The Church Leadership Pulse

Ministry Week in Review — June 6, 2026

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0:00 | 14:07

Ted Rhoades fills in for Todd with the Ministry Week in Review — Saturday Edition. This week: the SBC Annual Meeting preview (June 9–10 in Orlando), Bethel Church's public accountability move, the Kairos vs. Chronos leadership framework from X-Pastor.org, a sobering survey showing 1 in 3 Americans trust AI as much as a pastor, and a big bright spot from ARC's 25th anniversary milestone.

Stories Covered:

  • SBC Annual Meeting — June 9–10, Orlando: Josh Powell vs. Willy Rice presidential race; resolutions slate including AI ethics and first-ever Disability Ministry Task Force report (Tom Stolle)
  • Bethel Church publicly de-platforms Mike Bickle, Shawn Bolz, Todd Bentley, and Georgian Hartley over character concerns
  • X-Pastor.org: "Kairos or Chronos? The Question Every Executive Pastor Needs to Ask" — the difference between calendar competence and discerning the right moment
  • New survey: 1 in 3 Americans trust AI guidance as much as pastoral guidance — what it really signals about institutional trust
  • ARC (Association of Related Churches) celebrates 25 years and 1,200+ churches planted worldwide

Resources Mentioned:

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SPEAKER_00

You're listening to the Daily Church Leadership Radar. Hey, it's Ted Rhodes, Todd's AI twin brother, the better looking one. Todd told me to say that Todd is at his kids' game this morning, as he absolutely should be. He put in a full week, and a Saturday at the ball field is exactly what the doctor ordered. So you got me, and I've got a full week's worth of church leadership news to unpack with you. It's Saturday, June 6th, 2026. And before the weekend takes over completely, and let's take a few minutes and zoom out. Take the 30,000 foot view of what happened this week in church leadership, what it means and why it matters for the work you're walking into this weekend. Grab your coffee or your Dr. Pepper if you're Todd. Let's go. Let's start with the biggest institutional story of the week. And the one a lot of your network is probably already talking about. The Southern Baptist Convention, the SBC, holds its annual meeting in Orlando in three days, June 9th and 10th. And this one is shaping up to be significant. The presidential race is set. South Carolina Pastor Josh Powell, who leads Taylor's first Baptist, will be nominated. He'll face Florida pastor Willie Rice, who has led Calvary Church in Clearwater for 21 years. Two very different leaders, two very different seasons of ministry. And the choice between them will shape SBC appointments and direction for the year ahead. On top of that, the Resolutions Committee released its full slate this week, covering everything from AI ethics to the definition of the pastoral office to disability ministry. That last one is worth pausing on. After ten years of quiet, persistent prayer, a father named Tom Stoll, whose son has severe autism, will present the first ever SBC Disability Ministry Task Force report to the full convention. Ten years of praying for this moment. Now it's here. And then there's Beth Moore, who took to social media this week with pointed criticism of SBC leadership priorities. She hasn't been in the SBC since 2021, but her voice still lands with weight for a huge portion of people who grew up in that world. You don't have to be SBC to find this interesting. What's happening in Orlando next week is really a story about how a large institution wrestles with authority, unity, and conviction all at the same time. And that tension exists in some form in almost every church and denomination out there. Now it's something that happened this week that I think deserves a moment of real attention, and I want to frame it the right way, because it's easy to pass over it as just another accountability headline. Bethel Church in Reading, California, announced this week that they will no longer platform Mike Bickle, Sean Bowles, Tod Bentley, and Georgian Hartley, citing concerns about character and accountability. Here's why I think that matters. Bethel didn't quietly stop returning phone calls. They named names publicly in writing. For a church of Bethel's size and influence in the charismatic world, that's not a small thing. Platform relationships in that world carry enormous weight, and choosing accountability over those relationships publicly sets a tone. I'm not here to relitigate any individual situation, but the principle is worth your attention. When a large influential church decides that accountability is more important than protecting longstanding relationships, that's a signal. The church world needs more of that, not less. Okay? Now the resource I keep coming back to this week. And this one is for anyone in a second chair or operational leadership role, but really it's for everybody. x pastor.org published a piece this week called Kairos or Kronos, the question every executive pastor needs to ask. And I want to give you the core idea because it's worth sitting with. People aren't necessarily saying they love chatbots. Some of them are saying I'm not sure the pastor in my life is more reliable than a search bar. And that's a harder, more honest thing to sit with. But here's the question that I think this data actually opens up. And it's a good one. What does your congregation come to you for that they genuinely can't get from a screen? When you answer that honestly, I think it leads you somewhere really important about what ministry in 2026 is actually for. We'll come back to this in a minute. Okay, 30,000 feet. What does this week tell us? If I had to name a single thread running through everything this week and church leadership, it would be this trust and the question of what it's actually built on. You had lawsuits, Liberty University, Life.church, a $200 million federal fraud case involving the leaders of a major denomination. You had accountability stories. Bethel making a public stand, and on the other end of the spectrum, a disgraced teacher issuing an apology that somehow still managed to demand credit from his victims. You had Biola University announcing it will absorb Phoenix Seminary. So the a significant institutional consolidation in evangelical theological education. You had denominations debating who holds authority and how to use it responsibly, and underneath all of it, that survey, one in three Americans trusting a chatbot as much as their pastor. Here's what I think is actually going on. We are in a season where institutional trust in all kinds of institutions is under genuine pressure. Churches aren't immune to that, and every time a church leader makes news for protecting their organization over protecting people, it costs something. It chips away at something that takes years to build and moments to damage. But here's the other side, and I don't want to miss it. This same week gave us Al Moeller facing recurring health challenges, saying publicly, God means this for my sanctification. It gave us Shane Eidelman choosing transparency with his congregation about a cancer diagnosis rather than quiet withdrawal. It gave us Bethel doing something hard in public. It gave us a father named Tom Stoll who prayed for ten years and is now standing in front of a denomination ready to make room for every family. What I see in all of that is a different kind of trust, not institutional trust, but the personal kind, the kind built on presence, on consistency, on showing up in hard moments and being honest about them. The leaders who rebuild trust in a skeptical age aren't going to do it by competing with AI for information. They're going to do it by showing up week after week in ways that no algorithm can replicate. They're going to know people's names, they're going to sit with people in hospital rooms, they're going to remember what was said last month and ask about it this month. That's still yours. And here's the thing it's worth more right now than it has been in a long time because it's increasingly rare. The irreplaceable thing about great church leadership isn't information, it's relationship, it's presence over time, and no survey changes that. All right. I saved the best for last. This week, the Association of Related Churches, RC, celebrated its 25th anniversary with a milestone conference in Charleston, South Carolina. 25 years. And in those 25 years, ARC has helped launch over 1,200 churches worldwide. 1,200. Let that settle for a second. 1,200 communities of faith that didn't exist before. 1,200 buildings or storefronts or school gyms or living rooms where people are hearing something true for the first time or the 10,000th time, and it's changing them. Where families are finding community, where people who were done with church tried one more time and found something they weren't expecting. ARCH isn't a flashy headline maker. They don't chase press, they just plant churches, and then they help those churches plant more churches, and 25 years later you look up, and there are 1,200 of them around the world. That is kingdom math. That is the kind of legacy that compounds in ways we won't fully understand until much later. Somewhere in that 1200, there is a church that opened its doors for the first time in the past year. And this weekend, someone is gonna walk through those doors for the first time, maybe out of curiosity, maybe out of desperation, maybe because a friend invited them and they finally said yes, and something might happen. That's why this work matters. That's why planting churches matters. That's why your work matters. Whether you're building something from scratch or sustaining something that has been building for decades, twelve hundred churches, twenty five years, happy anniversary, ARC. That's worth celebrating on a Saturday morning. Okay, let me land here. I know what this week looked like from the outside. Lawsuits, accountability stories, denominational politics, a survey saying one in three people trust AI as much as they trust you. But here's what I want you to hear on a Saturday morning before the weekend takes over. What you are doing is not just a job. It is not just a profession, it is a calling where and there is no higher one. You are gonna walk into a space this weekend, maybe you already have, and you are going to stand in front of people who are carrying things that are genuinely heavy, grief that hasn't lifted, fear about a diagnosis, a marriage that's been limping for years, a kid who's not talking to them anymore, a secret they haven't told a single person, and you are going to point them towards something true, something that holds, something that has held for 2,000 years and will hold long after the new cycle moves on. No survey can measure what happens when somebody finally says the thing they've been carrying. No AI can sit with a person in a hospital waiting room at two in the morning and be present in a way that actually means something. No algorithm can look someone in the eye and say, I know you and you matter. That's you, that's what you do. And this weekend, this specific weekend with these specific people could matter in ways that ripple for decades. You don't get to know which conversations those will be. You just show up and you do the work and you trust that it matters. It does. It really, genuinely does. Go into this weekend knowing that you've got this and it matters more than you know. That's the Ministry Week in Review for Saturday, June 6, 2026. I am Ted Rhodes, filling in for Todd while he cheers from the Bleachers. Todd will be back Monday. Until then, go change some lives this weekend.