During the Executive Committee’s winter meeting in Nashville, Jeff Iorg shared his report emphasizing “steady incremental progress” despite ongoing challenges facing the Southern Baptist Convention.
Among the highlights, the EC’s president and CEO shared Monday evening (Feb. 16) promising reports related to the Cooperative Program. Iorg began by addressing last year’s $3 million allocation of CP funds needed to help the Executive Committee handle a flood of incoming legal expenses. He added some voiced concerns last year’s “priority allocation” would cause a significant decline in CP giving.
“Fortunately, that has not happened,” Iorg reported. “Since October 2025, during the first four months of the current fiscal year, we have received just over $63, 563,000, which is about $1.5 million dollars more than the same timeframe last year. … We are possibly on track to meet or exceed the national Cooperative Program budget for 2025–2026.”
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Iorg added, “Once again, Southern Baptists are demonstrating their resilience and their willingness to stand together to meet pressing challenges.”
Two “major changes for the current budget,” Iorg noted, include “no priority allocation” proposed in the 2026–2027 CP budget. “Second, the proposed national CP allocation for the International Mission Board will increase from 50.41% to 51% of the CP allocation budget, moving just over $1 million of new funding to the International Mission Board.”
Iorg thanked SBC entity leaders for “standing together with the Executive Committee to meet the goal of increasing funding for international missions.”
“While the SBC entities are sharing the responsibility for making this change,” he added, “the Executive Committee is still taking on the most of the financial burden.”
He added, “We will work at the Executive Committee over the next few months to create plans and implement them at the beginning of October 2026, assuming the Convention makes the final decision” related to the budget during the June meeting in Orlando.
Another highlight Iorg shared included the EC working with various Southern Baptist leaders and Lifeway Research to commission a study that asked thousands of pastors for “frank feedback” regarding their perspectives on the Cooperative Program.
“The response was strong,” said Iorg, noting 5,186 Southern Baptist pastors responded to the survey.
“We learned that pastors are overwhelmingly positive about the Cooperative Program.” Specifically, he noted that 91% of those who took the survey agreed or strongly agreed that CP “helps churches do more together than they can do alone.” And 84% agreed that a CP decline “would hurt missions effectiveness.”
While 19% of pastors agree or strongly agree that their church has decreased Cooperative Program giving due to a lack of confidence in the SBC, he said 74% disagree or strongly disagree with that statement.
The EC plans to release more results and detail from the study through Baptist Press in coming days, he said.
Revised SBC business and financial plan
Iorg also noted some challenges regarding messengers adopting a revised SBC business and financial plan at last year’s annual meeting in Dallas and its implementation.
“During this process, concerns have emerged about meeting the new deadlines because of varying fiscal years and recording cycles among entities, along with resolving the overlapping requirements of the old plan with the revised plan,” he said.
“These are normal challenges when putting any new set of policies in place across numerous entities with complex operations,” Iorg added. “As we said during the adoption process, we’ll work with the new plan for a year or two and then propose any adjustments or clarifications needed to smooth out its use. We already know some of these snags particularly related to the dates when things are required … and we’ll work those issues out as we fine tune the plan.”
Sexual abuse prevention
Iorg shared ongoing efforts to manage systems and resources related to sexual abuse prevention and response.
Among those efforts is finalizing plans for the Forces for Good Summit Feb. 24–25 at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which includes helping ministries implement abuse prevention measures. The EC, he added, has also released the updated Essential 2.0 training materials and is working on translating them into multiple languages. The EC is working on another initiative with associational leaders to create a training model to help churches with abuse prevention and response.
He also shared an update on efforts to resolve three major lawsuits against the SBC and others. Among those cases, he noted, “there may be trials on these matters later in 2026.”
“These cases continue to move forward slowly but purposely,” he said, “and we’re trying of course to resolve them as soon as possible.”
2026 SBC Annual Meeting
With the annual meeting in Orlando is still a few months away, Iorg shared initial projections show more than 20,000 people could attend this year’s event. He noted that number includes both messengers and guests, and about 1,000 of them are expected to be children.
“To put that in perspective,” he said, “in recent years we’ve had 500 to 600 children. That’s a lot of people and a lot of children.”
The theme for this year’s annual meeting June 7–10 is “Walking Worthy.”
