NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) — Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee struck a hopeful and defiant tone on Monday night (Feb. 17), acknowledging the fiscal woes facing the convention yet insisting the nation’s largest Protestant denomination remains a force for good in the world.
“Some critics persistently claim we are corrupt, and the entire Southern Baptist enterprise needs to be dismantled,” Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg told committee members in an impassioned speech. “They are wrong.”
The denomination would not fail on his watch, Iorg added, saying he hopes the SBC’s thousands of pastors feel the same way.
Iorg, a former seminary president, had been on his way to retirement last year before accepting the role of president of the Executive Committee. Convention leaders hope his tenure will bring an end to several years of instability and conflict for the Nashville-based committee, which manages the denomination’s business in between the SBC’s annual June gatherings.
When he was elected president, Iorg became the first permanent leader since 2021 and its third since 2018. His predecessor, Ronnie Floyd, resigned in October 2021 after a two-year tenure marked by the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis. Floyd’s predecessor, Frank Page, stepped down in 2018 for misconduct. An interim leader that followed Floyd also resigned after admitting he falsified his resume.
During Iorg’s speech, held in a meeting room at a Nashville airport hotel, he said the committee’s staff had begun to make progress in addressing abuse by hiring Jeff Dalrymple as a national director to oversee several proposed reforms. Iorg also outlined five steps the committee planned to take to implement the abuse reforms, including strengthening training materials and working more closely with the denomination’s state conventions to address abuse.
The abuse reforms, including a database to track abusive pastors, have largely stalled over the past three years — in part because there was no permanent funding and because implementing reforms had been left in the hands of a volunteer task force. Last year, the SBC’s annual meeting charged the Executive Committee with getting the reforms back on track. Iorg and Dalrymple are expected to meet with reporters to address the abuse reforms after the committee’s meetings on Tuesday.
Iorg said the committee’s plans for responding to abuse were shaped in part by the response to a hotline set up by the SBC in 2022 for reporting abuse claims. The hotline has received 1,008 contacts since then, said Iorg.
Two-thirds of those contacts – 674 in all — had to do with abuse. Of those, 41% dealt with alleged abuse of adults, while 59% were reports of alleged abuse of minors.
Iorg said those reports suggest sexual abuse is a serious issue for the SBC to deal with — but asserted it is not widespread.
“Abuse is not frequently being reported in Southern Baptist churches,” Iorg said. “We have widely publicized this issue for the past five years and encouraged people to come forward with information and allegations. We now have verified, third-party data.”
Iorg also said that the hotline call data was not a comprehensive look at the scope of abuse in the SBC and that more data was needed.
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