This question-and-answer interview with Jeff Iorg, president and CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, was posted March 11 by the California Southern Baptist Convention. This is an excerpt of that interview. See full interview.
It’s clear that the CP budget is going to require some prayerful consideration of the messengers leading up to and during the 2025 SBC Annual Meeting in Dallas. And I heard you when you urged the EC members to offer creative solutions to this proposed budget. Has the finance committee received any alternative suggestions to consider since that meeting? And should we expect to hear about those before June? Or are we hoping that something inspired will emerge from the floor? (See related story for background)
Iorg: Well, I would be delighted for something inspired to emerge from the floor. However, we had many options that were considered by the EC staff and by the Finance Committee of the Executive Committee prior to bringing their recommendation forward. Many of those options were also vetted by the Great Commission Council and others trying to find a way forward. It’s not that there haven’t been other suggestions considered; it’s that the one we came to (and I’ll say it this way) has the least amount of negative attached to it, and it has a lot of negative, which I said in my speech.
I find myself advocating or recommending something I don’t even want to do, and yet that’s where it came to. On the one hand, yes, we’re still open to considering options, but the biggest option that we’re working on still, is the selling and downsizing of our facility in Nashville. We have far more building than we need, and we can certainly function well in a different location. But offering a building for sale and actually selling it are not the same thing. We’re pushing to try to get that sale accomplished. If that were to happen, then we would bring a recommendation that we change the budget and remove the allocation. That’s something that we would like to see happen, but we can’t control the timing. And you know the budget has to be adopted in June, and it has to be effective October 1st. If, at any time in that window, we can sell the building or find an alternative funding source, we would certainly use it instead of the Cooperative Program allocation.
So, if the building doesn’t sell before the meeting in June, but it sells after, within the year, does the EC have the ability to make that adjustment to the budget?
Iorg: I believe the Executive Committee would be applauded if we made that adjustment. I don’t think it would be a legal or parliamentary hurdle to get over for us to say that we are not using that priority allocation as we indicated and instead sending it on to the mission. I think that would actually be celebrated by Southern Baptists.
Is there a word that you want to offer to our leaders who might still be on the fence about the investment it would take to go to Dallas?
Iorg: I would encourage leaders to consider coming to Dallas because the people who are in the room make the decisions.
I speak to many pastors who don’t come to the Southern Baptist Convention and then are frustrated by the decisions that are made, and I would say, “come and use your voice, use your vote, and help make a difference in whatever way you think it needs to be made.” Because, the people in the room? — they make the decisions. The root word for convention is convene. When you convene, that’s who the convention is, and that’s why I would encourage people to participate. We need every voice. And we especially need the voices in the West that are really on the cutting edge in many ways of what we’re accomplishing. I know it’s expensive and difficult, and I understand that. But I would encourage pastors and others to participate as much as they practically can.
There’s no question about it. It’s a significant cost.
What is your overall vision for our convention and what do we need to be doing today to ensure that that vision becomes a reality?
Iorg: My vision is that Southern Baptists would come together and spend 95% of their time talking about how to get the gospel to people in the world who’ve never even heard the name of Jesus. That’s what I think about every day, what gets me going every day, and what makes me stay with this work every day.
In practical terms, for my tenure, what I’d like to do is lead us through what is a very rocky time and bring us to the conclusion of some of these issues related to legal challenges establishing sex abuse prevention and response in our convention as an ongoing work that we’re doing. I don’t want to demean the importance of it, but I want it to be a routine part of what we do. I don’t want it to be something that we’re having to create or add to. I want it to be, that’s what we do. That’s part of who we are. And I want to get to that in the next two or three years as well.
I want to see us talking mostly about getting the gospel to the nations. I want my personal tenure at the EC to be a time of leading us through and putting behind us some of these difficulties and really returning, I hope, to a quieter time of leadership where the Executive Committee is not in the news. We’re at our best when we are behind the scenes facilitating the work of the entities, and the entities are the stars, the IMB, the North American Mission Board, the seminaries, the ERLC, Guidestone, LifeWay. These are the people and the organizations and the missional accomplishments that we ought to be talking about all the time, not legal battles that the EC is fighting on the SBC’s behalf.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Sarah M. Graham and originally published by the California Southern Baptist Convention.
