Why the SBC Is Worth Fighting For

Maybe "God doesn’t need the Southern Baptist Convention”. But you do.

Jun 07, 2026

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NOTE: This year’s Southern Baptist Convention begins today in Orlando. I am republishing this article to remind you what’s at stake. Voting doesn’t start till Tuesday morning, so it’s not too late to go. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
July 1, 2024

For many, the Southern Baptist Convention seems like a lost cause. From Critical Race Theory, to the leadership’s cavalier disregard for financial transparency, to sex abuse issues, to the heartbreakingly narrow defeat of the Law Amendment (61-39, with two-thirds required), many conservatives are at least considering leaving.

Don’t.

The SBC is worth fighting for. Maybe “God doesn’t need the Southern Baptist Convention,” as some always say. But you do. More than you realize.

Southern Baptists make up 11 percent of America’s churches. But what you probably don’t realize is that the six SBC seminaries educate roughly 33 percent of America’s seminary students.

We’re educating a lot more pastors than just our own. Losing our seminaries to the left would poison the pulpits of the planet. No, not just America’s churches, but the mission fields as well; countless lost souls across the world hear the name of Jesus, in many cases for the first time, but instead of receiving the Truth, they would get a woke false gospel.

Closer to home, if you’re a pastor and either retire or move elsewhere, odds are your church will pick one of the men trained by those seminaries to replace you. “Oh no, my church would never do that,” you might say. But in the real world, a pulpit committee made up of people who today may not even be members of your church will hire someone you probably don’t know. And maybe he’ll believe exactly as you do. But if he (or she, or “they”) was improperly trained, he could undo your entire ministry.

Examples of such are legion.

Now, those who believe we should give up claim that we can always build new seminaries. And maybe we can. But they don’t mention (or perhaps even realize) the following: when the PCUSA defrocked Gresham Machen almost a century ago, he left Princeton and founded Westminster Theological Seminary, which is certainly a fine institution. However today, ninety-five years later, Princeton still educates more seminarians than WTS.

Your SBC seminaries won’t go away if you abandon them. They’ll just replace you after you’re gone.

The logical retort, of course, is to ask why I am not suggesting we fight for Princeton? But there is indeed a reason, poorly understood by most Southern Baptists, but which is the philosophical and practical key to the whole argument.

Princeton, like Harvard, Baylor, and countless other formerly faithful institutions, is governed by what the law calls a ‘self-perpetuating board’. That means its board members select their own successors. You and I aren’t getting into that club. God may well redeem Princeton someday. But we never will.

By contrast, the SBC’s institutions are what the law describes as ‘membership organizations’: their members elect their boards. And as it turns out, all these institutions have exactly one member, the same member: the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

As a result, two things are true:

Those who show up at the Annual Meeting (‘messengers’) elect all the boards, and thus indirectly their professors and staff.

If conservatives don’t show up, they abdicate their stewardship duty and hand over these vital institutions to those who do.

“Those who do” tend to be people who have a dog in this fight. They’re often SBC or state convention employees, or people who’d like to be. Many are insiders or friends of insiders. They’re not prone to rocking the boat. And if there’s drift, that drift is always in the direction of the sin nature, because no one wants to take a hard honest look at their buddies, much less their bosses.

Just how bad is our stewardship? In an average year, just 7.2 percent of SBC churches are represented at the Annual Meeting. So it’s basically nonexistent. The club pretends to watch itself.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Any SBC church may send 12 messengers. No church, not even the giant ones like Prestonwood or The Summit, may send more. The formula favors small churches, which is a very good thing since 73 percent of all SBC churches have 100 members or less.

There’s absolutely no reason faithful Southern Baptists can’t steward their seminaries and thus protect their pulpits into the far future. All it will take is prayer, effort, and will. These things have been lacking for far too long. But we don’t have to continue in sloth. By God’s good grace, the Annual Meeting is annual.

For the sake of our grandchildren, let’s make the most of it.

— This essay originally appeared at ClearTruthMedia.com.