Every year the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention seats a large number of messengers for whom it is their first meeting, a significant number of messengers who attend occasionally, and a stalwart contingent of every-year messengers. Of the messengers seated in any given year, only for a few items on the adopted order of business will you see all of the seats full. Between the Exhibit Hall, Giant Cow, visiting with friends, and—[cough]—other local attractions, there are many things to do with your time.
And so, certainly for the first-timers, and even for some of the folks who have served as a messenger before, you may benefit from some sort of a guide to the experience. What follows is neither comprehensive nor authoritative; this is merely one messenger’s set of recommendations to other messengers.
Extra Things to Do
You probably know a little about the main business sessions. But the event calendar associated with our Annual Meeting offers a panoply of other opportunities. Here are some of my favorites:
1. New Messenger Orientation is but one of the ways that the Convention’s team of parliamentarians goes out of their way to help you fulfill your role as a messenger. This year’s messenger orientation is Monday, June 8, 4:30 PM, in Rooms 312 A/B/C at the Convention Center.
2. Pre-Convention Panels and Rallies: One opportunity to learn more about business before the Convention and to hear various perspectives is to attend one or more of the business-related events that come before the big meeting.
For example, I’ll be sitting on a panel speaking about Christian Nationalism at the Criswell College Dinner, Monday night, 5:00 PM, at Maggiano’s Pointe Orlando restaurant. Also, The Baptist Review is hosting the Presidential Forum, where you can hear from both Josh Powell and Willy Rice before the big vote on Tuesday.
3. The John Powell Memorial Toss has become a can’t miss event for me. John was a great guy before his untimely end came while he was stopped on a highway helping a stranger with a disabled car. Gathering with his family to play catch before the meeting is a yearly highlight.
4. Sunday Church: If you are a pastor and you’re like me, you don’t get many Sundays away from the church where you serve. It’s nice to have an opportunity occasionally to experience Sunday worship at another church, and your presence can be an encouragement to local believers on June 7.
5. The Exhibit Hall: Although I really don’t need another coffee mug, even I find compelling swag every year in the Exhibit Hall, and I usually encounter some booth that gives me new ideas for our ministry at FBC Farmersville.
6. Singing at the IX Marks Meetings: I’m not even a Calvinist, and my carriage turns into a pumpkin at around 10:00 PM, so you’ve really got to do something powerful to get me to show up at a 9:00 meeting. Singing hymns acapella with a huge number of brothers and sisters? I eat that up. Last year, security held me out because of the pocketknife I perennially carry. This year I will be prepared.
7. State Convention Fellowships: Your state convention probably has some sort of a reception or other gathering that takes place either Sunday or Monday. It is a great venue for strengthening or even initiating relationships with Southern Baptists who live and serve just out your back door.
General Ideas about Serving as a Messenger
I will write some things about specific issues below, but if you’re only going to read one thing in this article, I’d prefer that you read this section carefully. This is my general advice about how to be a good messenger.
1.Pray about your votes: In The Baptist Faith & Message, we as Southern Baptists commend “democratic processes,” but that doesn’t mean that we are in favor of democracy. All of God’s work is theocratic in nature. If there were some humanly available way to concentrate all of the decision making authority in the Triune God, we would do so, since Jesus is Lord. But, alas, the only options available to us are to concentrate authority in the hands of a small group of sinful believers or to disperse it among a large number of them.
We disperse that authority for a number of theological reasons. That is why our Convention operates according to democratic principles. The only thing that rescues us from the pitfalls attendant to the mob rule of sinners is if God’s people pray and the Spirit of God leads us in the making of our decisions. And so, you must pray about your votes. You owe it to the church who sent you, to the thousands of missionaries who are depending upon you, to a lost world who needs our witness, and most importantly, to the Lord who saved you.
If you don’t have time to pray, you don’t have time to vote.
2. Listen and Be Persuadable: It is not the Southern Baptist practice to have “instructed messengers.” Our process of motion-making, discussion, and voting is predicated upon the assumption that you are listening to discussion with an open heart for the Lord to persuade you.
3. Pick Up the Daily Bulletin: (or download it in your app). Use it to keep up with any changes to the order of business. Look in it for new information (like the proposed makeup of the Committee on Nominations for next year). The Daily Bulletin is your friend. You should find copies on tables just inside the door of the actual hall where the meeting is taking place.
4. Follow Instructions Carefully: There is a man who is more than a mere man—if there were some semi-pantheon of Godly savants to whom we should pay attention, among them would be The Honorable Mayor of Ozark, Missouri, our Registration Secretary, Don Currence.
Mayor Don will give you instructions about how to cast your ballot in various votes. Hear ye him. It’s more complicated than you may think. You came all this way to vote. Follow the instructions.
5. Require that Your Vote Be Earned: If a business matter comes up for a vote and you don’t understand it; consider not voting. If a business matter comes up, you do understand it, but you aren’t fully convinced, vote against it. Place the burden of proof upon the maker of the motion. It’s that person’s job to convince you.
6. Love the Brethren: Even the knuckleheads. You’ve been a knucklehead before, and God loved you anyway. So did your mama. Extend grace and the benefit of the doubt.
7. Give God Permission to Move You: The most consequential Convention event in my life was not my election to serve as Convention President in 2022. It happened eleven years earlier. Tom Elliff gave the IMB report and called for SBC churches to help reach Unengaged, Unreached People Groups. God stirred my heart that day, and for the past fourteen years, FBC Farmersville has been working to reach the Bayot people of Senegal. This Spring, we witnessed a major movement of conversions there. This is one of the most meaningful things that has happened in my life, and it started with an entity report at the SBC Annual Meeting.
Listen to Don Currence? Of course. I already said that. But listen also for Jesus to stir your heart over something while our meeting is taking place.
Specific Issues for 2026
We already know about some of the items that will come to the floor this year. Here are some key items, as well as some of my thoughts about each of them.
1. The Cooperative Program Budget
As a part of the Executive Committee’s Report, we will have an opportunity to vote on how the money is spent in 2026-27 that our churches give through the Cooperative Program. This year, that budget is being adjusted to raise the percentage going to the International Mission Board to 51%.
Accomplishing this has involved painful sacrifice on the part of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. All of the reallocated money has come out of their budget. Reaching the world with the gospel is the priority of Southern Baptists and the most prominent raison d’être for the Southern Baptist Convention. This is a good development. But we ought to give honor to those who have accepted a much more difficult job of doing more with less resources in order to make it happen.
2. The Presidential Election
In the Tuesday afternoon session, we will be asked to cast our ballots for the next President of the Southern Baptist Convention. It is one of the most important decisions every year. Plan to be in your seat for that one.
Believe it or not, we really don’t know who your choices will be. Although it is possible to announce a nomination ahead of time, no such thing is required. Without giving advance notice to anyone, any messenger can walk up onto the platform and make whatever nomination they wish for the office. You could even nominate yourself.
And yet, as of now, we know that both Josh Powell and Willy Rice have indicated that their names will be put into nomination. The elected President will plan and moderate next year’s meeting, will serve on some committees and boards, and will have the power to appoint some people to various offices. Beyond those constitutional powers, presidents have very little authority. You may have heard a lot of promises down through the years about what various presidents will or will not do. Most of those come to naught.
The most important question you should ask yourself about a presiding officer is whether that person will aid the messengers in their work at the annual meeting and will respect the decisions that the messengers have made. A good president is thankful for his wins but is respectful of the messenger body when they vote differently from what he had hoped. That factor alone has helped me to make my choice as to how I will cast my ballot as I have listened to what both candidates have to say.
3. The Mohler Amendment Proposal
Dr. Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has announced his attention to propose an amendment to the Constitution of the Convention. His amendment would add language to Article III stipulating that churches are not in friendly cooperation with the Convention if they install women as pastors or let them preach to the full congregation of the church.
OK. The actual language is more complicated than that, and it has been changed just in the past few days.
Southern Baptists are complementarians, especially with regard to the office of Pastor. Indeed, my church, along with every other SBC church where I have ever been a member, is also complementarian with regard to the office of Deacon.
I am generally disposed against having an ever-increasing laundry list of offenses like this encoded into our Constitution. The Constitution should ideally include the most general statements of our Convention’s name makeup, and purpose, and only such of those as are bulletproof in their wording.
We are not governed by the warm feelings we had when we adopted constitutional language, nor by the things people said in debate, nor by our intentions, whether for good or for ill. We are governed by the words in our Constitution. The Constitution is deliberately difficult to amend, and therefore, if we wind up stuck with recklessly composed words in the Constitution, it can be quite difficult to get out from under them.
But with all of that having been said, if we are going to have language like this in the Constitution, I think Dr. Mohler has, in this latest iteration, found the language that summarizes a sentiment upon which 90% of Southern Baptist messengers have strong agreement. I think I might actually vote in favor of the proposed amendment as it now stands.
It is Special Rule of the Convention that motions regarding our governing documents should go to the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention for study before coming back to the Convention’s messengers for a vote. In addition to proposing his amendment, Dr. Mohler has announced his attention to move for the suspension of this rule (“Rule 6”) to allow the messengers to vote on this constitutional amendment without conducting such a study.
I am opposed to suspending Rule 6. The very fact that the language of the proposed amendment has been changed after it was announced is strong evidence that the text of the amendment is not well established. The alteration of the language from “such as” to “specifically” (which I much appreciated), made a massive difference in the level of support that the amendment now enjoys. This is proof-positive that improvement of the language is both possible and potentially profitable. We should not bypass review of a change to our governing documents for which the ink is not even dry.
Also, even in the present state of the amendment, both current presidential candidates have said in interview with Ben Cole that the wording is subject to varying interpretations and perhaps a little fuzzy. If significant supporters of the amendment are among those who lack confidence in the specificity and clarity of the wording, then why would we bypass customary review?
In saying this, I do have some mixed feelings. I do agree with Dr. Mohler that it is important to sort out and fix some of the problems we have recently endured with regard to determining the parameters friendly cooperation among our churches. Specifically, I think it is important to bring to a fixed conclusion our conversations about qualifications for pastoral roles and the role of women in our churches.
The referral of this matter to the Executive Committee involves some risks. They have been known in the past, on some occasions, to take matters referred to them and just never report them out to the Convention at all, neither to recommend their adoption, nor to recommend the adoption of alternative language, nor to recommend that they not be adopted. Past motions have occasionally, upon referral to the Executive Committee, just been shoved into a drawer and forgotten.
That must not happen with this question. Some definitive resolution is worth achieving.
And so, I am exploring avenues that our messengers might explore that would give us the benefit of study and review to this amendment—and really, we should almost always do this for anything going into the Constitution—while securing an iron-clad guarantee that the Executive Committee will report out to the messengers at our very next meeting some recommended language that will come to us for a vote.
Some Heroes I Appreciate
I want to wrap up by expressing my appreciation for some people whose heroic actions, in my opinion, serve Southern Baptists well.
1. Dr. Albert Mohler: In response to his first proposed amendment, I suggested that the way to secure unity in the Southern Baptist Convention is to give an honest hearing to the 30% of the messenger body who have strongly supported the enforcement of a complementarian boundary of cooperation for the SBC but have rejected previous attempts to put language into the constitution enshrining that. Dr. Mohler did exactly that. He heard people’s concerns and he modified his proposal. This is heroic humility, and he is to be commended for it.
2. Pastor Jason Paredes and Fielder Church: After four years of scrutiny for their use of the title “Pastor” to describe staff members who were not serving as elder either in terms of church governance or in the function of preaching, Fielder Church (Arlington, TX) and Pastor Jason Paredes have announced that they will now use the title “Pastor” only with regard to those who are Pastors/Elders/Overseers.
This move brings Fielder into line not only with The Baptist Faith & Message but also with four centuries of Baptist confessions of faith. Jason served with me on the Cooperation Group. I have been impressed with who he is as a person and a brother in Christ. It takes a whole lot of humility for people on his staff to relinquish a title that had been given to them. It takes a whole lot of humility for Jason, having publicly defended their prior terminology, to concede the point. Such humility is rare. It ought to be celebrated.
3. Jonathan Sams and the Credentials Committee: No group of dedicated servants in our Convention has been more questioned and maligned than the Credentials Committee. Chairman Jonathan Sams has given good leadership to this group. This week we learned that a widely acclaimed resolution on the Office of Pastor/Elder/Overseer was actually submitted by Sams on the part of the Credentials Committee. The spirit of harmony potentially achieved by this action is a needed balm upon our fellowship.
There are many, many more who deserve mention, but this essay can only be so long if I want anyone to read it. I will close with this sentiment:
I have long believed that the measure of a meeting is not how much tension or controversy takes place during the meeting, but rather how much tension, confusion, or controversy remains when it is over. I am praying for our President, Clint Pressley. I am praying for you, too, fellow messenger! Let’s meet one another in Orlando in a few days, and may God bring us together in His name.
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Editor's Note: As a part of its commitment to fostering conversation within the Southern Baptist Convention, the Baptist Review may publish editorials that espouse viewpoints that are not necessarily shared by the TBR leadership team or other contributors. We welcome submissions for responses and rebuttals to any editorials as we seek to host meaningful conversations about the present and future of our convention.
Bart Barber
Bart Barber has been the pastor of First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, since 1999 and served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2022-2024. He earned a B.A. from Baylor University and both an M.Div. and a Ph.D. in Church History from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Bart is married to Tracy, and they have two children, Jim and Sarah.