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by Michael Clary
May 24, 2026
Last year, I wrote a recap of the SBC’s 2025 Annual Meeting in Dallas, arguing that it was largely a “status quo” Convention.
Despite spirited debates on the Law Amendment and women pastors (and a third vote on a constitutional amendment), calls for increased financial transparency from SBC entities, and a major vote on the future of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), when we left Dallas, it looked like not much had changed. Hence, I settled on the description “status quo.”
In retrospect, I would now say that the multi-year, coordinated efforts to force change at the ERLC, one of the most liberal entities in the SBC, over the last decade turned out to be a big win for the Reformers. Just six weeks after a 43 percent vote in Dallas in favor of abolishing the entity outright, Brent Leatherwood resigned as President of the ERLC, marking the end of the Russell Moore-Bren…
