--- type: newsletter-issue title: State of the Church Today — Issue 12 issue: 12 date: 2026-08-09 audience: Pastors & Elders status: draft created: 2026-08-09T07:00 updated: 2026-08-09T07:05 --- # State of the Church Today *A weekly digest of Southern Baptist, Reformed, and broader theological news — curated for pastors and elders.* **Issue 12 · Sunday, August 9, 2026** > A proposed federal class action out of Pawleys Island named the Southern Baptist Convention itself this week — testing whether "autonomous local church" holds as a legal shield, and putting every elder board's child-protection file back on the table. --- ## ⛪ SBC & Convention Watch *Annual meeting, entities, ERLC, resolutions, denominational politics.* **The SBC is now a named defendant over a South Carolina church's sex offender.** An Aug. 4 filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina names the SBC and its Executive Committee alongside Pawleys Island Community Church, Pawleys Island Christian Academy, former senior pastor Donald "Don" Williams, his wife Virginia "Ginny" Williams, former academy director Jennifer "Niki" Howard, unnamed elders, and Warren Spencer Perry — the registered sex offender the Georgetown County Sheriff's Office says was volunteering on a campus with an elementary school, preschool, and nursery. The complaint concedes the church is "an independent, self-governing, elder-led congregation not subject to the control of a parent denomination," then argues the SBC is liable anyway because the church "participated in and benefited from" Baptist ministries, resources, and cooperative programs. Jeff Iorg said only that the EC does not comment on ongoing litigation. Watch this one closely: the plaintiffs are attempting exactly the theory Southern Baptists have long insisted cannot work, and the filing does *not* allege the named child was abused — the claimed injury is exposure and the uncertainty that follows. — [Baptist Press](https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/southern-baptist-convention-named-in-lawsuit-tied-to-pawleys-island-church-investigation/) · [The Alabama Baptist](https://thealabamabaptist.org/sbc-named-in-lawsuit-tied-to-pawleys-island-church-investigation/) · [Live 5 News](https://www.live5news.com/2026/08/06/southern-baptist-convention-named-federal-lawsuit-over-pawleys-island-area-church-case/) **"I've never seen anything like this": Spokane, and a five-year cleanup.** Southern Baptist Disaster Relief and Northwest churches are working amid historic wildfires across Oregon, Washington, and into Idaho. More than 65,000 people have been displaced; two deaths are blamed on the fires; at least one church has burned; and of Oregon's two million acres lost this year, 1.81 million are from the 32 fires still burning. Valleypoint Church is assembling hygiene kits, The Rock Church is running groceries, and Grace Christian Fellowship took in 30 displaced memory-care residents. State director Gary Floyd expects cleanup to take up to five years and says the two great needs are prayer and money — not teams, yet. Local pastors are praying together daily at 10:02 a.m. — [Baptist Press](https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/northwest-wildfires-continue-generating-need-response/) **Lifeway Research: small groups still carry discipleship.** New Lifeway data reported this week finds regular small-group participants score meaningfully higher on discipleship maturity measures than non-participants — while still showing predictable soft spots. Nothing here overturns what you already believe about the ordinary means, but it's a useful number to put in front of a leadership team weighing whether to keep investing in community groups. — [Lifeway Research via The Roys Report](https://roysreport.com/study-small-group-participation-linked-to-higher-discipleship-scores/) **GuideStone warns of the "Phantom Hacker" scam.** GuideStone issued a member alert about a multi-stage fraud in which callers pose as tech support, then as bank or government officials, to persuade victims to move retirement savings into a "safe" account. Worth reading and passing to your senior members — this one specifically targets people with retirement balances, which describes a good share of most congregations. — [Baptist Press](https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/guidestone-warns-members-about-growing-phantom-hacker-scam/) --- ## 📖 Reformed & Confessional *Reformed Baptist, Presbyterian (PCA/OPC), confessional churches and networks.* **R. Scott Clark answers "Redeemed Zoomer" on schism and fidelity.** Clark's Superfriends Saturday episode this week takes up the argument, popular with a young online audience, that faithful Reformed Christians should stay inside mainline denominations and reform them from within rather than leave. His reply works the older question underneath it: when does departure become obedience rather than schism? If you have twenty-somethings in your congregation catechized more by YouTube than by your pulpit, this is the conversation they are already having. — [Heidelblog](https://heidelblog.net/2026/08/heidelcast-superfriends-saturday-on-schism-fidelity-a-reply-to-redeemed-zoomer/) **A confessional sacramentology series worth an elders' meeting.** Clark also opened a multi-part treatment of whether the Westminster Confession teaches baptismal regeneration — a question that comes up in every congregation that receives members from Anglican, Lutheran, or Federal Vision-adjacent backgrounds. Reformed Baptists will read it from the other side of the font, but the confessional grammar it recovers about sign and thing signified is the same grammar the 1689 uses. — [Heidelblog](https://heidelblog.net/2026/08/does-the-westminster-confession-teach-baptismal-regeneration-part-1/) **Founders Seminary heads into convocation with a new Trinity volume on the table.** Founders Seminary's convocation is set for Aug. 15, opening its second academic year and its first full one with Tom Ascol as president, and Founders Press has released *From Nicea to Now*, an essay collection defending classical Trinitarianism and Christology from a confessional Baptist stance, with contributions including Founders Seminary systematic theology professor Peter Sammons. For a Reformed Baptist elder, this is the institutional shape of the retrieval movement: the doctrine of God is no longer a specialist's topic but the entry-level curriculum. — [Founders Seminary](https://www.foundersseminary.org/announcement/) · [Founders Press](https://founderspress.org/products/from-nicea-to-now) **Grimké's church planting and revitalization residency runs this fall.** The seminary's Carey Center track — which trains and assesses prospective planters and revitalizers rather than simply lecturing them — is scheduled for the fall term, alongside its sister work through Grimké Europe out of Liverpool. If your church has a man you suspect is called to plant or to take on a dying congregation, this is the season to point him at an assessment process rather than a job board. — [Grimké Seminary](https://grimkeseminary.org/) · [Carey Center](https://grimkeeurope.org/carey/carey-center-courses/) --- ## 🕊️ Theology & Doctrine *Major debates, books, controversies, council and committee statements.* **Bethel pauses sales of The Passion Translation.** On Aug. 4, Bethel Church — long the most prominent institutional backer of Brian Simmons's TPT — announced it is pausing all sales of the paraphrase in its bookstore pending "additional clarity" on allegations surrounding Simmons, with outside reviews reportedly underway. The pause follows Life Bible, an app used by an estimated 1.5 million readers, dropping the translation. The pastoral point is not that critics were vindicated but that translation philosophy is a shepherding matter: when a text adds words the manuscripts don't have, the people who read it devotionally are the last to know. Worth asking what's actually in the hands of your women's Bible study. — [The Christian Post](https://www.christianpost.com/news/bethel-pausing-sale-of-the-passion-translation-amid-backlash.html) · [The Roys Report](https://roysreport.com/bethel-church-stops-selling-controversial-passion-bible-for-now/) **The Reformed Baptist argument over Thomas Aquinas keeps going — politely.** Founders published the third installment of Jacob Trotter's "A Friendly Response to Dr. Wright," working through Thomas, the Reformed tradition, and theology proper. This is the retrieval debate at its most useful: whether confessional Baptists can draw on medieval scholastic categories for divine simplicity and impassibility without importing Rome. Note the tone as much as the content — a model of how doctrinal disagreement between brothers should be conducted in public. — [Founders Ministries](https://founders.org/articles/a-friendly-response-to-dr-wright-part-3-thomas-the-reformed-and-theology-proper/) **Barna: Christian adoption of AI is climbing.** New Barna research reported this week finds a rising share of Christians using generative AI tools, including for spiritual and devotional purposes. Read alongside last week's refusal manifestos, the picture is clear enough: your members are not waiting for the church to form a position. Better to teach discernment now than to litigate it later. — [Baptist Press](https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/barna-research-suggests-more-christians-are-adopting-ai/) --- ## 🏛️ Culture & Church-State *Religious liberty, ethics, politics affecting the church, cultural engagement.* **Kurdish pastor freed from a Syrian prison.** Pastor Nihad Hassan is safe in Beirut after being released from Syrian custody, Baptist Press reported Aug. 7. A concrete answer to prayers many congregations have offered without knowing the name — and a reminder to keep persecuted-church intercession specific rather than generic in your Sunday prayers. — [Baptist Press](https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/kurdish-pastor-released-from-syrian-prison-safe-in-beirut/) **"We never imagined": a Chinese pastor's wife jailed, two toddlers watching.** The Roys Report tells the story of a house-church family separated when Chinese police arrested a pastor's wife in front of their small children while he was 600 miles away on a ministry trip. Report it to your congregation not as geopolitics but as what it is: a family in the same body as yours, paying a cost your members are not asked to pay. — [The Roys Report](https://roysreport.com/pastor-and-father-cut-off-from-family-as-wife-jailed-in-china/) **A sitting megachurch pastor wins a Senate primary.** Adam Hamilton, pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, won a Democratic Senate primary this week. Whatever one makes of his theology or his politics, the mechanics are the story worth watching: a pastor moving from pulpit to partisan ballot raises the questions of tax exemption, congregational division, and pastoral authority that most elder boards would rather never face — and a live test case is now running in public. — [The Roys Report / RNS](https://roysreport.com/adam-hamilton-megachurch-pastor-wins-dem-senate-primary/) --- ## 🔥 Also Worth Noting *Notable controversy and media shake-ups — reported with discernment, not appetite.* **Construction workers suing Grace Community Church say the hypocrisy shook their faith.** Men who worked on construction at John MacArthur's church and are now plaintiffs in an asbestos-exposure suit told The Roys Report that what has damaged them most is the gap between the preaching they sat under and the treatment they say they received. Litigation will sort the facts; the pastoral observation stands regardless — the people most wounded by an institution's failures are often the ones who believed its sermons. — [The Roys Report](https://roysreport.com/construction-workers-suing-john-macarthurs-grace-community-church-say-leaders-hypocrisy-has-rocked-their-faith/) **Liberty's compensation numbers, in daylight.** Newly reported filings show Liberty University more than doubled Jonathan Falwell's compensation as trustee and chancellor between fiscal 2023 and 2025 — a 171% increase — while former president Jerry Prevo's pay fell. No allegation of wrongdoing attaches to the disclosure. It is simply a reminder that in Christian institutions, compensation decisions eventually become public documents, and elders should set them as though that day were today. — [The Roys Report](https://roysreport.com/as-liberty-u-raised-jonathan-falwells-salary-171-jerry-prevos-pay-fell/) --- ## 🧭 For the Elder's Desk *A pastoral takeaway for your leadership team this week.* > The Pawleys Island filing will be argued on legal grounds — cooperation, control, agency, whether a convention can be liable for a church it does not govern. Southern Baptists have good reasons to defend local autonomy, and the theory in this complaint may well fail. But notice what the plaintiffs are actually claiming injured them: not proven abuse, but the discovery that a place they were told was safe had a registered offender walking its halls, and the permanent uncertainty of never knowing what their child saw. That is a claim about trust, and no polity argument answers it. Peter charges elders to shepherd "the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight" (1 Pet. 5:2) — *oversight*, the word for actually looking. The question this week is not whether your church could be sued. It is narrower and harder: *When did an elder last physically walk the nursery, the children's wing, and the youth space during a service — not to check a policy binder, but to see with his own eyes who is with the children and whether anyone is ever alone with one?* If no one can name the last time, that is this week's business, and it should not wait for a called meeting. --- *State of the Church Today · Compiled August 9, 2026. Reply with corrections or tips. Forward to a fellow elder.*