The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) just wrapped up its big 2025 Annual Meeting in Dallas. Its theme, “Hold Fast,” doubles a hilarious descriptor of the event—because you could all but hear the denomination’s leaders whispering nonstop: Oh god oh god just let us get through this defunding vote in one piece. In some ways, the meeting was a nothingburger. In others, it reflects a lot of heavy faction-based infighting and fear of ongoing declines. We’ll check out the big news for the event and what that news tells us about the SBC’s strategies for the year ahead.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 6/13/2025. They’re both available now! From introduction: A tale of two non-solutions (2018).)
(PRE-SHOW NOTE: The Old Guard is my name for SBC hardliners. I nicknamed their dread enemies the Pretend Progressives because they make mouth-noises about sex abuse reform. In general beliefs and culture-war opinions, both groups are very conservative. Also, the voting attendees of the Annual Meeting are called “messengers.” Messengers pre-qualify to attend by donating a certain part of their church’s donations to the SBC. Qualification gets them two messengers, but they can get up to 12 total through extra donations.)
SITUATION REPORT: Southern Baptists ‘Hold fast’ at their 2025 Annual Meeting
This past week, the SBC held its Annual Meeting in Dallas. Over 10k “messengers” debated and voted on SBC business. This year’s theme, “Hold Fast,” comes from Hebrews 10:23-24:
Let us hold resolutely to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to spur one another on to love and good deeds. [Berean Standard Bible version]
Talk about wishful thinking! Instead, vicious infighting behind the scenes is clear as crystal to veteran SBC-watchers. The two factions were at each other’s throats, with each threatening their enemy’s weak spot. In turn, the leaders of contested groups, like Jeff Iorg (of the Executive Committee) and Brent Leatherwood (of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, or ERLC), did their damndest to shore up support among the flocks.
Though in a lot of ways this meeting didn’t seem like a big deal, a lot of interesting stuff happened under the surface.
First order of business: And the new SBC President is…. Clint Pressley by a landslide!
One of the major functions of the Annual Meeting is electing the denomination’s president for the year ahead. Clint Pressley, the incumbent from last year, ran against a literal who, David Morrill.
According to Baptist Press, David Morrill pastors Applewood Baptist Church in Colorado. The megapastor who nominated him called him a “soldier for the truth.” If that seems to just scream “Old Guard,” it should. Indeed, Morrill turns out to write for the Old Guard-loving site Protestia. J.D. Hall founded this ultraconservative site as Pulpit and Pen—before losing it entirely in 2022 due to various substance abuse, dishonesty, and violence issues. When Hall and Protestia parted ways, Morrill even wrote the site’s official statement about their troubled founder.
Looking over his Twitter account (archive), it’s easy to see that he’s never met an Old Guard talking point he didn’t embrace to the hilt.
Clint Pressley, by contrast, loosely affiliates with the Pretend Progressive faction. That said, he plays to both factions and tries to find a compromise that works for both (or at least doesn’t give either faction too much power). His leadership last year was, in my opinion, adequate. As such, he won the election with 92% of the votes—compared to Morrill’s 6%.
The SBC dodged a bullet by refusing to give Morrill the time of day. I wonder if the messengers noticed him demanding on Twitter that his factional opponents get disqualified from ministry?
The Annual Meeting election that was something more than just an election
By now, Southern Baptist members are overwhelmingly Pretend Progressive-leaning. But this election feels like way more than just the flocks continuing to snub the Old Guard and its ambitions.
Morrill’s last-second nomination feels orchestrated.
For one, Morrill is really unknown outside of Protestia. For another, his internet footprint reveals that he is an extremist even among that merry pack of extremists. By now, even the Old Guard’s generals should have known the flocks would find his extremism off-putting.
The Old Guard faction has had a string of president-election losses since 2018, when J.D. Greear kicked off the Pretend Progressives’ ongoing domination of the office. They’ve run everything from big names like Ken Hemphill (2018) and Tom Ascol (2022) to midlevel lackeys like Mike Stone (2021, 2023) to downright puzzling picks like Voddie Baucham (who ended up not running in 2022 after all). All of them have lost.
It’s got to be a little frustrating to be an Old Guard kingmaker these days!
Now, Clint Pressley was also a bit unknown when he first ran for president last year. But his leadership chops were in order. He wasn’t actively repulsive, either, to moderate voters in either faction. Morrill couldn’t say the same. There’s little room for “faith, hope, and love” when one is put forth as a “soldier for the truth.”
No, there was never any way in the world that David Morrill could ever have done more than briefly distract voters on their way to elect Clint Pressley.
Still, that vote split tells the Old Guard just how many supporters they really have. It combines with shrinking Annual Meeting attendance over the past few years (15.7k in 2021; 8.1k in 2022; 12.7k in 2023; 10.9k last year; and 10.5k this year). Their base keeps shrinking!
The Old Guard attacked the ERLC while NAMB braced for a counterattack
As a bastion of the Pretend Progressives, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) has been in the Old Guard’s crosshairs for a solid decade now. They’ve been pissed at the ERLC since its then-leader, Russell Moore, spoke out against Donald Trump in 2015. His successor, Brent Leatherwood, hasn’t made the Old Guard any happier.
By now, the Old Guard knows they can’t control the ERLC. So instead, for a couple of years now they’ve introduced motions to defund and disband the group. Spearheaded by Old Guard lackey Willy Rice, they tried again this year—but failed again. I expect them to learn nothing from the newest failure. Meanwhile, the ERLC presented a discussion about their necessity to the SBC. It focused primarily on anti-trans legislation and opposition to Planned Parenthood.
At the same time, the North American Mission Board (NAMB) braced for a counterattack. However, the Pretend Progressives don’t seem to see NAMB in the same way the Old Guard sees the ERLC. Every so often we hear about someone wanting to defund NAMB. But it’s never a faction-based move.
Still, NAMB’s leaders still launched a preemptive defense this year: a presentation about the group’s work with small church congregations. Since about 72% of SBC churches have fewer than 100 attendees, that might gain them some support.
It’s interesting that NAMB has begun thinking in terms of gaining grassroots support from the flocks after years of clearly not caring what they think.
The SBC’s longstanding tradition of rearranging the deck chairs on their sinking ship continues
When you look at the list of topics covered at this year’s Annual Meeting, you might be struck by just how little any of it matters—at least in terms of the SBC’s official goal of recruitment above all other considerations. Celebrating 58 new missionaries barely even touches that goal.
According to Baptist Press, Old Guard bootlicker Tom Buck presented a motion demanding the investigation of the Executive Committee’s potential mistreatment of a former chairman. The story doesn’t say who the chairman was, but this may refer to Kevin Smith. He used to be the chair of the ERLC’s Board of Trustees (a mixed factional bag). Almost exactly a year ago, Smith tried to fire Brent Leatherwood, the leader of the ERLC. Smith resigned after it emerged that he’d had no authorization for the firing.
However, Buck might mean Mike Stone. The Old Guard’s still angry about him losing in 2023.
This year’s meeting also saw a new attempt to pass the so-called Law Amendment. This is a formal rule outlawing female pastors in SBC-affiliated churches. It’s failed since its creation 2022, and it failed again—narrowly, but still.
Motions demanding more financial and operational transparency also failed. Jeff Iorg, the Old Guard leader of the denomination’s Executive Committee, showed up to oppose those ideas. He wants the foxes guarding the henhouse to keep an eye on themselves, because that’s worked so well for the SBC’s flocks in the past. In his speech, he spent a good long time talking about the money the Executive Committee is spending on abuse lawsuits and criminal investigations. They’re up to USD$11M spent already—and the Old Guard is bitterly angry about every dollar.
Come to think of it, nobody really focused on the SBC’s ongoing and massive sex abuse crisis. Baptist News Global mentions that the convention budgeted another USD$3M toward future legal fees related to the crisis. Instead, messengers debated proposals about same-sex marriage, abortion, too much separation of church and state, online gambling, and “willful childlessness.”
Sidebar: The hilarious disappearing optics disaster at the 2025 Annual Meeting
You won’t find the exact phrase “willful childlessness” in any official SBC stories, even though a Southern Baptist actually came up with it. I saw it nowhere on any SBC-created materials anywhere. However, many non-SBC sources mention the phrase!
So I went digging. Was “willful childlessness” just a false memory? Or was the SBC trying to memory-hole the phrase?
The answer appears to be the latter.
“Willful childlessness” is a real thing that someone in the SBC included in a resolution at this year’s Annual Meeting. The denomination then included that exact phrase on a PDF they created and put online about this year’s proposed resolutions (on page 9). The PDF is now deleted from their site, but Wayback Machine captured it.
The resolution passed, obviously. Unsurprisingly, Baptist News Global says that it faced no “notable opposition.” But still, the disappearance of “willful childlessness” from SBC lips makes me wonder if someone at the denomination finally realized what spectacularly bad optics it is.
For my own part, I cannot wait to see how SBC women react to being interrogated about their private childbearing decisions (or lack thereof—cuz folks, there are a lot of single, middle-aged women in the SBC).
Now imagine how many memory-holed optics disasters the SBC must have successfully hid before the internet became their only real accountability engine.
Holding fast, indeed, at the 2025 Annual Meeting
The SBC’s Annual Meetings are such a treasure trove of information about this dysfunctional group. Their self-image and stated goals explode on impact with their actual behavior! Not only do we get a bird’s eye view of the flocks’ current concerns, but we also gain insight to the denomination’s leaders’ plans for the year ahead.
Right now, those leaders are just trying to hold a disintegrating tent together in a massive thunderstorm. “Hold fast” is the only thing on SBC leaders’ minds.
At the start of each Annual Meeting, the president of the SBC delivers a sermon that encapsulates that year’s theme. So on Tuesday morning, Clint Pressley focused completely on reminding SBC members of their strengths and cooperative power. This wasn’t a sermon meant to rev the flocks up to go out and evangelize their hearts out. It was, instead, a sermon meant to keep the flocks’ butts in pews for another year:
Pressley, pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church, Charlotte, said messengers should focus on the mission and celebrate the things that make the SBC strong, unique and useful to the Kingdom of God.
“I think we can do that without downplaying or ignoring or sidestepping some of the serious issues that we have to address,” Pressley added. “We have faced a lot. We still have some things we need to face. But do you know that you can be happy and convictional at the same time?” [Source: Baptist and Reflector]
Convictional is advanced Christianese. Jesus assigns convictions to his followers. These convictions center on hard-right conservative opinions. A convictional Christian aligns completely with hard-right culture-war positions.
So Pressley’s sermon asked listeners to be happy while dealing in a hard-right way with the SBC’s entrenched, systemic problems. Considering just the sex abuse crisis alone, it’s a weird ask.
Pressley has a lot of reasons to downplay the increasing friction in the SBC.
The SBC is not a “strong” denomination at all. It’s struggling hard. This year’s Book of Reports (available here; metrics on p. 13) reveals increasing polarization amid ongoing and staggering membership losses. They’re all celebrating 250k baptisms and a baptism ratio of a baptism for every 51 members (1:51), but the ratio only looks that nice because they’ve dropped to 12M members. In 2017, they baptized 254k members, but they had 15M members—which is a baptism ratio of almost 1:60. The money train’s starting to slip off the tracks, too, though exactly how much is open to speculation as they’ve changed their financial reporting metrics in the Annual Meetings.
When the SBC first stood at 12M members, 1972, they scored 445k baptisms—a ratio of 1:27. If that fact alone doesn’t fully explain why Clint Pressley is doing his damndest to keep everyone’s minds off the SBC’s worst problems, then perhaps nothing could.
But the flocks deserve better than this thoroughly broken system. They always have. I hope one day they find a group that treats them right, because the SBC never will.
NEXT UP: Pastors’ wives got another useless freebie from this year’s Annual Meeting. We’ll explore the new one next time. See you soon! <3
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