EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is drawn from an interview with Josh Powell. You can watch the full interview here or listen to it here.
ORLANDO (BP) – There are several aspects to serving as Southern Baptist Convention president, including being a voice that speaks to the issues. Josh Powell acknowledges that is baked into the job, but prefers an in-house approach that celebrates gains while addressing the issues that hinder fulfilling the Great Commission.
“There’s a resolve that I think [is] important to the presidency,” said Powell, pastor of Taylors (S.C.) First Baptist Church, in a recent interview with Baptist Press. He will accept a nomination at next month’s annual meeting to serve as president. “Here’s what [Southern Baptists] are coming to do, and we’re not going to move away from that. We’re not going to divide away from the task.
“There are a lot of people who, I think, want the SBC to be something that it’s not. We are a group of autonomous churches … gathered together … as we cooperate [in] the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. So we want to stay with a humble, faithful resolve to make sure we’re doing what we need to do.”
That isn’t to ignore issues within the Convention.
“Looking back on our history, we’ve had challenges,” he said. “There are problems, things we have to walk through. Cooperation is hard.
“[But] there are two options we can take. There are those in the convention [who] want to focus on our problems … to talk about them all the time. I would rather focus on the priorities, because I believe that … you cannot focus on the priorities and the problems at the same time.”
That takes a shift of focus.
“Southern Baptists are at their best when they’re laser-focused on the priority of the Great Commission that we do together,” he said. “One of my hopes is that out of a difficult past six or seven years … we can start focusing on the priorities gain … start pressing hard on the gas of the Great Commission.”
Presidential responsibilities
Powell said he knows the convention president doesn’t speak “for every single person in the SBC.”
If elected, and someone were to ask for his opinion, he would first turn to James 1 where it says “if somebody needs wisdom, let them ask. And so, the first move for me is always [to] pray.”
“I want to be one who speaks to unify, not divide,” he said.
When it comes to the annual meeting, messengers and entity leaders look to the president to set tone.
“I just want to create a meeting that is God-glorifying, Christ-exalting and mission-focused to who we are,” he said. “So let’s address the things we need to address. Let’s deal with those things. I want to create that kind of atmosphere for our messengers.”
The president also chooses who will serve on the Committee on Committees and the Resolutions Committee.
Powell said he would have three criteria for choosing committee members:
- They must be a believer in Jesus Christ.
- They must be a believer in Jesus Christ demonstrating the fruit of the Spirit. (Galatians 5:22-23)
- They must be an active member who is serving faithfully in a Southern Baptist church that is committed to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 and to the Cooperative Program.
When it comes to the Resolutions Committee, Powell said, those same criteria apply and he would choose people who are “not agenda driven” but are “committed to our cooperative work together.”
The committee member would work “to speak clearly on issues that we are united on and … in a way that testifies to our greater mission and calling,” he said.
Credentials Committee debate
In recent years, a proposed amendment to the SBC Constitution failed to reach the two-thirds voting threshold required. Recommendations by a task force on defining “friendly cooperation” when it comes to churches were delivered in 2024. The mechanisms by which to determine a church’s cooperation within the SBC are in place, Powell said, it’s just a matter of enforcing them.
“The Credentials Committee just needs to do what the messengers have been clear on,” he said. “They have been clear over and over again on … the women pastor issue. The Baptist Faith and Message is absolutely clear on this. I urge the Credentials Committee to do what the messengers have been clear on [because] the messengers have the ultimate final authority.”
Powell voted twice in support of the so-called Law Amendment that would have amended the SBC Constitution and again in favor of a version further amended by Texas pastor Juan Sanchez.
He recommends a reevaluation of the Credentials Committee itself. One of the recommendations by the aforementioned 2024 task force, the Cooperation Group, was to decouple the Credentials Committee from the SBC Executive Committee and have it report directly to the messengers, for instance.
“The Convention approved those recommendations, and then they weren’t put into place,” Powell said. “I still think that’s the best way to handle it.”
Taking influence from the messengers tends to bring division, he added. Giving them a more direct line to such discussions strengthens their collective voice.
“I think you can set it up and organize it in such a way that we can deal with the business very cleanly, very clearly and establish the fact that the messengers understand the [Baptist Faith and Message] to be what it is, and we want churches to abide by that.”
One way is to provide an opportunity for messengers to unseat those from a church that the Credentials Committee has recommended for such a vote. A church would be given the opportunity over the next year to address the issue and bring itself back into friendly cooperation.
“It would almost lead to a disciplinary process that hopefully would welcome a brother or sister church back to us,” said Powell. “We can work together and put something like this in place that would make a powerful statement.”
He considers Southern Baptist churches to be “clearly” complementarian with the “adjudication” of the process being the issue.
“I am not suggesting I’ve got every answer. What I am suggesting is that we have seen a task force already, and] they have already made recommendations,” he said. “… Let’s put those [recommendations] into work.”
Concerns: Ministry pipeline, trust, CP
There are other issues to command the next SBC president’s attention, Powell noted, including encouraging the next generation of pastors and leadership, Cooperative Program support and addressing issues of trust.
“I have concerns about how we can strengthen our trustee system,” said Powell, who recently completed his tenure as trustee chairman at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “Our messengers have clearly said [it’s] the best system we have.
“There’s no way to manage the entities as a convention, so we have to have trustees who manage them.”
His concerns lie in adequately training trustees for times like leadership changes, which have been common in recent years in the SBC.
“We have to make sure they’re equipped and ready to understand their responsibility both to the institution and the Convention,” he said.
The number of churches without a pastor has caught his attention as well.
“How do we steward into the next generation the idea of calling out the called, and pressing in on them to raise them up to carry the mantle of the Great Commission through our cooperative work together?” he asked. “That’s a real concern for me.”
That blends into concerns over the Cooperative Program.
“It’s still the best method by which to fund our cooperative work,” said Powell. “But it’s been declining. [Trust issues] are part of it, but … I think it’s more complicated than we want to say. We need to tell the story of why we do this together.”
Avoiding that brings division among Southern Baptists.
“… I have real concerns over how many of us in different segments talk to each other. The secret sauce of Southern Baptists is relationships. Whenever we start driving wedges in those relationships, that brings division, and that’s why we have a hard time fixing the challenges that lie before us.”
The vote to elect the next SBC president is scheduled for June 9 at 3:30 pm during the 2026 SBC Annual Meeting in Orlando.
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