Brent Refuses To Be Managed; The Trustees Refuse To Do Their Job
This article was originally published by our friends at the Center for Baptist Leadership
Southern Baptist writer James Sullivan memorably described the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) as a “rope of sand with strength of steel.” This analogy helps explain the incredible fact that the world’s largest missionary enterprise rests on voluntary cooperation. Baptist funding, through the Cooperative Program, powers global missions work and theological education. Baptist control is provided through the Convention-Trustee system.
This year, Sam Rainer wrote about “The Unraveling of Our Cooperation.” Rainer has blackpilled on the Conservative Resurgence and the Cooperative Program. The Resurgence did not work, he argues; it made us angrier and smaller. The Cooperative Program of those rancorous churches is “in its last season” as “every scandal and worrisome news report acts like another small prick in the balloon.”
To follow the metaphor, Rainer argued that the local churches are letting go of the “rope of sand,” ceasing to be cooperative and ceasing to adequately fund the mission.
Rainer’s take is notable for two reasons. First, it was published in The Baptist Review, which is the latest mouthpiece for the more moderate-to-liberalizing SBC-related institutions like Southeastern Seminary and Criswell College and the men who think they stand to inherit the system. If Baptist Press is the SBC’s Pravda, The Baptist Review is Pionerskaya Pravda, “Truth for Young Pioneers.” The article has been found “important” by the party leaders who live on Baptist tithes.
Second, it comes from a Rainer. Sam Rainer is Thom Rainer’s son and business partner. Thom led Lifeway from 2005, where he once told the board that Lifeway’s retail stores had a protectable business model against online retailing. Trustees hailed him as a “man of authority in the areas of trends.” What many thought was visionary turned out to be hubris. He retired in 2018, just weeks before interim leaders started closing stores and eventually abandoning Rainer’s purpose-built Nashville skyscraper for a suburban office park.
Poignantly, Amazon moved into the old Lifeway campus and imploded its buildings. In 2019, Lifeway sued Thom Rainer, accusing him of taking a seven-figure golden parachute without proper authorization and then violating its noncompete clause. The case was settled quickly. Thom and Sam Rainer now work together at Church Answers, the family consulting business, which reportedly generated significant revenue for the family during Thom’s tenure at Lifeway.
The Rainer view says the rope of sand is anchored to cantankerous churches, and their “scandals and worrisome news reports” are fraying the strand of Baptist funding that will entice the next generation of leaders to take up the mission.
But are the churches really the ones to blame for our crumbling cooperation? It’s not so simple.
The churches have the job of holding the trustees to the “trust”—the gospel mission—through the nomination and appointment process. But “trust the trustees” has become “rubber stamp the trustees” and, perhaps, raises the question: Is it time to start voting down trustees or even working to replace them?
If that’s where we are as a Convention (and it appears we are getting very close to such an impasse), that’s not a failure of the churches—it’s a failure of the trustees at their respective institutions to maintain the trust and transparency needed to preserve the system.
Trustees: The Link Between Churches and Entities
The Center for Baptist Leadership believes the firm anchor in Baptist life is the local church. It is not visionaries with new ideas about milking the cash cow of the Cooperative Program. If the rope becomes a pile of sand, it is not because churches abandoned faithful Cooperative Program funding. It is because the SBC’s expert class slips free of the Convention-Trustee model of Baptist control.
In our current moment, trustees have two options.
The first option is to maintain the rope’s strength of steel so that when the churches pull, it is felt by our entities. We need to see that the trustees are responsive to these pulls. When the entity that they oversee becomes a constant source of contention within the SBC, and pastors and messengers make that known through withholding funds or forcing votes to abolish said entities, the trustees must respond. If they don’t, or won’t, it is the trustees that have broken trust and cut the rope.
The second option is to ignore the concerns of the churches or to belittle and castigate questions about our entities’ mission fidelity. Instead of being the rope of sand, the trustees become sand dunes, protecting their CEOs and being unresponsive to the layman’s concerns.
It is human nature for religious entrepreneurs to see the rope of sand as an obstacle to their “freedom.” The public flocks to self-styled visionaries—not SBC bondservants. As SBC layperson and journalist Megan Basham reports in her new book, Shepherds for Sale, many religious CEOs are eager to trade their SBC bona fides for cash and cachet from liberal special interest groups.
The ERLC’s General Failure: Refusing to Respond to the Pull of the Churches
This is starkly illustrated by the chaos surrounding the SBC’s smallest but most political institution: the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and its embattled leader, Brent Leatherwood.
The ERLC has, for years, caused controversy among rank-and-file Southern Baptists. Rather than speak for the Convention, it zealously speaks at the Convention. When the Baptist churchmen favor the abolition of abortion, the ERLC signs letters undermining it. When the Baptist Faith & Message calls for the will of Christ to be made supreme in human institutions, the ERLC promotes scholars who deride that goal as “Christian Nationalism.” When the Baptists unite around protecting the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, the ERLC tells statehouses to balance those rights against “creative constitutional [sic] solutions.” And when Megan Basham asks for concrete evidence the ERLC had any influence on Tennessee’s transgender legislation, a trustee on the ERLC’s Executive Committee defended it by claiming that “the ERLC has made their positions clear on these issues holistically, not that we spoke officially to each one on a state level.”
So when Leatherwood decides a constitutionally suspect and divisive “red flag law” in the Tennessee statehouse is important, he throws the public weight of the SBC behind it. But when Leatherwood was silent in that same statehouse on transgender laws, the trustees claimed the laymen must not understand their “holistic” political approach.
When the churches pull on their end of the rope, the trustees defend the ERLC’s inaction as “holistic” genius.
Trustees who abandon their roles have harmed the Convention. The ERLC is ground zero for this harm.
Last Fall, the ERLC’s Trustees adopted bylaws that neutered their own control. The six-member executive committee was given all the powers of the whole board, except in seven limited circumstances like the dissolution of the corporation or the amendment of the bylaws. After the board sets the CEO’s initial compensation, the Executive Committee controls his pay, which the full board only has the right to “review.” In a typical year, the full board needs only to approve an annual budget and the Executive Committee.
As CBL Advisory Board Member and ERLC Trustee Jon Whitehead disclosed in the first episode of the CBL Podcast, the ERLC’s former CEO Russell Moore had a vitriolic reaction to the rope of sand. When the SBC EC asked questions about Moore’s management, he spent over a year plotting to make unfounded accusations that the ERLC’s sister entity had a culture where “countless children have been torn to shreds” and “women have been raped.” Moore’s trustees backed him to the hilt and gave him a generous departure package when he pulled the ripcord and left the ERLC for Christianity Today. The SBC EC has been nearly bankrupted by the outside investigation and its fallout, which found nothing resembling Moore’s purple prose.
The Convention is growing increasingly impatient with ERLC trustee inaction. At the 2024 SBC annual meeting, Pastor Tom Ascol brought a motion to abolish the ERLC. In prior years, such motions would have been voted down by 80% margins. This year, on a show of hands, observers estimated 35% to 45% of the room supported the motion. Even Baptist Press was forced to acknowledge that “attempts in recent years…have failed by bigger margins.”
This should have been taken as a clear signal for the ERLC trustees to get their house in order.
The ERLC’s Particular Failure: Sacrificing Kevin Smith Instead of Managing Brent Leatherwood
Tragically, instead of reforms at the ERLC, Southern Baptists were treated to 48 hours of one of the most embarrassing news cycles we’ve seen in recent years. Instead of positive change, the former Chairman of the ERLC’s Board of Trustees, Pastor Kevin Smith, has been crushed. And why? Because he took to heart the Convention’s clear signal for corrective action to be applied to Leatherwood and acted on it.
As the first African American chair, Smith is a political moderate. He had publicly criticized other Baptists as being “whores” for Donald Trump. But Smith saw the Convention’s mood after the most recent Annual Meeting, and met with his Executive Committee. He thought he had consensus among the five of them to impose new limits on Leatherwood if things did not get better.
Things did not get better. They got worse.
When President Biden surrendered to internal Democrat politics, Leatherwood issued a farcical statement suggesting Biden had “put the needs of the nation above personal ambition.” But the move was hardly voluntary, and the “need of the nation” was actually the need for Democrats to ditch their elected candidate to have any chance at retaining the Presidency. The statement was so baldly partisan, dishonest, and unnecessary that SBC President Clint Pressley felt the need to contradict Leatherwood in his own tweet.
On Monday, July 22, Smith reportedly drove to Nashville to meet with Leatherwood and deliver what he believed to be the ERLC EC’s consensus decision to interrupt Leatherwood’s self-destructive leadership. But at the end of the meeting, Smith told ERLC staff to publish a statement announcing Leatherwood’s termination. The dots are easy to connect: Leatherwood refused to submit, and Smith understood insubordination to be grounds for termination.
Smith mistakenly believed ERLC trustees would find insubordination a red line.
Instead, the rest of the ERLC EC—Tony Beam, Amy Pettway, Anthony Cox, and Nathan Lugbill—turned on Smith.
At the same time, Leatherwood’s mentor, Russell Moore, launched a media frenzy. He labeled Smith’s action as the perfect overlap of “stupid and evil.” Liberal media quickly piled on, generating a firestorm. Whether or not this caused the EC members to backtrack, as one source suggested to Megan Basham, we will never know. But safe to say no trustee wanted to be the next person investigated for “rape” and “tearing children to shreds” (which is what happened to the last SBC leader who dared cross the vindictive Russell Moore).
Smith resigned and apologized for not getting a formal vote on the consensus. He failed to follow the lawyer’s classic advice: “Get it in writing.” Still, this mistake was no worse than many made by Leatherwood’s questionable public statements.
But apparently, in the SBC, it is offensive to suggest trustees might have reason to manage CEOs, even if Smith went too fast in firing one. The ERLC could have rebuked Smith and allowed him to continue to serve and, at the same time, affirm Leatherwood’s need for increasing limits. But the trustees seem terrified to admit Leatherwood needed their management. The ERLC EC’s press release quickly stated the true, non-negotiable: “At the outset, we wish to affirm our support for the ERLC staff,” that is to say, Leatherwood.
The ERLC EC’s last press release on the issue does, in fact, mention the need to “rebuild trust” with Southern Baptists. But, astoundingly, it says the issue that caused lost trust is the events around the termination. In prior paragraphs, the vote for abolition is called “discontent” that “does not rise to the level of a fireable offense.” There is not one admission that the “discontent” in the Convention is valid. But Smith’s actions are trotted out as the reason for shaken trust; it is “a flurry of activity over the last 24 hours” that has been “destabilizing.”
The rope of sand is not “fraying.” No, our trustees and pernicious outside actors are gnawing through the rope to avoid any pull on Mr. Leatherwood.
Ultimately, if you want to know who to thank for Kevin Smith’s punishment for doing the right thing and Brent Leatherwood’s reward for his insubordination, you can thank the remaining men and women on the ERLC EC (listed above).
In giving the ERLC free rein to divide Southern Baptists along partisan and political lines, the trustees are failing. The ERLC’s statements should amplify SBC messages. However, the trustees are either entranced or held hostage by the idea of Mr. Leatherwood as a uniquely gifted practitioner of holistic politics. And Mr. Leatherwood apparently finds it beneath him to think the SBC’s consensus statements should limit his public actions as the face of the ERLC.
However, his use of the SBC platform is divisive. His problem is not the cantankerous churches or the rope of sand that binds us but his ambition to tell Baptists he has found the true Baptist political positions for them on immigration, guns, abortion, and even taxpayer funding of foreign wars. He is stubbornly loud where Baptists have not so much as whispered.
Southern Baptists should not tolerate this incessant division. New groups are springing up to fill the urgent need. If the ERLC’s trustees do not respond to the pull of the churches, the rope of sand will be cut, and faithful Baptist churchmen will carry the mission forward.
They will find the rope was not, in fact, an anchor holding Brent Leatherwood down from aspirational leadership.
It was the rope that kept him and the ERLC tethered to the faithful anchor of the cooperative mission—the local church.
Image Credit: Unsplash
You bring shame to the church. This statement is horrific. Repent.
Your arrogance is clear in your failure to defend your statement, which I quote at the bottom of this comment. What Leatherwood said was precisely correct and if you disagree, you need to disagree with what he said and share why, rather than write this incoherent rambling bunk.
I don’t know how you could disagree with what Leatherwood said. Are you a conspiracy theorist? Do you have insider access into the inner workings of the White House? How the heck is Biden’s resignation not a big win for the USA? I’m left to guess, because you can’t explain yourself.
Resign from your elder post immediately. This statement has disqualified you per the Scriptures. 1 Timothy 1:7-9.
“When President Biden surrendered to internal Democrat politics, Leatherwood issued a farcical statement suggesting Biden had “put the needs of the nation above personal ambition.” But the move was hardly voluntary, and the “need of the nation” was actually the need for Democrats to ditch their elected candidate to have any chance at retaining the Presidency. The statement was so baldly partisan, dishonest, and unnecessary that SBC President Clint Pressley felt the need to contradict Leatherwood in his own tweet.”