After greater than two years of uncertainty and at times, chaos, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee has a latest president.
At a special meeting in Dallas, members of the committee—which oversees the work of the 13 million-member denomination in between its annual meetings—unanimously elected Jeff Iorg as its latest president and CEO. The meeting was held in executive session, and Iorg’s election was announced within the early afternoon on Thursday.
Iorg, longtime president of Gateway Seminary, a Southern Baptist school in Ontario, California, is well respected in Southern Baptist circles for his regular and low-key approach to leadership. In a press conference following his election, Iorg said he would deal with earning trust in his latest role.
“Organizational trust is earned by two things: sacrificial service and demonstrated competence,” said Iorg, 65, who will begin his latest role in May, after Gateway’s school yr ends. “You don’t gain trust by asking people to trust you. You gain trust by doing the best thing, serving sacrificially and demonstrating competence. And people trust organizations that do this.”
Iorg is the Executive Committee’s first everlasting leader since 2021 and its third since 2018. His predecessor, Ronnie Floyd, resigned in October 2021 after a two-year tenure overshadowed by the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis. Floyd’s predecessor, Frank Page, resigned in 2018 for misconduct.
Finding a latest leader for the committee was an arduous process.
Committee members had hoped to approve a distinct candidate—Georgia Baptist leader Thomas Hammond—in February, but Hammond withdrew on the last moment. In May of 2023, the committee voted down Texas pastor Jared Wellman, a former Executive Committee trustee, as a candidate for the highest job. Some trustees had been concerned that Wellman had served as chair of the Executive Committee and was on the search committee before becoming a candidate.
Willie McLaurin, an interim leader for the committee, had been considered for the everlasting job but resigned last fall after the search committee discovered he had falsified his resume, claiming degrees he didn’t earn.
Jonathan Howe, who has served as interim Executive Committee leader, will remain in that role until May, when Iorg begins serving as president.
Louisiana pastor Philip Robertson, who chairs the Executive Committee, called the search process “an extended journey” when Iorg was announced as a candidate. Iorg’s election, he said, marked a “latest day” for the committee.
“The way Southern Baptists have united around this nomination is something we haven’t seen in an extended time,” he told Baptist Press, an official SBC publication. “I’m extremely grateful to God for that.”
Iorg’s colleagues have applauded his move to the Executive Committee.
“He is strictly what we want as president of the Executive Committee at this historic moment,” Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press in February.
Unlike other Southern Baptist seminary leaders, equivalent to Mohler, Iorg has operated largely out of the limelight during his 20 years at Gateway Seminary.“Jeff has managed to do an incredible job at Gateway Seminary while concurrently avoiding the internecine fighting of the SBC,” said Ed Stetzer, dean of the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and a former Southern Baptist leader. “That probably makes him one in all the few candidates who can unite all sides in 2024.”
Gateway has experienced slow but regular growth under his leadership. When he was named president of the seminary in 2004, the college had 696 total students and the equivalent of 403 full-time students, in response to data from the Association of Theological Schools. In the autumn of 2023, essentially the most recent semester for which data is accessible, the college had 1,499 total students—the equivalent of 783 full-time enrollees.
Iorg also oversaw a move from San Francisco, where the college had been often known as Golden Gate Seminary, to Ontario, California, in 2016. According to Baptist Press, Iorg had asked the college’s trustees to start trying to find his successor as president last fall.
The newly elected president said he planned to fly to Nashville on Thursday to start trying to find a spot to live. He also said he and his wife plan to purchase a house in Portland, Oregon, where his wife’s parents live, and that he would likely spend much of his time as Executive Committee president on the road fairly than in an office.
In his latest role, Iorg will lead a committee facing fiscal and legal challenges. In recent years, the committee’s legal costs have skyrocketed in response to the denomination’s abuse crisis. At their last meeting, the Executive Committee approved a budget that included drawing on more reserves to make up a deficit.
The committee can even play a job in deciding the fate of a series of abuse reforms approved by local church representatives on the denomination’s annual meeting. Currently, there is no such thing as a longterm plan to fund those reforms, which have stalled.
Giving to the SBC’s Cooperative Program, which funds international and national ministries, is down, and trust within the denomination’s leadership has been frayed in recent times.
Iorg said that as a seminary president, he has long benefited from the Cooperative Program and plans to enthusiastically market it.
A former pastor and state convention leader, Iorg is the writer of eight books and holds degrees from Hardin-Simmons University, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Ann, have three children and five grandchildren.
