Every June, messengers from thousands of cooperating churches attend the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting. There are many people who help that gathering, as well as adjacent meetings, go as smoothly as possible. A few are elected officers of the SBC. Far more are elected members of various committees. Some of the most helpful include the Executive Committee’s professional staff, or various contracted experts like our parliamentarians. Southern Baptists are always grateful for the assistance of the many staff members who work for the venues, hotels, and restaurants in each host city.
Another group plays a crucial role in the success of the SBC Annual Meeting. These folks aren’t exactly behind-the-scenes, but neither are they on the platform. Every one of them are volunteers, and most of them are in their late teens and 20s. They can easily be taken for granted, but there is no way Southern Baptists could conduct our business without them. I’m talking about the pages.
Pages are volunteers who assist with the business sessions during the annual meeting. Pages are most visible when they monitor the microphones, assisting messengers as they ask questions from the floor. While Paul’s admonition to “let all things be done decently and in order” in 1 Corinthians 14:40 is directed at public worship in local churches, pages help us apply that principle to our business meetings (which, of course, include elements of public worship).
Pages do more than just monitor the microphones, however. They also ensure that motions and other parliamentary matters that originate from a messenger are written down by that messenger and delivered to the platform. As the SBC’s recording secretary, I work with the SBC Executive Committee staff to produce the Daily Bulletin and edit the SBC Annual. I could not keep accurate records without the help of the pages who make sure I get the information I need.
It takes around 75 volunteers to serve as pages at each annual meeting to guarantee adequate coverage and to ensure that each page only needs to work a couple of shifts. In recent years, the number of pages has been around half of that number. The result has been unexpected “hiccups” and overworked pages.
This year, our friends at Criswell College and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary are helping us find some pages. While we are grateful for their willingness to help, those two wonderful schools alone will not be able to help us reach our minimum number of 75 pages. Too many students are away during the summer, or unavailable because of other commitments, or perhaps just not interested.
So, I have a favor to ask: will you help us find pages for the 2025 SBC Annual Meeting in Dallas?
Perhaps your entire family will be in Dallas, including teenagers or young adults. Would you encourage them to serve as pages? My own 18-year-daughter will be a page for the first time this year.
Maybe you are a pastor or student minister at a church in metropolitan Dallas-Fort Worth. Do you have high school juniors and seniors or college students who would be willing to serve as pages? Consider encouraging them to do so.
While most pages are in their late teens and 20s, there is no requirement they must be. Every year, a handful of pages are older adult volunteers. We need some more “seasoned” folks to help us out by volunteering to serve their fellow messengers as a page.
If you or someone you know is willing to serve as a page, please email [email protected] for more information. You can also sign up to be a page on the Annual Meeting website.
Thanks for anything you can do to help us find pages for the 2025 SBC Annual Meeting. Wouldn’t it be amazing to see well over 100 (mostly) young people, perhaps attending their first annual meeting, volunteering their time to help messengers conduct our business for the glory of God and the sake of our Great Commission obedience?
Related posts:
National African American Fellowship continues five-year Vision 2030 
Highlights of the 2015 Southern Baptist Convention 
‘Post-Gospel’ Indy friendly, slow to embrace Church, association rep says 
Hispanic pastors discuss leading a church out of COVID 2015 Annual Meeting Story Collection 
Abortion, sex abuse, racism, Christian unity addressed in diverse resolutions SBC 2018: Executive Committee Report Part 1 Evangelism, Tithing Crucial, EC Leader Boto Tells SBC
