Southern Baptists heard a very different message at their Annual Meeting this year

Every year’s Annual Report from the Southern Baptists contains a lot of information. But maybe one of the funniest parts of it is always the President’s Address. The previous year’s president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) gives this address to open the Annual Meeting each summer. Usually, it’s a sermon. This year, it was a feel-good emotional outpouring about how very very wonderful the SBC totally is. Let’s dive into this address, compare it to previous ones, and laugh at how very wrong one of its claims truly is.

(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 11/30/2025. They’re both available now! ALSO: Next Alpha Course watch party: November 22nd, 6pm PT in the discord. Link: 8pkasaySuD – see you there!)

SITUATION REPORT: An out of character President’s Address for the Southern Baptists

In the 2025 Annual Report of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the President’s Address (on page 102) is titled “It’s Good to Be a Southern Baptist” • Hebrews 10:23-24.” Clint Pressley wrote this sermon and delivered it at the Annual Meeting this past summer as the denomination’s President. The Bible verse makes little to no sense paired with that title:

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. [Hebrews 10:23-24, Berean Standard Bible]

But as the address proceeds, we learn exactly why Clint Pressley paired the verse with the title—and then wrapped both of them around the theme of the 2025 Annual Meeting: “Hold Fast.” Hold fast is another way to say “hold resolutely,” and that’s exactly what Pressley wants the flocks to do. He wants them to hold fast not only to the SBC’s culture-warrior ethos, but also to its fundamentalism and patriarchal structure. Unfortunately, he can’t really induce the flocks to do so with anything but emotional appeals.

I don’t normally devote an entire topic to just the President’s Address in these reports. But this time, the address itself was remarkably different enough from previous ones that I wanted to show it to you.

Basically, this address tells us that these guys are panicking. And they damned well should be.

A quick whisking-through of the 2025 President’s Address

Just so we all have a mental picture of this sermon, here are its basic points:

1. From his earliest years as a fervent Christian child, Clint Pressley was deeply impressed with Southern Baptists. He deeply enjoys being the President of the SBC.
2. Southern Baptists are more fun in person than online.
3. Nobody but Southern Baptists understands Southern Baptists’ “polity.” (We’re coming back to this one in short order, trust me.)
4. Almost no “historic denominations” have “a gospel,” but Southern Baptists sure do. And it’s better than anyone else’s. *sticks out tongue*
5. Southern Baptists can celebrate: more baptisms than last year; higher church attendance rates; and more church plants and missionaries “in the pipeline.”
6. He does not mention any of the signs of deepening, worrisome decline: tanking membership, fewer churches, declining donations, and more.
7. The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (BFM2K or BFM) is super-duper important still because it centers Southern Baptists’ fundamentalist doctrinal stance. It also writes Southern Baptists’ culture-war mentality into stone.
8. The Cooperative Program (CP) allows churches to be independent while also working together. (See: “polity” note, above.)
9. Clint Pressley played football for his college team. He says that a college football team working together is just like SBC churches paying into the Cooperative Program—except of course that they are nothing whatsoever alike. (Christians really don’t make good analogies.)

I won’t dwell overmuch on the last point, except to say that I went supernova when I realized what comparison he was making. The president of a denomination that still hasn’t done anything meaningful about its sex abuse mega-crisis after six years shouldn’t be making such comparisons. There’s a far better one to be made here, and I’ll reveal it at the end of today’s topic.

These, then, are the reasons why Clint Pressley urges Southern Baptists not to leave his denomination: They’re a laugh riot of fun, they’re inerrant culture warriors, and they are just like a college football team working together to score a touchdown.

Previous addresses looked quite different from this one

Normally, these sermons are a great way to see the strategies the SBC’s top leaders have concocted for the year ahead. In that sense, they are invaluable. Here are the topics and meeting themes of previous years:

• 2006 theme: “Everyone Can!” Address: “More!” by Bobby Welch (p. 126 of report PDF). This year, Welch commanded Southern Baptists to bag one million baptisms. The effort failed spectacularly, a serious blow to the recently-concluded Conservative Resurgence.
• 2010 theme: “LoveLoud Through the Great Commission.” Address: Basic untitled evangelism rah-rah from Johnny Hunt (p. 121 of report PDF). He focuses on the Great Commission Task Force, convened the year before. This one failed so hard the hardliners are still doing their best to memory-hole it 15 years later. Also, Johnny Hunt is a kingmaker in the hardliner Old Guard faction.
• 2015 theme: “Great Awakening.” Address: “Now is the Time to Lead” by Ronnie Floyd (p. 115 of report PDF). Another Old Guard kingmaker tells the flocks to drill down even harder on evangelism. A good read if you ever wonder why evangelicals seem so fighty. Also, the SBC’s decline began in earnest here.
• 2019 theme: “Gospel Above All.” Address: “Three Defining Values” by J.D. Greear (p. 114 of report PDF). A very long sermon with an emphasis on evangelism. J.D. Greear is the first president from the Old Guard’s enemy faction, the Pretend Progressives. The Old Guard hasn’t won another presidency since.
• 2021 theme: “We Are Great Commission Baptists.” Address: Untitled exhortation to unity in evangelism focus from J.D. Greear (p. 112 of report PDF). This attempted rename, by the way, is the single cringiest thing the SBC has done since they named a major evangelism strategy the “Bold Mission Thrust.”
• 2025 theme: “Hold Fast.” Address: Untitled exhortation to stay Southern Baptist from Clint Pressley (p. 102 of report PDF).

This year, the theme isn’t about evangelism, and neither is the president’s address. It’s a very different story!

Rather, the sermon this year was a feel-good appeal to emotions to persuade the flocks that supporting Southern Baptist churches is a worthwhile endeavor. When I saw it, I felt like I’d just experienced emotional whiplash. I’ve never before seen any president’s address that looks remotely like this desperate plea.

(Related: Dysfunctional authoritarians do not like supporting losing teams.)

Pressley sounds like a narcissistic boyfriend trying to keep his partner reeled in by reminding them of the good times. He’s not trying to advance the SBC’s stated goals of evangelism. He’s just trying to get the flocks so misty-eyed that they overlook all the very valid reasons to abandon this utterly dysfunctional system.

But Southern Baptists aren’t like other denominations, see!

Part of Pressley’s strategy this year was making Southern Baptists feel that their denomination is unique among all denominations. The flocks can’t leave the only denomination that’s fun to be around, that embraces inerrancy, that has a culture-war mentality etched in stone and required of all member churches, that has a polity that no outsiders can understand! (We’re still coming to that last part. Hold onto it. Its time is coming.)

This strategy reminds me of something similar.

Ten or fifteen years ago, young women on the internet coined the phrase “not like other girls” (NLOG). But I’ve known about the general concept for many decades. NLOGs, the shorthand term for those who are not like other girls, are attention-seeking women who reject what they perceive as stereotypical femininity: makeup, revealing clothes, pop-culture interests, participation in “drama,” etc. By doing this, they hope to gain male approval and validation, because they think men themselves look down upon stereotypically-feminine interests and behaviors.

The NLOG mindset divides women and isolates us from much-needed support networks with other women. And in similar way, Southern Baptists’ insistence on being not-like-other-denominations reveals its sneering arrogance toward religious groups they perceive as inferior. Pressley can’t acknowledge that the chances of any one flavor of Christianity totally getting the Bible 100% correct is slim to none, and that they’re all just doing the best they can to understand a maddeningly-inconsistent book with countless editors, written in languages that nobody fully understands anymore.

Southern Baptists can’t do that. They derive a lot of their borrowed authority from claims to having a monopoly on perfect Jesusing. Pressley even refers to that claim in his sermon:

Let me tell you what else I learned being the President of the Southern Baptist Convention. I learned that you and I thank God we still have a gospel. So many historic denominations in America do not have a gospel anymore. Thank God that the Southern Baptist Convention still has a gospel. [p. 103 of report PDF]

Shortly afterward, he refers to the SBC’s abuse mega-crisis and its dramatic declines as “a bit of a storm.” But he pleads with the flocks not to abandon the two “rails” of the denomination: Its dedication to the culture wars and its emphasis on inerrancy.

The polity of Southern Baptists

In the address, Pressley further laments:

I learned something else about being President. Nobody outside of the Southern Baptist Convention understands our polity. Nobody understands. [p. 102 of the report PDF]

He doesn’t say another word about this “polity.” But I bet that quote drew cheers from the audience of mostly-pastors.

Here’s what he means:

Out of all the denominations, the SBC insists that its member churches are autonomous. In other words, there’s no central Pope or Council of Bishops running all SBC churches. Nobody releases missals containing church service proceedings for the full year or two ahead. Officially speaking, the SBC itself exists in only two places: The denomination-wide subgroups funded by the Cooperative Program, and the Annual Meetings themselves.

Otherwise, the SBC exists as a loose alliance of churches that band together to fund endeavors related to evangelism—much like individual households might join a co-op to purchase wholesale groceries at a bulk discount that members couldn’t achieve on their own.

That’s the SBC polity. It’s not hard to understand. I’m a heathen, and I completely get it.

But there’s a very, very dark side to that polity. And I think that’s what Pressley means by bringing up this point—especially without any further comments, as he offers aplenty with every other point he makes.

The dark side of Southern Baptists’ polity

That was the official description of SBC polity.

Unofficially, SBC leadership exerts a great deal of control over individual churches. Every member church must affirm solidarity with the culture-warrior mentality and inerrancy as a core doctrine. If member churches step out of line with whatever the SBC mother ship deems essential, denominational leaders will step in right away to correct them. If an errant church refuses to get back into line, the mother ship can and will “disfellowship” them—meaning it will remove them from active membership in the SBC.

Between 2000 and 2012, no churches officially got disfellowshipped. The Conservative Resurgence had just wrapped up, losing the SBC at least 1900 member churches. But otherwise, nobody got officially punished for wrongthink.

Then, in 2018, SBC leaders disfellowshipped a church in Georgia for blatant racism. Since then, they’ve disfellowshipped a handful of churches for employing sex abusers and registered sex offenders, a handful for being too nice to gay people, and a bunch for employing women as pastors. In 2024, they also made an example of New Hope Baptist Church in North Carolina for being okay with female pastors and not participating at all in the Cooperative Program.

It’s painfully clear that nothing’s changed since their Executive Committee held a special meeting in 2014 to disfellowship New Heart Community Church. That church’s pastor (Danny Cortez) had changed his stance toward gay people after his son came out to him. And suddenly the SBC was extremely hands-on about churches, ignoring their so-called autonomy.

Really, the SBC only cares about autonomy in one place and one place only: Avoiding any accountability for church pastors who commit sexual abuse. When it comes to avoiding accountability for sex abuse, no churches are less connected to their denominational leaders than those in the SBC!

So it’s muh church autonomy when it benefits the SBC. But it’s hands-on micromanagement when they want the power to yank chains and enforce compliance.

The football team that isn’t much like any football team in the world

I mentioned earlier that Clint Pressley compares the SBC’s member churches to players on a football team. Now, I might not be the world’s most knowledgeable person about football teams generally, but it sure doesn’t act like any team I’ve ever encountered.

In real football teams, coaches exert a large amount of power over players, and team managers and owners in turn exert a large amount of power over coaches. It’s an extremely hierarchical system, and largely—not perfectly, but largely—a functional one with accountability at each level.

Players carry out coaches’ instructions to the letter, or they won’t be on their team for long. Nor will players who embarrass their coaches or owners too much. Just in 2025 alone, a large number of professional football players, team managers, and coaches have lost their jobs for various reasons.

I can’t imagine the SBC operating less like a football team.

What Southern Baptists’ dysfunctional system much more resembles

No, this troubled denomination far better resembles a really nitpicky Homeowners’ Association (HOA) in a neighborhood full of people straining for upward mobility. We’ve likely all heard stories of HOAs headed by petty, small-minded, power-hungry, unaccountable leaders who go hog-wild with the power they wield.

Stay on the HOA dictators’ good side, and you’ll be okay. Stray onto their bad side, and they will stop at nothing to punish you. If you refuse to fall into line, they will drive you away without a second thought. To win against such an HOA, you must become one of its leaders—or else leave that entire neighborhood. Or not to buy a home there at all.

All the good feelings Clint Pressley mentions in his President’s Address this year are based on being on SBC leaders’ good side. On being the exact people SBC leaders value and cater to.

For those outside that group, like sex abuse victims, Southern Baptists aren’t fun at all. Their “polity” just helps them avoid accountability for fostering a system that allows sex abusers into positions of power, then keeps them there forever. Their focus on inerrancy allows abusers to keep victims in line and quiet.

And Southern Baptists’ gospel, their real “good news,” is good only for top leaders and those who escape abuse by predatory ministers: The SBC system will continue to benefit a very small number of people at the top at the expense of the majority of its members.

No wonder the SBC’s leaders have pivoted from evangelism to retention!

NEXT UP: AI meets Christianity in a very up close and personal way as we playtest Text With Jesus. Also don’t forget we’re screening the next two eps of Alpha Course Saturday, November 22 at 6pm PT (Discord link: 8pkasaySuD ) See you soon! <3

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