NC Pastor Clint Pressley Elected SBC President
Pressley, a North Carolina megachurch pastor, was elected after a pair of runoffs.
INDIANAPOLIS (RNS) — Clint Pressley, a North Carolina megachurch pastor known for a conservative but even-keel approach to leadership and who does not wear jeans in the pulpit, was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Pastor Clint Pressley speaks alongside other SBC presidential candidates, June 10, 2024, in Indianapolis. (RNS Photo/Adelle M. Banks)
After a pair of runoff elections, Pressley received 56% of the 7,562 votes cast during a Wednesday (June 12) morning session of the SBC annual meeting at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. Tennessee pastor Dan Spencer, who had qualified for the final runoff with Pressley, received 43.7% of the votes.
Pressley, who has led Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte for the past 14 years, prefers a suit and tie and a more traditional approach in worship, and he has indicated that his more formal style will translate into his leadership. “It seems like the kind of rhetoric and the temperature is really high and I’d like to see it come down a good bit,” Pressley told Religion News Service earlier this year.
He repeated that message at a forum hosted by the National African American Fellowship of the SBC earlier this week, saying he hoped Southern Baptists, known for evangelism and missions, would “get our attention focused back on what we do.”
“We got to quit arguing and start going back to work,” he said.
Pressley was one of six candidates seeking the SBC presidency, an influential volunteer role in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Three of the candidates — North Carolina pastor Bruce Frank, Oklahoma pastor Mike Keahbone and Tennessee pastor Jared Moore — were eliminated after the first round of votes. David Allen, a longtime seminary pastor, missed the cutoff during a first runoff.
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The field of six candidates was the largest since 2008. This year’s race was the first to be undecided after one runoff since 2016. That year, a runoff between North Carolina megachurch pastor J.D. Greear and Tennessee megachurch pastor Steve Gaines ended in a tie. Greear dropped out of the race but was elected president two years later.
Pressley supported the so-called Law Amendment, a measure that would have barred churches with women pastors. That measure failed to reach the required two-thirds vote and was not passed. He also has been generally supportive of abuse reforms but did have questions about a proposed database of abusers, which was approved for the third year in a row by messengers on Monday.
He supports more training and awareness for churches in dealing with abuse. At an SBC presidential forum, Pressley said that in the past, his church would not have been prepared to deal with abuse. But the recent reforms, he said, caused his church to take the issue seriously and enact policies and training to deal with abuse.
That training meant the Hickory Grove leaders knew what to do when a church volunteer was recently accused of abusing a family member. Had the SBC not started dealing with abuse in recent years, he said, “We would not have known what to do.”
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