Ahead of next month’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Florida Pastor Willy Rice said the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) is “a mess” that has “lost the confidence of Southern Baptists” and “alienated lots of people.”
Speaking to William Wolfe on the May 20 episode of the Center for Baptist Leadership podcast, Rice said the SBC needs to “read the writing on the wall” regarding the ERLC. By not holding that entity accountable, he added, the SBC is “just delaying a painful, inevitable end.”
Rice, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater, Florida, called the ERLC’s recent work to defund Planned Parenthood a “PR campaign.” He compared the efforts to an unfaithful husband buying his wife “flowers at Walgreen’s” to try to make up for years of adultery.
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Meanwhile, 10 former SBC presidents penned an open letter in favor of retaining the ERLC. In it, they tell the denomination’s messengers, or voters, “If a motion arises [at the annual meeting] to disband the ERLC, we ask you to vote with confidence that Southern Baptists still have a role to play in the public square, and that the ERLC can help us do it faithfully.”
Willy Rice: ERLC Has Become ‘Very Divisive’
In this week’s conversation with Wolfe, Rice pointed to encouraging signs within the SBC, such as young people being increasingly hungry for truth. But he also sounded the alarm about drift and frustrations within America’s largest Protestant denomination. Leaders should “get in front of” the “earthquake” that’s coming, said Rice, adding that he hopes North Carolina Pastor Clint Pressley is re-elected as SBC president.
Pressley has said he can’t take sides about the ERLC, which has survived previous attempts to disband it. At the SBC’s 2024 Annual Meeting, Tom Ascol—Florida pastor and Founders Ministries president—made a motion to abolish the ERLC, but that failed. Votes in support of that motion were reported to be between 25% and nearly 40%, well below the simple majority needed in two successive votes.
But Rice said those numbers should have alerted ERLC leaders that “radical changes” were necessary. “If 40% of people had voted to fire me,” he told Wolfe, “I don’t think I’d spike the ball” in celebration, Rice said. “I’d act like we got fired.”
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Rice denied having any “personal animosity” toward ERLC staff, including president and CEO Brent Leatherwood. (Last fall, the ERLC announced that Leatherwood had been removed but then retracted that announcement a few hours later. At issue were some comments he had made about Joe Biden withdrawing from the 2024 U.S. presidential race.)
Rice said he’d initially been a “fan” of Russell Moore, who led the ERLC from 2013 to 2021 and has since left the SBC. But the group’s decline became too “damaging” and “divisive,” Rice said, with leaders who “look down on average Baptists.” The result is “a mess [that’s] got to be cleaned up.”
Rice told Wolfe his first question to ERLC leaders would be, “Will you acknowledge that you took funding from non-Baptist sources [and] left-leaning advocacy groups?” The pastor said he’s “seen the receipts,” including from groups that are “diametrically opposed to Southern Baptist values.”
Everyone makes mistakes, Rice acknowledged, but he had hoped for “an apology, some commitment [from ERLC leaders] to say we’ll never do that again.”
In 2022, Rice withdrew his name from consideration to be SBC president, following revelations about sexual abuse by a former deacon at his church. In May 2024, Rice spoke to Wolfe about that experience—and how it opened his eyes to agendas and wokeness within the denomination.
Willy Rice: ERLC Leaders Overlook Everyday Baptists
Last week, the ERLC’s Leatherwood met with members of Congress in Washington, D.C., about ending taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. Although Rice agrees with that goal, he said the ERLC is merely waging “a pretty pedestrian PR campaign” at a time when “the house is on fire.”
“You have to understand how bad it’s gotten,” Rice said of the ERLC. “It’s gonna take a lot more than that [PR campaign] to restore my confidence.”
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