Top Southern Baptist Convention official resigns amid infighting over handling of sexual abuse cases
A top Southern Baptist leader announced his resignation on Thursday following weeks of internal turmoil over how the denomination should handle investigations into sexual abuse cases.
Ronnie Floyd made the announcement in a letter sent to members of the committee saying that he could no longer serve in the role. His last day will be Oct. 31.
Floyd is the president and CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, which acts on behalf of the convention when the SBC isn’t in session during its two-day annual meeting.
Earlier this month, members of the Nashville-based committee agreed to waive attorney-client privilege as part of investigations on sexual abuse cases over the past two decades.
Floyd had sided with legal counsel, who advised against it.
The nation’s largest protestant denomination has been rocked by reports of hundreds of sexual abuse cases, which were uncovered in 2019 by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News.
“Due to my personal integrity and the leadership responsibility entrusted to me, I will not and cannot any longer fulfill the duties placed upon me as the leader of the executive, fiscal, and fiduciary entity of the SBC,” Floyd wrote in his letter Thursday.
“In the midst of deep disappointment and discouragement, we have to make this decision by our own choice and do so willingly, because there is no other decision for me to make,” he added.
Before becoming the highest-ranking official of the SBC executive committee, Floyd spent more than three decades as the pastor of Cross Church, a megachurch in Arkansas.
He served as president of the convention from 2014 to 2016. In 2019 he succeeded Frank Page as the committee’s president.
Page, who’s now the main pastor at the Pebble Creek Baptist Church in South Carolina, resigned from his post in 2018 over a “morally inappropriate relationship.”
