Southern Baptist Presidential Hopeful, Willy Rice, Argues Location Matters

Rice opened with a real estate analogy, “location, location, location,” and applied it directly to SBC polity. He highlighted the Executive Committee’s recently announced schedule: after Orlando in 2026, the convention returns to the Southeast only once in the next decade (New Orleans in 2034). Texas gets two meetings (San Antonio and Houston), but the rest include Indianapolis (twice), St. Louis, and Anaheim, California (twice in a five-year span). In short, seven of the next ten years would place the meeting outside the geographic heartland of most SBC churches.

The Annual Meeting is intended to be a business meeting, but the theme park locations like with Anaheim and Orlando give way to the idea that many messengers sign in and promptly go on vacation, as the vote totals never match up. Moreover, the convention has devolved into a sales pitch for corrupted organizations like the North American Mission Board and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

With roughly 47,000 cooperating churches, the SBC remains overwhelmingly concentrated in the South and border states. Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee lead in membership. It’s central location, give or take would be between Nashville, TN and Birmingham, AL.

Willy Rice is running for president and has the luxury of being a local candidate in Orlando. Nevertheless, the Southern Baptist Convention’s lack of remote voting and opting for a distant meeting, with hopes of meeting in Hawaii, has priced out many churches from attending and even more from caring.