(RNS) — In mid-February, Southern Baptist Convention leaders received grim news. The denomination’s Executive Committee was essentially broke.
Over the past four years, the committee has spent more than $13 million on legal fees and other costs related to a historic sexual abuse investigation by Guidepost Solutions, draining its reserves and leaving it unable to pay its bills for the following year. Among those bills were $3 million in additional legal fees for the upcoming year, with more likely to come.
“Those bills are due,” Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, said in his speech to SBC leaders meeting at a Nashville, Tennessee, airport hotel in February. “And they must be paid.”
To deal with the financial crisis, the Executive Committee has put its Nashville headquarters up for sale, cut staff and applied for a $3 million loan. The committee is also seeking a $3 million “priority allocation” for legal fees from the denomination’s $190 million Cooperative Program budget, which is usually used for missions and ministries.
Iorg said the committee had avoided tapping those funds for years. Now, there are no other options.
“This is a controversial and difficult recommendation to make,” Iorg said. “No mission-centered Southern Baptist wants to take this action. I don’t, you don’t. No one does. But we have exhausted other definitive options.”
The SBC budget, including the legal allocation, must be approved during the denomination’s annual meeting in June. It’s unclear what will happen if the request fails.
How did the nation’s largest Protestant denomination get in such financial trouble?
One reason is Johnny Hunt.
Hunt, a former Southern Baptist Convention president and megachurch pastor, sued the denomination in 2023, after allegations he had sexually assaulted another pastor’s wife were published in the Guidepost report. Hunt denied the allegations at first, then said the sexual conduct was consensual.
His lawyers have argued Hunt’s sins were nobody’s business but God’s and have sought tens of millions of dollars in damages.
As of fall 2024, the Executive Committee had spent more than $3.1 million on legal fees related to the Hunt lawsuit and a second suit filed by David Sills, a former seminary professor named in the report. Most of the costs were due to the Hunt lawsuit, which goes to trial in June.
