Sunday, August 30, 2026
SBC President Willy Rice named a commission to settle how the ban on women pastors will actually be applied — and the G3 network dissolved after its president admitted to anonymously mailing the plagiarism dossier against Tom Buck that this digest covered last week. One story is about drawing a boundary; the other is about what happens when men police a boundary in the dark.
Annual meeting, entities, ERLC, resolutions, denominational politics.
Rice announces a Commission on Women Serving in Pastoral Ministry. The new SBC president has formed a commission “to help Southern Baptists achieve greater clarity and consensus” on the office of pastor and women in ministry — in practice, to work out how the Truth and Unity Amendment will be applied and enforced. A preliminary report goes to the Executive Committee in February; a final report is due no later than six weeks before the Indianapolis annual meeting, June 13–16. Some messengers want assurance the convention will not go beyond the BF&M’s plain words; others want assurance the boundary will actually be enforced. The commission exists because both groups voted for the same amendment meaning different things — watch who gets appointed. Baptist Press ChurchLeaders
Blackwell installed as Lifeway’s 11th president. Ryan Blackwell, elected in April from Cross Church in Springdale, Ark., was formally installed Monday evening, Aug. 24, at Lifeway’s trustee meeting, pledging to “come alongside” churches rather than merely sell to them. Lifeway’s curriculum decisions quietly shape the theology of thousands of small-church Sunday schools; his tenure is worth watching for that reason alone. Baptist Press
NAMB hosts its largest-ever Replant Summit. Nearly 400 pastors and leaders from 181 churches in 24 states gathered in Alpharetta Aug. 25–26 for an event built around renewing dying churches, with corporate prayer at its center. The replanting movement is one of the healthier instincts in SBC life right now: it treats a declining congregation as something to be shepherded back to life rather than harvested for its building. Baptist Press
Reformed Baptist, Presbyterian (PCA/OPC), confessional churches and networks.
Grace Community Church calls Nathan Busenitz to succeed John MacArthur. The elders voted unanimously Aug. 20 and told the congregation Sunday: Busenitz, 48 — raised at GCC, MacArthur’s longtime personal assistant, now executive vice president of The Master’s Seminary and professor of church history — becomes senior pastor a little over a year after MacArthur’s death. Succession after a 55-year pulpit is among the hardest transitions a church can attempt; choosing a churchman formed inside the congregation rather than a name hired from outside is the traditional Reformed answer, and now we watch whether it holds. ChurchLeaders The Roys Report
CRCNA Synod tells Calvin University faculty to conform to the confessions. A Heidelblog analysis this month reviews Synod 2026’s instruction that Calvin University faculty be brought into conformity with the church’s creeds and confessions, with a report back due in 2028 — and notes a gay pride flag displayed on a faculty office door during synod, later removed. The CRC’s multi-year turn back toward confessional discipline is one of the more remarkable denominational reversals in North America, and the university is where it will be tested. Heidelblog
Founders keeps working the 1689 — and takes up IVF. The Sword & the Trowel’s walk through the confession continued from adoption into fresh territory this week, while a new episode asked directly, “Should Christians Use IVF?” — a question more of our members are living inside than most elder boards realize. Also worth passing along: Tyler Ivey’s essay on Asahel Nettleton, on the cost of the right man saying too little. Announcements and resources rather than news, but usable ones. Founders: IVF Founders: Nettleton
Major debates, books, controversies, council and committee statements.
Pastors trust AI least where Scripture is contested. Barna’s latest State of the Church release (with Gloo) finds Protestant pastors register their deepest distrust of AI when it comes to interpreting “contested” Scriptures — yet few would abandon the technology altogether, and most already use it somewhere in their workflow. The finding worth discussing with your elders is the line pastors are implicitly drawing: administration yes, interpretation no. That line will not hold on its own; it has to be articulated and taught, because your members are already asking chatbots their theology questions. Baptist Press
Surrogacy’s “ethical quagmire,” from the new ERLC president. Responding to a high-profile custody battle over a surrogate-born child, SBC ethics head Evan Lenow argued the case exposes what surrogacy contracts always contained: a child treated as the deliverable in a commercial agreement. Reformed ethics has been slow to catechize congregations on third-party reproduction; the cases are arriving faster than the teaching. Baptist Press
Religious liberty, ethics, politics affecting the church, cultural engagement.
Forty-seven killed as a gang overruns a Haitian church compound. Members of Viv Ansanm — designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. last year — attacked Kenscoff commune overnight Aug. 23–24, killing at least 47 people including five children and kidnapping more than 50. Twenty-two of the dead were executed inside the compound of the Ark of the New Testament evangelical church, where families displaced from Port-au-Prince had taken shelter. The persecuted church is not an abstraction this week; it has an address. Pray for Haiti’s believers by name from the pulpit. NPR International Christian Concern
Vance’s faith memoir and America’s “invigorated public Christianity.” Baptist Press reads the vice president’s new memoir of his conversion as evidence of a more assertive public Christianity in American life. Elders should hold two things at once: gratitude when public figures profess Christ, and clear-eyed caution about a Christianity that gains cultural altitude by proximity to power. The memoir is a conversation opener with congregants either encouraged or unsettled by it — likely both are in your pews. Baptist Press
Notable controversy and media shake-ups — reported with discernment, not appetite.
The Tom Buck accusation came from inside G3 — and G3’s church network is gone. A week after this digest noted the anonymous plagiarism dossier against Tom Buck, its authors identified themselves: G3 president Scott Aniol and three fellow Pray’s Mill Baptist Church pastors, who confessed they “sinned against God and against Tom Buck,” resigned their pastorates, and were forgiven by their congregation; G3 announced the immediate dissolution of its church network. Last week’s caution — that the response to evidence had become a question about who surfaced it — turned out to be the story itself. What remains commendable: the confession was specific, public, and costly, which is what repentance looks like when it is real. ChurchLeaders Plagiarism Today
Wheaton’s student newspaper covers the cover-up — partially. The Wheaton Record published its first substantial account of the college’s decades-long concealment of former student-ministries director Dennis Massaro, a marked improvement on its 1998 coverage. Julie Roys’s Aug. 26 response argues the account still omits key facts, including an administrator’s role in bringing Massaro back in 2018. Her piece is advocacy and reads like it; the underlying documented history is why it belongs here. The Roys Report
A former N.C. pastor is charged with embezzling $58K. Sixteen felony counts allege the misappropriation of nearly $58,000 from a Whiteville, N.C., Baptist church. Second week running with a church embezzlement story in this section, and the lesson has not changed: separation of financial duties is not distrust of your pastor, it is protection of him. Baptist Press
A pastoral takeaway for your leadership team this week.
The G3 story deserves ten minutes at your next elders’ meeting, because every part of it could happen to a board like yours. Four pastors believed something true enough to act on — and acted anonymously, outside their own church’s authority, inside another church’s discipline. When it unraveled, they did the rare thing: named their sin specifically, resigned, and submitted to a congregation that then forgave them. Notice what made the difference between the sin and the repentance. It was not conviction; they had conviction all along. It was daylight. Anonymous zeal let them do in the dark what they would never have defended in the light, and open confession restored what the dossier destroyed. Set beside it the Rice commission, which exists because Southern Baptists keep trying to resolve by amendment what can only be resolved by trust. Both stories ask the same question of your board: is there anything your elders are currently doing, saying, or forwarding about another church, another pastor, or one another that you would not sign your names to? “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (Eph. 4:25). A charge worth making is worth making with your name on it, to the man’s face, in the order Christ gave (Matt. 18:15) — and a board that practices that rule when it is costly will rarely need to practice public repentance.
State of the Church Today · Compiled August 30, 2026. Reply with corrections or tips. Forward to a fellow elder.