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Southern Baptist leader Ronnie Floyd resigns after internal fight over sex abuse investigation

Updated October 15, 2021 at 12:15 a.m. EDT|Published October 14, 2021 at 10:53 p.m. EDT
Southern Baptist leader Ronnie Floyd speaks to members of the organization in St. Louis in June 2016. (Jeff Roberson/AP)

Ronnie Floyd, the acting CEO of the business arm for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, has resigned from his position as head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee after a weeks-long internal battle over how the denomination should handle a sex abuse investigation.

Although Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee handles the business of the SBC, including its $192 million cooperative program that funds its missions and ministries.

Floyd’s resignation comes after weeks of intense debates that played out on Zoom and Twitter over an internal investigation into how the Executive Committee has handled sexual abuse allegations.

The SBC has been rocked by reports of hundreds of sexual abuse cases revealed in a 2019 investigation by the Houston Chronicle. It has ousted churches that employed pastors who were abusers and set up resources for churches to prevent sexual abuse. However, several sexual abuse survivors have said the denomination has not done enough to investigate and prevent more abuse from happening, because it does not have a way of tracking abusers within its network of churches.

During Executive Committee meetings over the past several weeks, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would have given investigators access to records of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staff. They said doing so went against the advice of convention lawyers and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits. Some committee members resigned over the issue.

In an initial vote on the issue Sept. 21, the committee voted against waiving attorney-client privilege.

Delegates to the Southern Baptists’ national meeting in June had approved the independent probe and voted for the committee to waive privilege if asked to do so by the investigating firm. The initial vote to defy their decision upset a huge swath of Southern Baptist leaders and lay members. As the controversy escalated, several church leaders had threatened to withhold funds, angry that the committee did not follow through on the will of the messengers.

The committee reversed course on Oct. 5 and voted to waive attorney-client privilege as part of the investigation.

After that vote, the SBC’s longtime general counsel decided to cut ties with the denomination.

In a letter released Thursday, Floyd wrote, “I will not and cannot any longer fulfill the duties placed upon me,” adding that the vote on Oct. 5 placed Southern Baptists into “uncertain, unknown, unprecedented and uncharted waters” that created potential risks to the SBC’s liability.

Several Southern Baptist insiders said Floyd’s resignation was inevitable. Ahead of his resignation, 25 members of the Executive Committee had planned to call a meeting to discuss issues of leadership within the panel, according to a letter shared with The Washington Post.

The recent vote over the investigation revealed divides at the highest levels of leadership over how to run the business of the SBC. Before the committee vote, SBC President Ed Litton of Alabama signaled his support for waiving attorney-client privilege. And before the final vote to waive privilege, dozens of concerned pastors in state conventions and local associations published numerous statements.

Dean Inserra, an Executive Committee member and pastor of a large Southern Baptist church in Tallahassee, said that, from the beginning, Floyd stubbornly resisted the will of Southern Baptist messengers. He said behind the scenes in Nashville, Floyd tried to talk other Baptist leaders out of putting forward a motion to waive executive privilege.

“He won’t accept any blame whatsoever and has made this about his integrity,” Inserra said. “He could’ve been the leader of doing what the messengers wanted and could’ve been a hero. Since he did not do that, there had to be a grass-roots movement to counter it.”

Floyd was formerly the head of a Northwest Arkansas megachurch, where he was pastor for 32 years. In 1989, he was a candidate for president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention but was defeated by Mike Huckabee, who later became state governor. Floyd was president of the SBC from 2014 to 2016. He served on former president Donald Trump’s advisory council ahead of Trump’s 2016 election and was elected president of the Executive Committee in 2019. He succeeded Southern Baptist pastor Frank Page, who resigned in 2018 over “a morally inappropriate relationship.”