Have you ever opened a sack of flour that’s been sitting just a little too long in a damp basement? At first, it looks okay—sealed up, stacked neatly, part of the pantry. But peel it open, and the putrid smell is suddenly overwhelming. It’s filled with fat, white maggots, squirming over each other, feeding on what was supposed to good food.

These maggots didn’t plant the grain. They didn’t mill it. They didn’t package it and they certainly didn’t bake anything with it. They just showed up and started feasting, unnoticed. And the longer they’re left alone, the more they multiply.

That’s the best description I can come up with for the status quo of the Southern Baptist Convention. The entity heads, the megachurch pastors, the seminary presidents, the committee leaders, and the vast majority of the trustees—they don’t have to do anything. They don’t have to answer to the common Southern Baptist. They know their position is secure, and they know that when their time runs up, the system is rigged to usher them into their next cushy position.

Why?

Because the system is rigged.

The Southern Baptist Convention has always presented itself as a loosely knit association of like-minded, but independent Baptist churches. These churches, they say, cooperate primarily for the cause of missions. The Southern Baptist Convention, they say, isn’t a denomination in the strictest sense, as there is no top-down hierarchy, no rules or laws that churches are forced to follow, and churches are free to disassociate at any time.

And while this may technically be true, let’s be real, that isn’t how the Southern Baptist Convention operates. While churches, on paper, may technically and legally be independent, to hold any leadership role in what has become nothing more than a bunch of obsessed and incessant ladder-climbers (more on that in a future article), the pastors, leaders, entity heads, trustees—they must follow an unwritten code of conduct. Otherwise, the system is against you.

According to the Constitution, Southern Baptist churches send “messengers” (voting representatives) to the SBC Annual Meeting based on a formula tied to church giving and size. Every cooperating church gets 2 messengers by default, with opportunities to earn up to 10 additional messengers (for 12 total) by meeting giving thresholds.

And this is part of the problem. It’s all about money. The first problem with this is that in order for your vote to count, you must already be highly financially supportive of the current trajectory of the denomination. This means, for example, if you don’t support the fact that the ERLC is lobbying state legislators to vote against legislation that would completely ban abortion, and you decide to withhold money from the convention because of this, this hurts your church’s voting capacity.

That’s just one example, and that’s just where it’s written into the bylaws of the convention. It gets much more shady, trust me. You see, not only does the convention require you to give more money for more votes, but that same money you give is often used to bus in status-quo aligned voters.

In theory this representative messenger system allows even creatively targeted giving to be recognized with representation. But in practice, this formula disproportionately benefits large and wealthy congregations—and more often than not, these are congregations that the cooperative program has funded through the North American Mission Board (NAMB) and pastors (messengers) placed in these churches by the very men who need them to vote for them to keep them in their positions.

NAMB financially supports hundreds of church plants and missionaries, and it requires each NAMB-funded church plant to “give back” a portion (6%) of its offerings to the Cooperative Program, plus additional Great Commission offerings. In this way, CP money circulates to new congregations which in turn become voting members of the SBC family, subsidized by NAMB.

This creates a kind of patronage system: NAMB-backed plants owe their funding (and sometimes their very existence) to these SBC institutions, so their messengers feel pressured to support the status quo. In layman’s terms, they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them.

To make matters worse, not only that, but NAMB has been exposed for using CP money to fund travel and hotel expenses as well as registration fees for many of these institutionally-funded churches…the ones with hand-picked messengers who are expected to cast a vote for the hand that feeds them. They do this through NAMB’s SEND Network under the guise of missions funding. But in reality, they’re just bussing and flying in voters who will support their preferred outcome.

Meanwhile, the system does not fund any travel expenses for the thousands upon thousands of “irrelevant” rural Southern Baptist churches with only 50 members who can’t afford to send their pastor or a messenger to the annual meeting to cast a vote.

The bottom line is that the voting system consists of a significant amount of paid voters. In 2023, for example, one analysis found that 2.7% of all SBC messengers (283 people) were actually employees of national SBC entities (such as NAMB, the International Mission Board, or the six seminaries).

When adding in state convention and local association employees (whose salaries also ultimately trace back to Cooperative Program funds), roughly 10% of the voting body worked for the Southern Baptist Convention in some capacity. This means a significant bloc of voters each year draw a paycheck from the very institutions whose policies and leaders are being decided on at the meeting.

And this doesn’t even include the megachurch pastors who, in large proportion, are fed in other ways by the system, either directly or indirectly, through speaking engagements, trustee positions, or other volunteer leadership positions in exchange for influence and status. When looking at the system as a whole, the vast majority of the vote is already determined by those who created the system to keep themselves in positions of power and influence.

It’s the ladder-climber syndrome.

While there have been attempts by self-described reformers of the Southern Baptist Convention to mobilize movements to oppose the establishment, year after year, they fail. And they are destined to continue to fail because the system is broken, unfair, and rigged, and is not representative of the actual churches, pastors, and rank-and-file Southern Baptists who fund the system. And it’s not ever going to change, no hostile takeover or “conservative resurgence” is going to be able to out-man the system that’s there, because the system is designed to reward the ladder-climber and punish the dissenter (no pun intended).

And as long as the maggots are being fed by the system, they’re not going to give it up without a fight.