Attendance at the SBC Annual Meeting in my active SBC lifetime has ranged from under five thousand to over forty-five thousand. We can expect less then the convention is outside of the traditional southern cities that regularly host the meeting (Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Orlando, St. Louis, Kansas City, San Antonio; more recently Louisville, Birmingham, Greensboro and others). We Baptists like to travel and it’s a boost for SBC work outside of the traditional south for the meeting to be held in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Portland, and other cities. The farther from where the churches are located and over 80% of all SBC churches are in the Southern states from Oklahoma to Virginia, Kentucky to Florida, the less attendance. We Baptists like to fight as well, so the less contested conventions, last year in Birmingham for example but not this year in Orlando, the smaller the attendance.
The populist idea that a convention of small churches should have the messengers from those small churches voting on all of our budgets, offices, elections, motions, and resolutions will never be killed. It always has appeal. I mean, if two-thirds of SBC churches are under 100 on an average Sunday why shouldn’t those churches get an allotment of messengers who can vote in person or remotely?
If readers are interested in an answer to that, and most are not, they can read this most recent article on the matter and follow links going back years on it. When we check clicks from the Voices site, there is almost never more than two or three, occasionally they will get up to ten or twelve. So, no one is much interested in actually reading whatever background and previous discussions are relevant to the question. The reflexive position (Dang straight! We ought to have remote voting so all the small church guys can vote!) is taken, reason has no place in the discussion.
Just for fun here are a few points about SBC annual meetings:
- We have the system we have always have. The messenger formula has been tweaked a time or two but we’ve never had any system of proxy or remote voting.
- We had the Conservative Resurgence, the most dramatic illustration that a grassroots movement can use the existing system and change the convention. People (I’m one of them) thought it important enough to find the funds and show up to register and vote.
- The convention messenger system is already weighted towards small churches. Those megachurches get far fewer messengers than their membership would permit if there was not a cap of 12 messengers per church. Podunk Number Two Baptist Church with an attendance of 12 could get the maximum, as could Super-Mega-Baptist Church with 12 thousand in attendance. How fair is that?
- Thus, those who think the route to whatever reform is needed by the SBC is through small churches voting might look at the current system as already favoring them. Any changes may hurt them. Unanticipated consequences abound.
- No one, even those who support remote voting (like Randy Adams candidate for SBC president) has made a concrete proposal. If all SBC churches were allotted the number of votes based on their giving (again, 12 maximum) and these votes could be voted apart from appearing physically at the Annual Meeting, then I suspect we would see the convention politicized like never before.
- And, hey, the Annual Meeting is sausage-making as it is. Imagine if the moderator had to allow for discussions, motions, or voting from remote locations.
- Besides, the Annual Meeting is an essential corporate meeting with legal requirements that prohibit remote voting.
But, we can have fun thinking, scheming, and demagoguing the idea. We do it every year.
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A deal for my populist brethren/sistren: You make a concrete proposal and I’ll either post it here or use it in an article of my own here.
Remote voting is a stupid and unworkable idea – plain and simple.
Sorry, I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
#StillTrueThough
Seems to me, it could be possible to have a remote location locally during the annual meeting for voting, but only allow the local meeting to vote on the office of SBC president. But the local voting could be limited to that one vote only. All other votes, policies, and procedures would then be left up to the messengers that took the time to make the trip in person. I don’t see how that would hamstring the actual proceedings in let’s say Orlando this year. It would quite possibly give a much more broader view of the views held by… Read more »
Boom?. Messengers may currently register online with their church. The system uses a unique identifier for every church in friendly cooperation with the SBC and utilizes the amount of gifts from the church to SBC causes; thus, the number of messengers allowed from that church is a discrete number, up to twelve max. The online registration accepts any name submitted by the church…but…that individual still has to show up in person at the Annual Meeting, identify him or herself, and receive be formally accepted as a messenger. If the last step is eliminated (and, in our governing documents, it’s actually… Read more »
Wait, if it’s like American Idol, then maybe we should do it…the system that gave us Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood should be good…
It gave us Clay Aiken, too.
Never mind.
Bro, I’ve often voted stock shares online and have never attended a shareholders annual meeting. You figure it out and make a concrete proposal. If churches have unique and identifiable “shares” then what might change about our system?
Hey, I think Iowa Democrats showed that electronic voting is a foolproof system. All you need is an app and…
Wait, never mind.
I am very appreciative that an Iowan has made this point.
😉
We just don’t need to let the DNC have a hand in designing the app.
In June 2016, the SBC held a presidential election with two candidates and neither got a majority of the votes. Do we really want to complicate our elections process?
Right – And when Frank page defeated Ronnie Floyd in Greensboro serves as another example of a close vote…
Imagine what would happen if three or more candidates were running and it ended up being a close vote and There was a problem with some of the polling places or the software… We could very well (likely) leave the convention site without a president… Yeah this seems like a great idea…
NOT.
Nope.
Not to mention the predictable and easily foreseen distrust of results this will bring. This would also – inevitably – render the SBC actually gathering for a convention unnecessary – just do all business remotely – and thus actually end the need to conduct CONVENTION officer elections (Who, as it has been argued here on this blog many times have no official job other than moderating meetings, honorary positions on committees and making appointments. Let’s just go ahead and do remote voting using technology, stop having a gathered convention, and just give that appointment power to, I don’t know, the… Read more »
I used to think this was a good idea, but now admit it really wouldn’t work out.
The comparisons, like how you vote your proxy stuff for those 3 shares of stock you own, aren’t the same. Typically, you vote in corporate elections on board members by name from pre-done nominations, and you have maybe 1 or 2 proposals that are pre-screened to vote on.
The SBC has a lot more going on than that, and a lot more flexibility.
That being said, I’m all for studying how, when, and where we should be scheduling the annual meeting to see if there are better ways to do it, that enable more folks to attend. I would be interested to see if convention city costs have outpaced inflation since the 1980s—everybody looks back at the CR and says “Well, people made it then…” But were they: 1) paying $40 to park? 2)$10 for bologna sandwich at the meeting location? I know these things happened: churches in the vicinity of the annual meeting helped facilitate places to stay: church members opened homes,… Read more »
Well put, Doug. I recall seeing a lot of people at the big meetings of the CR who brought their own food, had a picnic in the convention hall. The ideas about sharing rides and things looks workable to me.
I’m just thinking about some of the websites I’ve seen spring up like “TakeThemaMeal” and some others, where you can organize doing things like providing food for families–think what Sunday School classes used to do in church, this lets your Sunday School class sign up to feed the new family through the Interwebz–we should be able to construct something of that nature within the SBC.
Lower the hill to climb to participate. Actually try to help enable, and if folks still cannot (versus WILL not) participate, then maybe there’s something else to talk about.
Would a partial system of online voting be viable. I mean if the entire SBC network of members were able to have real, repeat real, input into issues to be voted on by the convention attendees at least that would be some progress. Keep in simple , have online voting done at church site with the results sent in by each church. The voting would be on what the agenda would be as far as issues the lay members of the SBC are concerned with such as 1. Here is one example. Up and down vote on complete financial disclosure… Read more »
I suspect that people who are paid to attend the convention and who also have their travel expenses reimbursed are disproportionately more likely to favor the current system.