A lot is going down in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I mean that literally. Their membership hasn’t even yet hit the bottom of its long-haul decline, and now the money train is slowing down. And now, as they gear up for their big Annual Meeting (June 8-11 in Dallas), I’m sensing a bit of panic from the denomination’s leaders over one of their most reliable money trains: the Cooperative Program (CP) that funds most of their denominational projects and evangelism programs. But other news is also concerning them!
Today, let me show you how to detect the undeniable whiff of fear from a bunch of evangelicals who otherwise play their worry cards very close to the vest indeed.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 4/8/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: The SBC’s various official communications reveal a hint of panic wafting through its leadership
The SBC’s denominational leaders like to pretend that they, their decisions, and their metrics are all transparent to the hoi polloi supporting them.
Not so.
In truth, the SBC is well aware of the quirks and flaws lurking within the evangelical psyche that make such transparency impossible—or at least galactically ill-advised.
Here are some recent headlines from the denomination’s official website:
- “2025 SBC Annual Meeting schedule released” [March 25, Source 1]
- “State of the Church: More men attending than women, volunteering rebounding” [March 25, Source 2]
- “South Carolina megachurch withdraws from SBC” [April 1, Source 3]
- “After two years of litigation, one count remains in Johnny Hunt suit” [April 1, Source 4]
- “Cooperation as a Southern Baptist distinctive” [April 3, Source 5]
- “CP receipts 3.3% below budget halfway through fiscal year” [April 3, Source 6]
- “Investors called to remain steady amid chaotic financial headlines” [April 4, Source 7]
Every single post on that website communicates SBC leaders’ wishes to members. Everything that’s there is there with a purpose. Taken together and with those facts in mind, we can tell that these headlines tell a very distinct story—and not one the SBC’s leaders likely want told. Something is seriously very wrong upstairs in this denomination, something they don’t dare speak aloud to their members.
But today, that is exactly what we are going to do.
SBC leaders cannot be pleased with the health of the Cooperative Program (CP)
For our first chapter in the story, let’s look at the SBC’s Cooperative Program (CP). We’ve talked about it before, but it’s been a bit, so let me whisk through the basics. SBC-affiliated churches donate money to this fund, which then goes on to pay for most of the SBC’s denominational projects: Seminaries, formal missionary programs and church-starting projects in North America and abroad, the culture-war politicking that the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) does, etc.
Here’s how SBC membership works:
First, a church congregation decides to affiliate with the SBC. After its congregation and pastor agree to some basic doctrinal tenets, the SBC admits the church. Usually, the church also joins a state-level SBC-lite convention. In the United States, most states have their own convention (though in sparse states, like in the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast, states band together; in others where there are tons of SBC churches, like Texas, there might be two). The SBC proper does not run the state conventions, in theory at least, or the churches themselves.
After joining, affiliated churches’ leaders decide how much of their weekly donations they will send on to either their state-level convention or to the Executive Committee (EC) directly. If they donate a certain amount or percentage of their take, they are called “cooperating churches.” (Source: 2024 Annual Report, pp 6-7.) If they gave the money to their state-level convention, its leaders in turn decide how much of their take they will send on to the EC.
Only cooperative congregations who donate enough money are allowed to send “messengers” to the big Annual Meeting every summer. And only “messengers” are allowed to vote on SBC business.
You’d think SBC churches would donate lots more to this fund, but they sure don’t
A large number of SBC churches do not donate money to the CP. SBC leaders do not make it easy to suss out what percentage of churches donate money, but one Baptist site thinks the number has fallen in recent years:
In the mid-2000s, about three-quarters of churches gave to the program. Today, less than 60 percent give, according to data from the Executive Committee. [Source]
So if donations falter, the SBC has a much tougher time paying for all of its big programs. And that, in turn, has a knock-on effect on its recruitment metrics. So SBC leaders really like to see high participation and donations in this program.
That’s the story, at least. However, as the unaffiliated site Baptist News Global points out, CP funding has become a fraction of those programs’ budgets each year. SBC entities these days rely on investments, endowments, and fundraisers to cover the rest. No wonder Baptist Press recently ran a post advising investors to the SBC’s GuideStone entity not to panic over tariffs!
Still, the CP might be one of the most characteristically SBC things in the SBC, so leaders want it to grow. And it isn’t.
CP giving still way way down
Not only are fewer churches donating money to the CP, but the amount of money sent to the CP has declined as well. According to one of those sources I listed earlier (relink), CP giving has declined 3.3%. Oh, they’re still raking in the cash, though:
Cooperative Program giving was 2.43 percent below the budget goal in March, while designated giving was 1.57 percent below the same number from last year. Southern Baptists gave nearly $14.9 million through CP during the sixth month of the fiscal year. The budget target was $15.25 million.
We don’t need to wonder if some of their high-rolling leaders—on par with, say, Johnny Hunt, who says he made 600k/year from the SBC!—might donate some of their own salaries to help with missionary stuff and seminaries. Nobody likes money quite as much as these guys.
So the entire term “cooperation” and its various forms has become a dogwhistle for SBC leaders all up and down the ladder. I suspect they think it gooses the flocks into remembering they’re supposed to be giving lots of money to the CP. Alas for SBC leaders, members’ opinions of the CP are, as Steam’s video-game rating system puts it so well, mixed.
Some SBC observers blame the decline in CP giving on church membership declines in general. Others blame America’s recent financial recession, which led to SBC members having less overall money to give. Still others blame inflation. One thing I think may be affecting CP giving is animosity toward particular SBC programs like the ERLC and the North American Mission Board (NAMB). In recent years, I’ve heard rumors of churches withholding CP giving on that basis.
In 2020, for example, one SBC member wrote that he just didn’t think NAMB used its CP funds wisely at all. Six state conventions spoke against NAMB for that reason.
As for the ERLC, in 2021 a state-level convention leader told an SBC task force that he felt the ERLC was “a stumbling block not worth the mission dollar investment.” In 2017, a Dallas megachurch even temporarily halted CP giving until a recent ERLC squabble was ironed out. Mainly, all of these fights concerned ERLC’s leader Russell Moore and his steadfast refusal to endorse Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.
(See also: But are they hateful enough? and Russell Moore refused to ‘play ball’ with the SBC.)
Whatever the cause of the decreased CP giving, it has impacted a number of SBC entities. Last year, California Southern Baptist Convention (one of the state-level conventions) had to cut six staff positions due to that decline in giving.
Other state conventions seem to be reducing their CP giving so they can continue operations. They’re maintaining, but barely. If SBC members continue to give less money to their churches, and their churches continue to send less money to the state conventions, then the state conventions will likely be cutting staff and/or programs as well.
The SBC has a lurching side-to-side focus on the Cooperative Program
The CP is 100 years old this year. It began in 1925—and without reaching its first goal, which makes me laugh because the SBC sets impossible goals for itself constantly. All the same, it’s showing its age.
One of the best ways to view the SBC is through the lens of a massive but ineptly-run corporation. When one performance metric looks bad, the company lurches toward dealing with that metric at the exclusion of all else. But when they finish overcorrecting to that metric, they’ve made one of their neglected metrics look drastically bad and must lurch in the other direction to deal with that one.
(Ask any call center employee about this whole drama. Be ready for an earful in reply, though!)
So this decline in CP giving has forced SBC leaders to shift their focus yet again, revealing a deeper pattern of dysfunction. For years, the SBC focused like lasers on their recruitment and baptism metrics. Unfortunately for them, their membership numbers haven’t recovered as a result, though basic recruitment is still bouncing back a bit from its abysmal pandemic numbers.
But while they focused there, they weren’t focusing as much on fundraising. So now membership is still declining and the Cooperative Program is in serious trouble. Even loyal SBC members have noticed.
Now SBC leaders seem barely interested in recruitment. Now they are all-in on CP fundraising.
Cue the headlines about how dreadfully important the CP is. Set the Annual Meeting’s focus to be talking up the CP. On Baptist Press, I see very few stories about recruitment these days. One concerns a “sold-out event,” the Women’s Evangelism Conference put on by NAMB—which is, as you might guess, one of the CP-funded SBC ventures. Far more recent stories center on CP giving.
Over at SBC.net, the denomination has planned a spectacular focus on CP giving. Besides giving the fund a lot of attention on Baptist Press and focusing on it during their Annual Meeting, SBC leaders are releasing a number of “promotional CP resources” for church leaders. One offers suggestions for church bulletins.
It’s hard to say what results the SBC’s leaders will get from all this rah-rah. All of their previous laser focusing on recruitment didn’t result in massive growth. Opening one’s wallet is a lot easier than recruiting new church members, which is probably the only reason as it is that the CP has maintained its money flow so well during the SBC’s decline. But that, too, has been failing. And nostalgia for Ye Olden Dayes can only take SBC churches so far.
I don’t think they’ll succeed in reviving this fund.
Another SBC church leaves the denomination
Though CP decline makes up most of the ingredients in this anxiety stew, a few other headlines stand out to confirm SBC leaders’ worries.
On April 1st, Baptist Press reported that one of their affiliated megachurches planned to withdraw from the denomination. In the story, we learn that the SBC’s “Credentials Committee” had been hassling NewSpring Church over having a (GASP OMG) woman listed on staff as a teaching pastor.
As we saw earlier, a church can only be considered “cooperating” if its people agree to a number of beliefs and doctrinal stances. One of the big ones lately is never giving any women any formal authority at all over any men. NewSpring’s leaders tried to play nice with the committee, but finally decided to leave the SBC entirely. They cited “distress and conflict” as their reason.
Every single church that leaves the SBC takes its money and membership with it. Because of its sexist leaders’ witch-hunt mentality over women pastors, the SBC lost a huge church that undoubtedly rakes in quite a lot of money each year. But don’t expect those SBC leaders to care. The purity spiral has them in its teeth. They need to lose a lot more megachurches to this issue before they start caring.
SBC leaders still fret about lawsuits
Obviously, the main lawsuits worrying SBC leaders involve the many victims of their affiliated pastors’ sex abuse—and, in some notable cases like Paul Pressler, their very own sex abuse. The question of just how responsible SBC leaders should be for affiliated pastors’ sex abuse has been tearing the denomination apart since before “Abuse of Faith” hit national headlines in 2019.
Most SBC leaders want the question’s answer to be “zero percent responsible.” That position might be understandable if they hadn’t also been keeping a detailed ledger of pastors accused of sex abuse for literal decades and deliberately shuffled sex abusers around churches and actively silenced victims. Alas for them, the SBC’s “messengers” —meaning the SBC members allowed to go to the Annual Meeting and vote on stuff—tend to disagree in the strongest terms. So I expect we’ll see more sex abuse lawsuits.
Even looking past sex abuse lawsuits, one recent one has had SBC leaders worried.
The Johnny Hunt lawsuit
One of their most powerful leaders, Johnny Hunt, accused the SBC’s other leaders of wrecking his reputation and earning potential. When the SBC’s third-party investigators wrote their massive report in 2022 about the denomination’s hand in the sex abuse crisis, its writers specifically named Johnny Hunt as one of the SBC’s high-ranking sex abusers (on p. 4 of the report):
During our investigation, an SBC pastor and his wife came forward to report that SBC President Johnny Hunt (2008-2010) had sexually assaulted the wife on July 25, 2010. [. . .] [O]ur investigators did not find Dr. Hunt’s statements related to the sexual assault allegation to be credible.
The investigators also named and shamed Hunt for repeatedly ignoring or opposing all sex abuse reform suggestions. But he was really only concerned about the assault allegation. His political faction within the SBC, which I’ve come to call the Old Guard, also ignores or opposes all sex abuse reform suggestions. Thus, he was in no danger of being rejected by them. But the assault allegation had become a serious problem. Here’s what he said of it himself:
When asked “What would it have cost you if it had come to light 12 years before when you committed the sin?” Hunt replied, “Probably some speaking engagements with the Southern Baptist Convention, but I really don’t think it would have cost me my church. I think I could have led them through that.”
So he filed suit against the SBC for—get this—USD$100M.
Johnny Hunt’s lawsuit survives, but barely
Alas for Johnny Hunt, a judge threw out all but one of his claims. On March 31, Baptist Press published an almost unintelligible post about it. You’ll find a far better examination of the decision on Baptist News Global. Mark Wingfield’s sly sense of humor peeks out a bit on this one, though I suspect only SBC-watchers (like us) would get most of the mirth:
Writing for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Campbell not only found Hunt’s claims unsuitable for trial but also blessed the investigation produced by Guidepost Solutions that has been a source of controversy within the SBC.
That made me laugh! And I bet that judge’s praise for Guidepost chaps Hunt’s hide.
In rejecting all but one of Hunt’s claims, the judge wrote a 75-page-long smackdown. If you like good legal smackdowns, this one’s a keeper.
The only and last surviving claim involves a tweet from then-SBC President Bart Barber. In 2022, Barber pushed this out to the world:
Hunt was the subject of a third-party investigation in response to allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman half his age in ways that would, to my knowledge, constitute a felony in any jurisdiction in the U.S.
The judge allowed that count to survive. However, to succeed in his lawsuit Hunt still needs to establish that Barber wrote that tweet as a public figure and that he did so with malice or reckless disregard for the truth. Should Hunt succeed, I doubt he’ll get $100M out of the SBC. But any amount he gets will be more than the SBC can comfortably afford. They’ve already spent $3M on this nonsense.
It’s extremely obvious to me that Hunt went about this lawsuit like he’d go about any SBC business. But courtrooms aren’t the SBC’s playground—at least, not yet. He holds no power there. The judge simply reminded him of that fact.
SBC attendance, but phrased as dishonestly as possible
Some years ago, I read a report about the uneven division of labor in two-income, mixed-sex households. As you might imagine, women did the lion’s share of housework and childcare. They had done so for centuries, but now a full workday outside the home made their tasks much harder. So they began to complain about this division of labor. Their male partners responded by doing slightly more. So to solve the problem, women simply began doing less housework and childcare. The overall number of hours women spent doing those chores declined until they were closer to the hours men put in.
I see something similar happening in evangelical church-attendance figures. On March 25, Baptist Press published an article about the “State of the Church.” They’re very enthused-sounding over the subtitle:
More men attending than women, volunteering rebounding
And I can see why they seem so happy about it. Johnny Hunt’s faction, the Old Guard, has been hammering at male attendance figures for decades now. They think that less-extremist evangelical church leaders drive away all the manly men, who apparently wilt like hothouse orchids upon hearing about Jesus in any form except the modern Republican fundagelical one. They call these churches “feminized.”
So now suddenly men’s attendance figures look better than ever! But we must ask why. And we get the answer right away:
Women had outpaced men in attendance since 2000, then at 47 percent to 38 percent, before men began outpacing women in 2022, at 35 percent to 30 percent. In 2024, 30 percent of men were attending weekly, compared to 27 percent of women.
Oh, okay. Men’s comparative attendance figures improved because women have simply seriously cut down on their own church attendance. That’s why male attendance figures suddenly sound so great. Men’s attendance also declined since 2000 (38% to 30%). However, it declined way less than that of women (47% to 27%).
Women aren’t just leaving church behind. Rather, it sounds like they are metaphorically pushing and shoving to get the heck out of churches. Research indicates that young women in particular bristle at evangelical groups’ sexism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry. The New York Times even called their leaving “predictable,” which it completely is.
Little wonder the rest of the post marvels at all the young adults volunteering compared to older people. As before, volunteering in general has declined among all age groups in recent years. But the percentage of volunteers who are Gen X and older has declined far more precipitously than that of Zoomers and Millennials.
We’ll be talking more next time about attendance figures, a sense of relevance, and more decline news. But this tidbit just struck me as yet another pain point for SBC leaders. They’re trying so hard to find a way to spin this stuff as a huge positive. But it really isn’t.
The SBC can’t run on thoughts and prayers
We’ve talked about a lot of news coming out about the SBC of late. One thing we haven’t talked about—or even need to talk about—is their actual beliefs or anything supernatural. That is because we don’t need to touch on any of that when we examine Christian groups.
In all ways, the SBC is simply an earthly organization. Their Jesus frosting is irrelevant. Its leaders pretend to speak for an almighty god, but they could be pretending to care about anything else in the world. Despite believing in the things they do, though, they still have no real idea why more people aren’t joining and attending their churches. I invite you to read again the excuses in that last story about women’s church attendance. Lifeway couldn’t even pin down what actually causes so many women to skip church.
Men, meanwhile, at least tend to be extremely vocal about why they won’t attend church. If the service and church culture don’t completely center and prioritize them in every single way, they get all huffy.
(See also: Gen Z women leaving evangelicalism in greater numbers than Gen Z men.)
Every person who decides not to attend an SBC church takes their money with them. In the case of women skipping church, they also take with them their volunteer labor and their children. So this entire situation is yet another demographic time bomb for the denomination.
To survive, churches need children to indoctrinate and they need volunteer labor. And both are in short supply nowadays. Their access to unindoctrinated children has all but vanished. And almost none of them can afford to pay people to do all of the work around the church that volunteers (barely) handle now.
In February, Pew Research analyzed Christianity’s decline. They found that it may have leveled off. But it is poised to decline even further in the future because our current crop of young Americans are less religious than they have ever been.
Of course, that news bodes very poorly for the SBC. But it’s good news for everyone else—and it’s real “good news” at that. An organization that hurts and deceives its members while raking in billions from them every year is not one that deserves to survive in the religious marketplace.
NEXT UP: Yet again, Christians try very hard to spin more bad news about their decline into good news for their members. We’ll talk about their new numbers—and why bad numbers are so distressing to hard-right Christians. See you soon! <3
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