s wrong with the SBC. Here’s the presentation itself:
None of their diagnoses will be unfamiliar to SBC-watchers, either. That night, these guys described an ailing denomination facing serious internal friction and increasing external scrutiny—which are both very difficult for evangelicals to navigate.
Today, we’ll cover their six main points. We’ll rate them in terms of importance, then explore whether or not the SBC in its current state can even address them before it’s far too late to fix anything. I’ll also note each suggestion’s chances of “working,” meaning its chances of reversing the SBC’s decline.
(I call the hardliner faction the “Old Guard,” and their opposition the “Pretend Progressives.” As far as I can tell, the factions don’t have formal names. The Old Guard, including men like Mike Stone, Tom Ascol, Paige Patterson, and Al Mohler, opposes women pastors, governing transparency, and abuse reforms. The Pretend Progressives, including men like J.D. Greear and Russell Moore, offer the flocks hope for abuse reform and governing transparency, and they’re less concerned with women pastors.)
Why this year’s 9Marks panel matters
Mark Dever founded 9Marks in 1998 (originally under the title “Center for Church Reform“). The entire title “9Marks” derives from a list Dever once made of nine signs of churches that grow rather than stagnate or shrink. Dever himself might have started evangelicals’ current habit of using the word “biblical” as an adjective to describe anything that aligns with their worldview. He’s ferociously Calvinist and solidly Old Guard.
As I said, 9Marks has been holding these panels since 2016. I didn’t pay them much mind, though, until this year. This year, their panel almost seemed neutral and even-handed. But it didn’t take long for me to notice a lot of behind-the-scenes Old Guard control-grabs.
It’s almost funny to see how very carefully these guys onstage offered their Old Guard-tinted diagnoses of the SBC’s big problems—and very funny indeed to see their utterly unsurprising suggestions for fixing those problems.
9Marks Diagnosis 1: Doctrinal drifting from their central creed
Our speakers spend a long time discussing their main creed, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (BFM2k, though usually just BFM). Its adoption vote was arguably the final fight of the schism now called the Conservative Resurgence. Each of the men onstage talks about how they use the BFM in their churches: as loyalty tests, sermon topics, membership requirements, etc.
The panelists’ solution, of course, involves passing the Sanchez (née Law) Amendment. (Unsurprisingly, Juan Sanchez is an Old Guard-leaning pastor.) It adds a specific passage to the BFM forbidding female pastors. Then, the Old Guard can drill down even harder on the modified BFM to ensure that all future SBC members and churches completely agree with the Old Guard’s platforms. Women pastors will be a thing of the distant past in no time flat! And then, churches will be crammed to bursting! Tons of new churches will join the SBC because they’ll be 100% sure of the denomination’s stances!
Or not.
Alas, the Old Guard’s already had a chance to demonstrate that a hardline focus will turn the SBC’s fortunes around. They’ve already failed, too. In 2005, when the Old Guard had solid control of the SBC, its then-President, Bobby Welch, set a stretch goal for the flocks of one million baptisms the next year. He knew at the time that he was testing the very premise of the Conservative Resurgence. And baptisms only declined the next year.
In fact, the Old Guard was in solid control of the SBC until about 2015. (We’ll get to why that year matters in a minute.) And yet the denomination did little but decline during those years. Enforcing even stricter doctrinal stances won’t help now, especially when the Old Guard’s leaders already know the flocks routinely reject hardline motions during Annual Meetings.
Accuracy: F. The Tarkin Effect is well established here: The harder Old Guard leaders tighten their grip on SBC members, the more of them will slip through their fingers.
Possibility of working: 0%. They might manage to pass the Sanchez Amendment, sure. But the Old Guard’s had decades to reverse the SBC’s decline. Doing more of what they want but harder won’t change failure into success now.
9Marks Diagnosis 2: Pastor shortages and ghost-town seminaries
At 40 minutes in, Mark Dever brings up his central concern:
Dever: I’m on the [Gordon-Conwell Seminary] campus there about a year ago, I literally see no humans. Same campus I went to 40 years ago, but I see no people. [. . .]
Akin: You have to work a lot harder to get people to campus than you ever have before.
Seminaries are doing more remote classes than ever. That distresses everyone on panel, including the two seminary presidents (Mohler and Akin). The presidents say that they’re filling student rosters quite nicely, but somehow the SBC is still short a lot of qualified pastors.
These days, many rural, small-venue churches are allowing pastors to slide into pulpits without seminary training. The traditional work-your-way-up career ladder for SBC seminary grads isn’t working anymore.
I see a lot of evangelicalism’s fusion with fundamentalism here. Numerous fundamentalist men sought ministry careers in churches just like those. They’d start as volunteers to work their way up the ladder of power (perhaps serving as a youth pastor), eventually landing a full pastor position. My Evil Ex even tried it! Our evangelical friends were horrified at such laxity at the time, but now many evangelicals seem to be comfortable with it.
For the Old Guard, getting more men into seminary programs is of paramount importance because those young men will almost certainly be hardliners who then teach their church congregations to be hardline.
The problem here is that these panelists don’t have a real plan for getting more students into seminary and then into pastor positions. That includes the two panelists who are, themselves, seminary presidents (Akin and Mohler). At 41 minutes, Akin mentions a “generous donor” who set up 15 full scholarships for men who want to go to seminary to be a pastor. But graduates won’t go far if small churches can’t afford to hire them—or decide that seminary degrees aren’t really that important to them, or decide not to pay a premium for seminary training. The actual cost of obtaining seminary training is only part of the SBC’s greater problem.
Accuracy: B. There’s definitely a pastor shortage in all flavors of Christianity. Keeping pastors employed is critical to keeping small churches alive. But the Old Guard doesn’t understand that the central issue churches have is tighter finances in general.
Possibility of working: 0%. However, the Old Guard has a good shot at bumping up registrations to SBC seminaries via those “generous donors.”
9Marks Diagnosis 3: Legal fees relating to the SBC sex abuse crisis
Quite a lot of the panel was taken up in talking about where donations actually go in the SBC. At the Annual Meeting this year (and after this panel), the voters approved a $3M fund for handling legal fees. Al Mohler accepts that the denomination needs that fund. But he also conceded that SBC pastors were very tetchy about their donations going to it:
I’ve had pastors say to me “No one should give to missions budget and and have it go to legal fees.” Well, no one should give to your church budget. But you’re going to get sued, brother. You’re going to have to pay lawyers. I’d rather do it honestly. I’d rather not try to put it through a lot of back chutes, and you know, call it something that it’s not. I’d rather just say: “This is what it’s going to cost us. We’re a grown-up denomination. We’ve got grown-up bills.” And long term, it’s better stewardship, by the way, to pay the lawyers rather than not pay. [Source: YouTube]
Even using the Christianese word “stewardship” won’t save Al Mohler now. (It means handling something as if one is only a temporary steward of it for its real owner, who is of course Jesus.) Old Guard leaders already dislike Mohler for not being extreme enough for their taste. They’ve already decided to oppose the idea of the SBC paying for any sex abuse lawsuits or legal defenses.
Capstone, an Old Guard site, calls such payments “reckless spending.” They quote Mike Stone—one of the faction’s bigger names—saying that Guidepost Solutions, which wrote an utterly damning abuse report in 2022, was “an existential threat to our cooperative efforts as a convention.” That site has also condemned the entire SBC Sex Abuse Task Force as “the chaos that has your conservative church dollars being sent to enrich radical Leftist lawyers who oppose everything you and your church believe.”
The Old Guard’s preferences here are delusional to say the least. Al Mohler is right: It’s better to have payments be transparent to the flocks rather than going through “back chutes.” If the Old Guard doesn’t like that, then perhaps they shouldn’t have shielded sex abusers in SBC leadership and SBC ministry for decades. The flocks know this, and they might explode if the Old Guard tries to memory-hole their complicity in that scandal.
Moreover, the entire transparency issue reveals a dealbreaking lack of trust in SBC leaders. The Old Guard opposes transparency measures in leadership but favors them in cases like the ERLC’s funding. That inconsistency will only make the Old Guard look more and more like it’s got something serious to hide. And Al Mohler isn’t helping by declaring (at 19 minutes in) that “mistakes were made” by people he insists are largely gone from the SBC. “Mistakes were made” is such an egregious dodge of accountability that I’m shocked anyone takes this man seriously.
Accuracy: B. The SBC’s legal troubles do erode members’ trust in their leaders, and transparency in how the SBC handles these troubles would help quite a bit—but those leaders refuse to take accountability.
Possibility of working: 30%. Seeing the SBC actually take accountability in handling this crisis might make a big difference.
9Marks Diagnosis 4: Disbanding the ERLC
Several panelists also expressed concern about the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). For a couple of years now, the ERLC has faced motions to defund and disband it. These motions have always failed, but it’s been a narrow vote each time.
Akin notes (at 14:40) that he’s always thought the ERLC is “a troubled child” for its entire existence. But “things changed a lot in 2016,” he says, and stops himself right there. But anyone in the Old Guard knows exactly what he means.
The Old Guard has had it in for the ERLC ever since they appointed Russell Moore to lead it in 2013. Moore was the polar opposite of his predecessor, Richard Land: principled, stubborn, sympathetic to those the SBC’s leaders had wronged, and extremely well-versed in public speaking, optics, and media usage. He opposed Donald Trump in 2015, and went on to oppose Old Guard plans for handling the denomination’s huge sex-abuse crisis (called by journalists “Abuse of Faith“).
The Old Guard’s enemy faction, the Pretend Progressives, now largely control the ERLC. Very clearly, the Old Guard has decided that if they can’t regain full control of it, they’d rather it not exist at all. But the flocks clearly like the ERLC. Moore’s gone, but his vocal defense of sex abuse victims and advocacy for denominational safety reforms endeared the ERLC to the flocks. Disbanding it would send a very clear message to them—and I don’t think the Old Guard would like their response to it.
Accuracy: F. The ERLC is probably the only SBC entity operating in mostly good faith.
Possibility of working: 0%. But 50% chance of it being disbanded in the next five years. The Old Guard really wants this to happen.
9Marks Diagnosis 5: Transparency with finances and leadership decisions
For the most part, financial and governmental transparency is a Pretend Progressive platform. So predictably, Mohler stands completely against it (at 22 minutes in):
Transparency is not a good platform. It’s not a good aspiration. Integrity is. The question is: how do you ensure the greatest integrity? Transparency is not always the way to do that.
Unfortunately, the Old Guard has demonstrated again and again that when they are allowed to operate with opacity, they don’t follow their own rules. The only way they follow their own rules is when they’re overseen by a greater authority they can’t ignore. (And I mean a real authority, not Jesus/Yahweh.)
For the SBC, integrity requires transparency. They have no integrity when they operate in secrecy. Their decades-old shielding of sex abusers within SBC ministry tells us that. So does the 2024 arrest of Old Guard member and pastor Jonathan Elwing for CSA and CSAM. So in turn do countless other Old Guard guys caught in wild hypocrisy, like Josh Buice and JD Hall. Opacity only allows SBC wrongdoing to fester.
Mohler has demonstrated many, many times that he can’t recognize a lack of integrity in his fellow SBC leaders. After all, in 2018 he sounded completely blindsided by the news of Paige Patterson and other abusers within his denomination. For that matter, none of the leaders in either faction could actually recognize a monster in their own ranks. So losing what little transparency SBC leaders have now would only guarantee an even greater lack of integrity.
Accuracy: A. Transparency would definitely help build trust in SBC leadership.
Possibility of working: 100%. But 0% chance of it happening.
9Marks Diagnosis 6: Inerrancy as every generation’s battle
At around 38 minutes into the panel, Danny Akin speaks to the very heart of the Old Guard:
What’s true today, you cannot take for granted for tomorrow. One of the things I’ve become aware of is the issue of inerrancy. That is a battle that every generation has to fight for itself—because there are students that are coming to our seminaries now [. . .] [who] didn’t go through the inerrancy war. This generation needs to recognize those gains can be just as easily and quickly lost. [Source: YouTube]
Akin speaks here, of course, of the Conservative Resurgence. Its clarion call to inerrancy from 1970s-1990s is what led the SBC to its current degraded, declining state. But you won’t hear Old Guard guys speaking truth about it. To them, inerrancy is the sledgehammer they use to force Southern Baptists to obey. With enough Bible verses, they can make any command sound mandatory.
Inerrancy is to the SBC what states’ rights were to the Civil War. For Confederacy folks back then, they supported states’ rights so they could own people as slaves. Nowadays, the Old Guard supports inerrancy to stop women from ever becoming pastors. In 2021, Al Mohler himself even wrote that the entire reason these hardliners started the Conservative Resurgence in the 1970s was to stop women from being pastors. They just used Bible frosting to make the idea sound like a divine command.
So the Old Guard guys are extra-peevish now that women are making progress again. They’re concerned that the SBC will drop inerrancy, thus allowing female pastors to serve in SBC churches—and destroying their very favorite sledgehammer.
Accuracy: F. A lack of inerrancy is not actually the cause of the SBC’s decline. Almost all Christian denominations are in decline regardless of their stance on inerrancy.
Possibility of working if adopted: 0%. It would only push any churches and members remaining afterward into greater commitment and extremism.
Summary: The Old Guard diagnosed the SBC in a way that requires Old Guard platforms to be adopted
Generally speaking, evangelicals will always diagnose something in such a way that only their favorite product can fix it. We see this reality in every single evangelical industry from homeschooling to financial planning to evangelism.
The Old Guard’s favorite product is increasingly conservative hardline evangelicalism. Since the 1970s at least, they’ve been pushing the idea that the SBC is in decline because it’s strayed too far from its ultraconservative roots. However, since the 1970s the SBC has only declined further.
Back then, they seemed to be growing. But they weren’t. Their baptism ratio, a measurement comparing their baptisms to their total membership, rose overall throughout the 1980s-2000s, according to their Annual Reports. By the mid-2010s it’d hit the 1:50s and beyond. Thanks to shrinking membership, their ratio’s gone back to 1:51 as of last year, but only because of that!
Only extremely authoritarian people respond to the Old Guard’s sales pitches. Such pitches may indeed attract more of them in coming years. But it’ll drive off anyone more moderate.
Of course, the Old Guard didn’t care about those people leaving in the 1980s-1990s. They don’t care now about it happening, either. But they should have a care for their coffers. Fewer people and churches means fewer dollars contributed to their projects. In the past, SBC leaders could afford not to care too much about schism-fed departures, but things are way different these days. They are out of time.
Marty McFly is in his car on the night of the storm, preparing to zoom to 88 miles per hour. But instead of hitting the gas, the Old Guard is fighting over the radio dial and blaming the car’s refusal to start on which music station is playing.
And I’m here for all of it.
NEXT UP: What?!? Demons in your AI chatbot? It’s more likely than you think! We’ll cover the ongoing evangelical love-hate relationship with this technology. See you soon! <3
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Endnotes
When the panel talks about how they use the BFM in their churches, it reminded me of the scene from Black Books where Bernard gets interrupted while doing his taxes. The interruption turns out to be a pair of missionaries. These poor missionaries have no idea how to proceed when Bernard asks them to share their favorite stories about Jesus.
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