EDITOR’S NOTE — The Baptist Paper reached out to those who have announced intentions to be nominated for president of the Southern Baptist Convention. No other nominees had been announced at press time. See Q&A with Josh Powell. ALSO, see full 2026 SBC Preview here.
Willy Rice
Age: 62
Current position and title: Pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater, Florida
Years of ministry service overall: More than 40 years
What led you to allow your name to be placed in nomination for SBC president?
I feel like we are at a strategic and pivotal moment in SBC life.
So many people are troubled by what they have seen and felt over the last decade. They feel a familiar drift taking place.
We need a renewal in Baptist life that emphasizes convictional clarity, denominational accountability and missional intentionality. We don’t need a cheerleader or a cynic, but we do need someone who will tell us the truth about the current situation and listen to concerned voices.
We need leaders who love our convention enough to call us back toward real doctrinal and missional health. I love our SBC, and as a fourth generation Florida Baptist, I want to be a voice for renewal and reconciliation.
If you could improve one thing in the SBC as president, what would that be? How would you go about it?
I obviously want to see us focused and energized by our global mission. However, that isn’t going to happen when we have leaders who seem embarrassed by our people and unwilling to trust grassroot churches and leaders with appropriate information.
We need leaders who demonstrate humility and accountability. I think the SBC functions best when it is led by local churches and pastors, not entities and executives. Right now, we need to restore trust with local churches and pastors.
Amid all the political and divisive messaging online, specifically social media, how can Southern Baptists stand up for truth while also helping bring a voice of calm amid the noise?
Speaking the truth in love should not be hard for people who follow Jesus. Love without truth is not real love, and truth without love is not real truth.
We absolutely must be known as a convictional people who don’t see political and social adversaries as our enemy, but as our neighbors and as a mission field. Yet, this age of apostasy and idolatry absolutely calls for people of conviction and courage. I like calm as much as anyone else, but I’d rather be rattled by the truth than be lulled into destruction.
Amid a shortage of pastors/and a need for more bivocational pastors, how would you address this issue if elected?
Leaders are built in local churches. We need to recover a burden to call, develop and deploy leaders from within our ranks.
At Calvary we’ve developed a Leadership Multiplication Pipeline that we have shared across the convention. We’ve worked in partnership with IMB and NAMB and seen 19 international missionaries called and sent from our church in the last decade. In the last 10 years, 159 people have responded to a call to ministry and taken a step in that direction.
I’d like to be able to share what we’ve done and see similar development processes modeled across our convention.
If you were asked to clearly communicate the mission of the SBC, what would you say?
Our mission is obviously the Great Commission given to us by our Lord. The SBC should be a convention of likeminded, Baptist churches united to spread the gospel across North American and the world.
What are your thoughts on the Cooperative Program’s future? How have your views of CP giving/designated giving changed or remained the same in recent years. Please explain.
We need some serious conversations about the Cooperative Program. Overall receipts from our churches have declined more than $100 Million in less than 20 years.
At the same time the number of churches has not decreased, nor have they gotten poorer, nor are they resistant to cooperative missions. As proof, during the same time frame, designated mission offerings have increased. Something isn’t adding up.
We need to ask some hard questions about why the trust in institutional leadership has waned. What we don’t need are leaders who just tell us everything is great and aren’t willing to face the hard issues. If Baptist people believe the CP is the most effective way to fund global missions, they will absolutely support it. That confidence must be restored.
