Faction warfare in the Southern Baptist Convention came to a serious head this past week at their big Annual Convention, nicknamed SBC26. The Old Guard enjoyed some very decisive victories, and the Pretend Progressives got BTFO’d. Today, we’re going to cruise into their mosh pit and see what happened.
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SITUATION REPORT: The Old Guard swept SBC26
For years now, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has endured a bitter fight between two factions. I’ve called these the Old Guard and the Pretend Progressives, since they don’t have formal names. Both are deeply conservative and neither wants the SBC to change character overmuch, but the Old Guard is slightly more honest about its goals and nature.
These factions crystallized around the SBC’s sex abuse crisis, which journalists dubbed “Abuse of Faith.” Pretend Progressives acted like they cared deeply about sex abuse and the victims of predatory SBC ministers. Meanwhile, the Old Guard snarled that it wasn’t the denomination’s problem. No, they needed to concentrate on missionaries and evangelism—and leave sex abuse reform to individual churches.
The Old Guard has also been solidly losing almost every major skirmish with the Pretend Progressives since about 2018. At their Annual Meetings, SBC flocks mostly always voted for Pretend Progressive candidates and causes.
This week at the SBC’s 2026 Annual Meeting (nicknamed SBC26), their losing streak came to a decided end. They swept SBC26, winning both the presidential election and the first of two required votes opposing women pastors.
This year’s meeting marks a big change for the SBC. They’ve abandoned what made them strong long ago, choosing instead to purity spiral. Worse, they’re putting their trust in the exact same zealots who caused their decline twenty years ago in the first place! Those zealots want to stage a second schism within the SBC, which they think will end the denomination’s membership hemorrhage. As one commenter put it, “just trust me, bro, just one more Conservative Resurgence, bro, that’s all I need!”
And that’s not even the wildest part of the news. Wait till you hear about the president they elected, Willy Rice. Just wait.
Today, I’ll show you what happened at SBC26.
An overview of SBC26
This year’s SBC meeting was in Orlando, Florida—and it enjoyed high attendance, as meetings in southern states usually do. 21,144 people attended, with 11,692 of them being “Messengers.” Only Messengers can actually vote on SBC business. Churches can send 2-12 Messengers to the Annual Meeting depending on how lavishly they contributed to the Cooperative Program (CP), which funds the SBC’s denominational projects. And as usual, most attendees hailed from nearby states.
In the presidential vote, Willy Rice won against Josh Powell. We’ll get to Rice in a bit. As for Powell, we briefly discussed him recently on the topic of “costly worship,” which he wholeheartedly supports. Otherwise, I’ve never heard of him. He was solidly Old Guard in his campaign, choosing to focus more on “the Great Commission” than on reforming SBC culture to make sex abuse less inevitable. In fact and like the Old Guard guys do, Powell flat rejected the idea that the SBC even has a sex abuse crisis.
Really, though, there wasn’t much difference between the candidates. Powell didn’t support Mohler’s amendment, while Rice did. And Powell didn’t think the SBC needed a second Conservative Resurgence, while Rice vocally supported the idea. That’s about it. Their similarity was reflected in the voting itself: Rice got 57% of the votes, while Powell got 42%. Notably, only about 9,000 Messengers voted in this election.
Al Mohler’s amendment banning female pastors passed its first round with nearly 75% of Messengers’ votes. We’ll get to that in a moment too. Also notably, only about 8,000 Messengers total cast ballots.
Beloved Old Guard causes like missionaries, church planting/starts, and evangelism showed up all through SBC26. The Old Guard consistently described this focus as part of their hoped-for “renewal.”
And the resolutions at SBC26
All of the resolutions proposed for SBC26 passed.
This year, messengers approved a major constitutional amendment against the ordination of women as pastors. Al Mohler, an Old Guard stalwart who runs an SBC seminary, proposed it. He titled it “The Truth and Unity Amendment.” The Old Guard hopes it’ll become an “amendment” to the SBC’s Constitution. It would then form part of the definition of a “cooperating church,” which determines membership eligibility. A church must be “in cooperation” with the SBC to be a member of the denomination and send Messengers to the Annual Meetings.
Getting such an amendment passed has been a major project for the Old Guard. Their first attempt was the Law Amendment, which passed its first vote in 2023 but failed its second in 2024. They tried again in 2025, but it failed then too—though by smaller and smaller margins every time.
Mohler’s version of this amendment is more strict and definitive than its predecessor. It rigidly defines what it calls the “function” of a pastor, not just the title of “pastor” itself. Other amendments didn’t define the function of a pastor, which gave churches some wiggle room in appointing women to preach and teach mixed-sex flocks. (The hardliners are deeply upset about that wiggling! They want total and complete control over their supposedly-autonomous churches.)
Notably, even this resolution’s opponents tend to oppose the idea of women being pastors. They’re just adamant that an official amendment to the Constitution isn’t needed, because the BFM (the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, their creedal statement) already forbids women to be pastors. And the fact that the SBC has kicked out several churches for this exact situation (including Saddleback Church, a major megachurch) proves that it doesn’t need to drill down further.
This amendment passed with a 74.7% vote in favor. If it passes again next year with a 2/3 vote, it becomes SBC canon (according to the SBC’s bylaws, Article XIV).
Other resolutions passed: Claiming America’s founders “comprehended the importance of Christianity to the framing and flourishing of the new republic”; targeting the disabled and their families for evangelism and church attendance; opposing medical assistance in dying (MAID); opposing violence done for political reasons; standing against antisemitism; supporting “orderly and credible” immigration laws; reaffirming that they prefer in-person gathering to online church attendance; and celebrating “bivocational” and volunteer pastors. (“Bivocational” means pastors with a day job outside the church, which they generally need because the church can’t afford to pay them.)
Overall, I’d call this year’s meeting a big success for the Old Guard. They got everything they wanted. The Pretend Progressives weren’t even very visible.
Sex abuse reform? Who’s that? Never met ‘er!
One topic didn’t come up at all:
The SBC’s ongoing sex abuse crisis.
Aside from one panel on the side that discussed sex abuse prevention, nothing official whatsoever got discussed about their crisis. SBC leaders’ utter silence on this topic spoke volumes.
Now we know for sure that the SBC is completely, utterly done and DONE with pretending to care about the many victims of SBC ministers. I sure hope SBC members are listening to that message. It’s not a subtle hint anymore, but rather the reality of where the SBC is now.
It’s entirely possible that these Old Guard scored so many wins is that they just drove out all the Pretend Progressive-aligned people. For years, I’ve watched the votes creep closer and closer to Old Guard wins—and kept hearing former SBC members talk about having left the denomination. I guess this year, they hit critical mass at last.
The Willy Rice situation: Early years
When I heard who won the election, I shrieked like a little girl. It was downright surreal news, and yet it fits so perfectly with exactly who and what the Old Guard are.
Willy Rice first ran for SBC President in 2022. At the time, I pegged him as a Pretend Progressive pick. Clint Pressley, a Pretend Progressive who himself became SBC President in 2025, nominated him.
At the time, Rice definitely was a Pretend Progressive guy. Here’s what he said about sex abuse:
We must respond with transparency, courage, and, as necessary, deep contrition to the sexual abuse crisis. God is watching and so is our mission field. We cannot dodge or obfuscate our responsibilities at this moment. We are all awaiting the Guidepost report and the report of the Sexual Abuse Task Force. I am hopeful that it will provide us a way forward, but it will be important that our leaders accept this challenge head-on in a way that restores trust and confidence and treats people everywhere with the dignity and respect they deserve.
But Willy Rice was hiding a dreadful secret: In the church he pastored, he’d ordained a guy named Jeff Ford as a deacon. He did so knowing full well that Ford had been credibly accused in 2005 of sexually abusing one of his students. He allegedly began grooming her before she reached 18, then sexually abused her afterward. That meant his state couldn’t charge him for any crimes. However, as a student of his she still should have been completely off-limits.
Tom Buck had been Ford’s pastor at that time. Buck had apparently even been involved in Ford’s confession to police. Now he was a lieutenant to the most hardline of the Old Guard, one of whom—Tom Ascol—was also running for the presidency that year.
But now Ford was Rice’s problem. Buck called Rice to talk about Ford’s past. In response, Rice “took another look” at the situation. Eventually, Rice not only removed Ford from that position but also (after much dithering) stepped down from the presidential race.
Willy Rice’s pivot to the Old Guard
Afterward, Rice began to distance himself from the Pretend Progressives. He began to push back against sex abuse reform, which was the big project of that faction. Disavowal of that cause is a tribal marker for the Old Guard at this point, so it signaled his pivot to his faction’s enemies.
In 2023, Rice announced that he’d be backing another big Old Guard leader, Mike Stone, for that year’s presidential election. The site Church Leaders characterized the nomination as “somewhat surprising,” which I nominate for Understatement of the Year. On his church’s website, Rice wrote:
Such an announcement would have been unthinkable for both of us a short time ago. I wish the status quo were an option. It’s not. [. . .] The sexual abuse reform movement began with the best of intentions, at least for most of us. But I now believe that movement, as currently engineered, threatens the very fabric of our fellowship. [. . .]
I didn’t sign up for left wing, feminist critical theory, cancel culture, politics. I didn’t sign up for leaked emails, taped conversations, endless lawsuits, and character assassination. A movement that should have united Southern Baptists to attack a problem has instead divided us into attacking one another.
With this announcement, he became a solid Old Guard supporter. By 2024, he was posting on an Old Guard site, the Center for Baptist Leadership. There, he expressed relief that he hadn’t become SBC president while he embraced the idea of sex abuse reform. Now, he says, those efforts were “politicized and weaponized.”
This year, he only rejected sex abuse reform more vocally than ever. He’s called this effort a “cultural riptide” and a “drift” that has all but destroyed Southern Baptist unity.
It’s a very confusing pivot, too
It’s a weird turnaround, and I really don’t understand why it happened. There’s really not a charitable read I can give for it. But there are certainly some very uncharitable ones bubbling away in my head.
No, I am nowhere near as trusting as the editor of Baptist News Global, Mark Wingfield. He’s characterized Tom Buck’s involvement in the Willy Rice/Jeff Ford situation as “the right thing in a very difficult situation.”
With all due respect to Wingfield, I disagree. Tom Buck eats, lives, and breathes Old Guard ambition. He is an angry, controlling, vitriolic man—and a product of the SBC’s incredibly dysfunctional authoritarian system. I’ve even seen him get all fluttery over the idea of becoming SBC President himself! No way, no how did he involve himself in an SBC election with only pure motives.
There’s this, too: A few days ago, Rice denied that there was any kind of “cover up at the highest levels” of sex abuse in SBC churches. But we already know there was. Denominational leaders even maintained a full database of accusations! He also describes the lackluster stabs at reform the SBC’s made as “some meaningful reforms.” I’d like to know what he considers meaningful, because I haven’t seen anything yet that fits that description.
Rice’s pivot could be as simple as him reading the writing on the wall, realizing the Pretend Progressives would never sponsor him again, recognizing the Old Guard as the more certain bet moving forward, and aligning himself as needed. He may complain about politicized, weaponized reform efforts from the Pretend Progressives, but the Old Guard is ten times worse. They’re far better organized, far more cohesive as a group, and far nastier to their enemies.
At SBC26, this time for sure they’ll fix the decline
To conclude our postmortem of SBC26, I’d like to share something funny about this year’s Annual Meeting.
After firmly destroying the illusion of “church autonomy” for member churches, after pushing forward a purity-spiral amendment, after ignoring sex abuse for what is likely forevermore, these guys seriously think they’re getting back to what’s important: recruitment. They think that this push for doctrinal purity will let them focus on evangelism, church starts, and missions.
It won’t happen.
They may indeed see an uptick in membership (or at least smaller losses) as unaffiliated right-wing churches join up, but the overall trend is clear. The Conservative Resurgence they had last time (a schism running from about the 1970s to the 1990s) lost them almost 2000 churches and started them on a downward spiral of membership loss that still hasn’t plateaued.
The hardliners have always hand-waved away those facts. In 2004, Paige Patterson himself compared his beloved schism to the cleanup around Chernobyl, saying that it might take 20 years to undo the damage he thought “liberal domination” had caused. Well, now it’s been 22—and the flocks still haven’t seen any of the movement’s promises delivered.
But the Old Guard is sure that one more Conservative Resurgence will do the trick.
Just one more. And when that, too, fails to bring worldwide revival to this struggling denomination, I wonder what they’ll suggest next.
A third one, probably.
NEXT UP: Evangelical leader Russell Moore doesn’t debate atheists. Okay…? Well, we’ll find out why next time. See you soon! <3
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