As he stepped up into the old-fashioned wooden pulpit on a recent Sunday, Pastor Clint Pressley wasted no time.
After quickly thanking the student discipleship minister who had brought many of the church’s Camp Paradise teens to the 11 a.m. service at his church, Hickory Grove Baptist, Pressley turned to the task at hand.
“Mark chapter 14,” he intoned in his Southern drawl. “If you’re a guest with us, we read the Bible and then we just talk about the Bible. You’re gonna find it feels a lot like a Bible study. Mark 14 starting in verse one …”
After relating the first 10 verses that tell the story of the woman who anoints Jesus with a bottle of expensive perfume, he drives home the passage’s lesson with a series of questions: “You have one life to live,” he said. “Pour it out. Have you done what you could? What’s holding you back? I want your life to be all-out devotion to God.”
This was Pressley’s third sermon of the day. He preached the 8 a.m. service, drove 13 miles to the church’s second campus to preach the 10 a.m. service, and then drove back to the main campus for the 11 a.m. service.
When he concluded, 40 minutes later, he shed his jacket and stood outside the doors the of cavernous chocolate-brick sanctuary, greeting worshippers on their way out, among them, his parents.
Pressley, 55, the newly elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention, is a hard-working pastor of North Carolina’s fifth-largest Baptist church, whose main campus lies on a busy commercial corner of a modest suburban neighborhood of 1950s ranch homes. A K-12 private Christian school is part of the main 56-acre campus.
Pastoring a church is what he’s wanted to do since he was a kid growing up in the state’s Queen City. He’s been devoted to the task ever since, building a multiracial, multigenerational megachurch that draws some 3,000 people each Sunday.
Southern Baptists, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, has a faced a series of challenges in recent years: declining membership, a sexual abuse crisis, a crackdown on women pastors, a condemnation of in vitro fertilization, an embrace of Trump and MAGA politics. Yet at its last meeting in June its members elected a traditional preacher who wears three-piece suits, a tie and monogrammed cuffs and mostly stays out of the limelight.
“In a time where we have so much cultural chaos, Clint’s steadiness and his reputation for integrity really impress a majority of Southern Baptists,” said Nathan Finn, a professor of faith and culture at North Greenville University in South Carolina and the recording secretary for the SBC.
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Pressley does not have a national following or a big social media presence. Though he is a trustee of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and has served in various other denominational roles, he is not trying to use the presidency, which he may serve for a maximum of two consecutive one-year terms, as a platform for influence.
“Really, my hope is to clear some of the fog of negativity and get us back on those two things we have: our confession and our mission,” he said of his mostly symbolic new role.
Pressley is the second North Carolina pastor to lead the SBC in less than a decade. J.D. Greear, who served as SBC president from 2018-2021, has a national following and leads the largest SBC congregation in North Carolina, the Summit Church, with an average attendance of more than 12,000 people spread out across 13 campuses.
Bart Barber, Pressley’s immediate predecessor, who led a small, rural Texas church but was known for his expertise on denominational governance, had a large social media following and an opinion about everything.
Pressley, by comparison, is low-key. His church does not hold voter drives, and he will only refer to current events if it relates directly to the Bible passages he is preaching on.
“He has said publicly, his goal is not to embarrass the convention,” said Chris Justice, pastor of Lee Park Church in Monroe, North Carolina, who nominated Pressley in June. “His answer to things will be short, biblical and delivered in such a way so as not to generate a fight. He’s looking to guide carefully and steward the convention with humility.”
Pressley wants to tone down the acrimony.
