Crossover: Southern Baptists set to evangelize Dallas at 2025 Annual Meeting

The 2025 Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) looms close, but we haven’t heard much out of the denomination’s leaders about it. We’ve heard nothing about last year’s metrics, for instance, nor much about this year’s SBC President nominees. But we have heard about one thing: The big evangelism plans ahead of that meeting. After all, tons of evangelical church leaders will be in Dallas for the meeting anyway! They might as well, right?

But these pre-meeting evangelism events are, as always, more for the benefit of the evangelists than the people being evangelized. Today, we’ll check out a short history of these events, then examine their effectiveness—and then ask why they do them at all.

(This post first went live on Patreon on 4/29/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! From introduction: When Kahvi lamented her people’s loss of courage. From Pentecostalism segue: 88 Reasons Rapture Scare.)

SITUATION REPORT: The strange silence ahead of the 2025 Annual Meeting—except for its customary evangelism drive

Every year for years now, Roll to Disbelieve has covered the SBC’s Annual Meetings. They are the big event of the denomination’s year. Around March and April, in the lead-up to the Annual Meeting each year, the SBC traditionally trickles out information about its previous year. This trickle includes metrics, important meeting topics, and biographical info about its important nominees (like for its president position, which must be filled each year).

But this year is different.

This year, we don’t have much information at all.

As of Monday, April 28, I’ve heard not one word about 2024 metrics. In addition, the site names only one nominee for the SBC’s presidency—the incumbent, Clint Pressley. The rest of the 2025 Annual Meeting posts are of little import.

Well, almost. Someone nominated Aaron Burgner to lead the Pastors’ Conference, a pre-meeting get-together for pastors only, next year. This isn’t his first nomination for the role, either. Burgner has way more ties to the Pretend Progressives than to the hardliner Old Guard, so I’m expecting to hear soon about a competing Old Guard get-together headlined by one of their own.

Compare and contrast to late April 2024, when we had information about six president nominees, plenty of 2023 metrics like baptisms and church attendance, and posts about major votes like the Law Amendment (which would have explicitly banned women pastors in SBC churches, but failed). By late April 2024, Baptist Press had five solid pages of posts about that year’s meeting—compared to barely 3 for this year’s.

In short, SBC leaders are likely sitting on some very bad 2024 numbers. I can’t wait to see them.

But we do have a little information. For instance, we know quite a bit about this year’s pre-meeting evangelism event, Crossover.

Every year since 1989, Annual Meeting attendees have descended upon their host city like locusts. Once there, they work with local volunteers who knock on residents’ doors and offer recruitment pitches. This year in Dallas, participating local churches also plan a soccer game (meant to be an evangelism drive), youth rallies and children’s events. Crossover wraps up with a “Harvest Sunday” service at an area church, which means it’s an evangelism event for guests rather than worship for existing members.

This 2025 situation confirms two evangelical rules I’ve noticed over the years:

1. If evangelicals don’t report a win, then you can be assured that they did not win. Any time they win, they can’t shut up about it. So if you don’t hear an explicit win in the anecdote, then no matter how promising the leadup sounds, there was no win. Even then, they might be exaggerating or outright lying, but most aren’t so brazen. They’d rather omit the loss and coast on plausible deniability.
2. Evangelicals don’t take a dump, son, without a prayer—or at least a claim to have prayed! So when they suffer a loss, back the wrong horse, or make a bad call, it’s after they claim to have gotten Jesus’ advice. Apparently, their god likes playing “wrong answers only” with them.

Today, we’ll see how Crossover events work—and how effective they are(n’t), and how they fit in with these two evangelical rules of life.

A quick word about SBC faction infighting as we head into the 2025 Annual Meeting

Right now in the SBC, we have two main factions fighting for dominance over the denomination (and its billion-dollar money train):

• The Old Guard: These hardliners push hard for culture-war engagement, political enmeshment, and evangelism. They want to forget the SBC’s still-unresolved sex abuse crisis and outlaw women pastors for good. They haven’t won any significant SBC Annual Meeting votes since 2017. Big names: Paige Patterson, Tom Ascol, Mike Stone.
• The Pretend Progressives: They’re also hardliners. But they pretend to care about sex abuse. Also, they’re not as draconian on the culture wars or women pastors. Many are anti-Trump, though still Republican. They’ve won most Annual Meeting skirmishes since about 2018, including SBC presidential elections. Big names: J.D. Greear, Ed Litton, Russell Moore (before he left the SBC).

SBC faction leaders rarely declare their affiliation. Doing so would alienate the other side’s voters! I call them the Old Guard and Pretend Progressives, but only because they’ve never given formal names to their cliques. (Old Guard guys sometimes call themselves “Traditional Baptists” or “Conservative Baptists,” but all Southern Baptist leaders are traditional and conservative. It isn’t helpful.)

Occasionally, someone in the Old Guard runs afoul of their purity spirals. Al Mohler is one. He flipped on women pastors during the Conservative Resurgence (1979-1990s). In 1993, his efforts paid off when the Resurgence’s leaders handed him the leadership of their flagship seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—at just 33 years old!

Since then, Mohler’s fallen out of favor with today’s extremist Old Guard. In 2020, he ran for SBC President, but he washed out in the first election round along with lesser-known Randy Adams, leaving Pretend Progressive Ed Litton to defeat Old Guarder Mike Stone in the second. Alas, Mohler doesn’t agree with Pretend Progressives’ priorities, so they don’t want him either—making him a man without a country!

Since 2018, Southern Baptist flocks have consistently voted for Pretend Progressive causes and candidates. That trend doesn’t seem set to change for the 2025—despite one Old Guard site, Center for Baptist Leadership, issuing a downright-histrionic call in January for its members to make sure to attend the 2025 Annual Meeting so their faction can out-vote all those evil liberals.

This factional drama sets the stage for Crossover, where both factions project unity through evangelism while hiding their respective losses.

Everyone, meet Dallas, the host city of the 2025 Annual Meeting

Every summer, the SBC holds its Annual Meeting somewhere in the United States. This year, Dallas-Fort Worth (hereafter “Dallas”) has the honor. Accordingly, this year’s pre-meeting evangelism events target Dallas residents.

Dallas might not seem like a fiery pit full of heathens aching to become dysfunctional authoritarian Christians. And it isn’t. A 2014 survey from American Bible Society (ABS) found Dallas to be the most “Bible-thumping” city in Texas! For such an urban, populous city, it’s always been dominated by right-wing Christianity.

(BTW: ABS also produced the State of the Bible report we talked about last week!)

According to Pew Research’s 2023-2024 numbers, 63% of Dallas residents identify as Christians, with 28% claiming to be evangelical—a decline from 2014’s numbers: 78% Christian, 38% evangelical. Additionally, Texas is so big, with so many Southern Baptists and SBC churches, that it has not one but two state-level conventions.

To Southern Baptists, though, that is just not enough evangelicals. They see Dallas as a mission field, a distraction from their internal struggles. That makes it a perfect stage for Crossover’s performative evangelism, as we’ll see.

The Southern Baptists Do Dallas: Crossover at the 2025 Annual Meeting

Ryan Jespersen, executive director of the Dallas Baptist Association, told Baptist Press on March 25:

Even though some think of Dallas as the “buckle of the Bible belt,” Jespersen said the city has significant lostness, where most of the population doesn’t have a relationship with Jesus Christ. He urged Southern Baptists not to think of Dallas as a “saved city” but as one where people need to hear and respond to the Gospel. 

“Crossover is an opportunity for churches to engage their communities,” Jespersen said. “NAMB [North American Mission Board] has pretty much taken all the excuses out — there’s funding, there are volunteers coming. Just plan something.”

Notably, Jespersen calls Dallas churches’ reasons not to evangelize “excuses.” To hard-sell hucksters, nobody ever has a valid reason to disobey! Lack of money and volunteers means nothing, especially now with NAMB pouring so much support into Crossover.

But Jespersen’s framing reeks of Rule 1: Prayer-soaked optics. Dallas has deep evangelical roots. It isn’t the “significant lostness” he describes. But he’s created a nice distraction from the SBC’s real problems, like their decades-old decline.

Crossover: An annual event that generally slides under everyone’s radar

Every year since 1989, the SBC has held a Crossover event just before its Annual Meeting—except in 2020, when it was canceled due to COVID. I never paid much attention to Crossover before because there was always just so much else to cover: Excel spreadsheets, calculator app windows, metrics galore.

But with so little other 2025 Annual Meeting info to work with, Crossover finally caught my eye. The more I studied it, the more interesting it got. And so here we are!

It all began in 1989, when Las Vegas was about to host that year’s Annual Meeting. It was a provocative choice for 1980s evangelicals. According Vision Magazine in 2023, some SBC members threatened to boycott the meeting. But others doubled down on the location, believing Las Vegas needed them most.

In partnership with NAMB, SBC leaders launched an “evangelistic blitz” the week before the meeting. According to a 2014 post from the Baptist Convention of Iowa, the name “Crossover” comes from an Australian evangelism conference. Area churches, state-level conventions, and evangelical associations banded together to evangelize their host city’s heathens. The SBC has held these events ever since.

Crossover’s history shows it’s always been about optics rather than results for SBC leaders—a pattern we’ll soon see in Dallas this year.

Let’s Play: Crossover!

A May 2017 post from the MBC (Missouri Baptist Convention) site Pathway explains how Crossover works: Not long before the Annual Meeting, a call for volunteers goes out via SBC networks. The week before the meeting, thousands of these volunteers descend on the host city. There, they fill various roles for the event:

In addition to Friday night training and Saturday outreach, volunteers will participate in a variety of roles at the Harvest Crusade on Sunday evening, including decision follow-up workers, prayer support, security, and ushers. [. . .] Once they sign up, they will receive instructions for training in preparation for the crusade. [Source]

Goodness, those Annual Meeting folks will be busy! Crossover runs June 2-8, the Pastors’ Conference runs June 8-9, and the actual Annual Meeting runs June 8-11! But as the great bard PJ O’Rourke once said: If you keep people busy and confused, they’re liable to think they’re having fun.

At NAMB’s signup site, many volunteer roles remain open as of Monday, April 28th. They began calling for volunteers at the end of March. Few of those roles involve the genuinely useful work Jesus commanded—like feeding the hungry. I’m not surprised.

I’d love to know where volunteers sign up the most. Given evangelicals’ dislike of uncertain fights, I bet door-knocking ranks low in signups compared to making shaved ice snacks and washing cars.

The #1 rule of Crossover: Don’t talk about losses, only wins

In evangelicalism, group leaders never want to talk about losses—only wins. The flocks, who will get restive at any hint of their side losing anything.

That 2017 Pathway post (relink) hoped “more than 50,000 attendees will participate in the crusade.” That’s a goodly jump from 2007’s Crossover event in San Antonio, which recorded 6,913 people attending and 959 “first-time decisions for Christ.” Arizona Southern Baptist Convention leader Eddy Pearson claimed, “Harvest Crusades typically see 8 to 10 percent of attendees make professions of faith.” That’s the “yes I accept Jesus as my lord and savior forever amen” mantra.

But those numbers don’t add up. 959 out of 6,913 is a 13.9% success rate, not 8-10%. And there’s zero follow-up data to show how many of those 959 stuck around.

These days, saying the mantra doesn’t translate to new recruits becoming baptized, pew-warming members. Perhaps it never did, and evangelicals are only noticing now as their churches decline. That 2017 Pathway post uses similar fudging language, asking Jesus “for more than 5,000 salvation decisions.” But they never report results either way.

SBC leaders prefer to tout cumulative Crossover successes. In 2014, the Baptist Convention of Iowa reported “more than 30,000 professions of faith” since Crossover’s first year in 1989. That works out to about 1,200 professions per year. Then, in 2023, NAMB claimed “an estimated 40,000 professions of faith” in total, roughly 1,000-1,100 per year. But specifics are rare. In 2024, NAMB reported that Indianapolis volunteers gave recruitment pitches to 5,393 people, 185 of whom said the mantra. That’s a dismal 3.4% success rate.

Older reports were far more candid. A 1993 SBC press release bragged (p.143 of the PDF):

HOUSTON, June 16–Southern Baptists recorded 1,253 professions of faith during Crossover Houston, for the largest number of conversions reported from pre-convention witnessing efforts.

But that practice soon faded. Recent stories rarely reveal results. Crossover’s leaders have even more rarely discussed long-term follow-up. Instead, we get a 2021 story about door-to-door Crossover evangelism, the 2023 NAMB writeup with its 40,000 figure, or 2010’s Hispanic Crossover events that recorded “more than 300 professions of faith” and “114 rededications” while the rest of Crossover studiously avoided mentioning any specifics.

I can understand why. A 2015 Baptist & Reflector report gave some numbers that must have caused indigestion: 3,385 volunteers knocked on 10,000 doors and had 4,950 “gospel conversations” (chats that can be steered toward a recruitment pitch). Out of all of that, they got 345 people to say the mantra. That’s a 7% success rate for the door-knocking. But Crossover includes block parties, rallies, and youth events—which implies that the overall success rate lagged way behind that.

Per our first rule, if we haven’t heard anything about success rates or follow-up success for Crossover, it’s because there is no follow-up success. Crossover’s lack of solid metrics show that these campaigns are more about optics than results—our first rule in action. I expect nothing different from the 2025 Annual Meeting itself!

But Southern Baptist leaders often highlight a different benefit: how these events benefit the evangelists themselves.

Performative piety is the other rule of evangelicalism

The most important rule may be never talking about losses. But the second is evangelicals’ need for performative piety. They can’t do anything without pretending Jesus told them to do it.

That makes Crossover strange. For an event so focused on recruitment, with these resources and so much volunteer labor, Crossover makes very few actual recruits. Follow-up seems nonexistent, too, meaning whatever success they see is not enriching area churches much at all. Sometimes, writeups mention plans for it. But I’ve never seen long-term metrics for any Crossover year.

Though we don’t know how many new converts to evangelicalism drop away after a short time, anecdotally the number seems high. One source, 28Nineteen, goes as high as 80%. At least since I’ve been alive, evangelical churches have always had trouble with follow-up with new converts. It’s an open secret—or should I say festering wound?—among evangelical church leaders.

Then again, good metrics may not be the actual point of Crossover. Most evangelism projects have a stated goal, with an unspoken primary goal that often benefits the evangelists more than the evangelized. Crossover is no different. A 2014 post from Baptist Convention of Iowa describes its hoped-for impact on their area:

Participating in Crossover equips believers to share their faith more effectively, including the next generation of pastors and ministers who are going through seminary training.

Preston Nix, director of the Leavell Center for Evangelism and Church Health at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, has seen Crossover transform the lives of his students, some of whom were already serving as pastors. “It changes students’ lives, and it affects and impacts their ministry,” he said. [. . .]

Especially from a student standpoint, Nix said, participants “gain experience, and they’re equipped to more effectively share their faith.” [. . .]

After Crossover, local church members are emboldened to go out sharing the Gospel on their own. Church members and volunteers learn from each other during outreach events, and once the teams have left, the local church members continue that vision. As a result, churches often see increases in baptisms for years after Crossover. [Source]

Indeed, a North Carolina pastor, Keith Hall, praised Crossover Greensboro:

Seeing all the volunteers on the “same missional page” was inspiring to Hall. “It inspired me to believe in the mission,” he said. [Source]

So let Southern Baptists claim they’re acting under Jesus’ orders. If they are, Jesus apparently likes seeing evangelicals fall flat! But somehow, I doubt it.

Crossover isn’t divine at all. Rather, it’s a psychological kick in the pants for insular SBC churches, reminding them of the people living around their “Fort God” bubbles. For all the good it’ll do the 2025 Annual Meeting, it might as well not happen at all.

It really speaks volumes that evangelicals need reminders this big and expensive. You’d think an omnimax, loving god would be telling his followers this stuff 24/7. But that is something we’ll cover next time!

NEXT UP: Crossover’s awful success rates and lack of follow-up reveal an even deeper issue: The sheer inauthenticity of evangelicalism in general and the SBC in particular. See you soon! <3

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Endnote

Dog will hunt, I’m the front-end loader
Travoltin’ over, so try my slam on for size
Drive stick with that kung-fu grip
Let the banana split and watch it go right to your thighs
Cop a feel, Copperfield style
Abracadabra that bra, do you think I can pull it off?
Wanna bang around? Just jot me down on your to-do list
Under “put out like a fire”, ’cause
[Chorus]
I got somethin’ and it goes thumpin’ like this
All you need is my uhn tiss, uhn tiss, uhn tiss

The moral of today’s story: Keep your little cats distracted with what they want, SBC leaders, or they will find other things to play with.