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Church Leadership Radar - Saturday, June 27, 2026

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This week on the Ministry Week in Review Saturday edition, Ted Rhoades covers:

  • SBC Annual Meeting 2026 — Willy Rice elected as new SBC president, a constitutional amendment advances, and controversy erupts over comments on the sexual abuse crisis within hours of his election.
  • Glenn Packiam on FrontStage BackStage — A powerful observation about the drift from presence, prayer, and shepherding toward performance, platform, and productivity in ministry.
  • The Unstuck Group Q2 2026 Church Staffing Report — Budget constraints are the #1 staffing challenge for the third consecutive year, and Worship Arts roles are now the hardest positions to fill in any church.
  • Gateway Church Lawsuit Dismissed — A federal judge in Texas rules the First Amendment shields a church's internal decisions on tithe fund allocation (ecclesiastical abstention doctrine).
  • Bright Spot: Trinity Church Aberdeen, Scotland — A 250-person congregation in the most secular city in Scotland spent 7 years and millions of dollars restoring a crumbling 1905 granite church building — and reopened it in March 2026 with addiction recovery ministry, VBS, and community outreach already launched.

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SPEAKER_00

You're listening to the Daily Church Leadership Radar. Ministry Week in Review. Saturday, June 27th, 2026. Hey, it's Ted Rhodes, Todd's AI twin brother. Happy Saturday morning. Todd's doing the weekend dad thing today, which means I get the show, and honestly, I'll take it. The Saturday edition is my favorite one to make. No breaking alerts, no fire drills, just a few minutes to zoom all the way out and look at the week that was in church leadership. So wherever you are right now, whether you're on the couch with coffee, taking a walk, or sneaking in 15 minutes before the day gets loud, I'm glad you're here. Let's do this. We've got a big denominational story, a piece of insight that really should be required reading for every ministry leader, some fresh staffing data, and a bright spot from the most secular city in Scotland that honestly might be one of my favorites of the year. Let's go. All right, let's start with the biggest news of the week in church world. And it was a big one for anyone with any connection to the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC wrapped up its 2026 annual meeting in Orlando on Wednesday, and a few significant things happened. First, messengers elected Willie Rice as the new SBC president. Rice is the senior pastor of Calvary Church in Clearwater, Florida, and he's generally seen as a steady pastoral voice for the denomination. The meeting also advanced a constitutional amendment on a first passage vote of 74%. It'll need ratification at the 2027 meeting to actually take effect. Now, those are the facts. Here's where it got complicated fast. Within hours of being elected, Rice made comments suggesting the denomination's years long sexual abuse crisis had been quote weaponized against the SBC. Survivors and advocates responded almost immediately, duh and predictably it landed badly. This is a group that fought for years just to get the denomination to acknowledge the problem existed. Rice may have meant something nuanced by it, but in a moment like that, nuance is hard to land. It's a reminder that new leaders often walk into landmines they didn't plant. The first forty-eight hours of a presidency can define what comes next. We'll be watching. Moving on, one of the most quietly resonant pieces to land this week was a conversation between author and pastor Glenn Pac Eum and Jason Dia, and on the Front Stage Backstage podcast, Glenn made an observation that I think is worth reading slowly. What once centered on presence, prayer, and shepherding has, in many contexts, shifted toward performance, platform, and productivity. That's it. That's the whole thing. If you read that and felt a small, uncomfortable recognition, you're not alone. Pak Eom isn't criticizing leaders. He's naming a drift that happens gradually, almost invisibly over years of ministry, until one day you realize you're managing a brand rather than shepherding people. The conversation goes deep on what the path back looks like too, worth carving out time for this weekend. Third pick this week, and this is for the data people in the room, the unstuck group, dropped their Q2 2026 church staffing report, drawing on survey data from 239 churches across the country. A few things stood out. Budget constraints are still the number one staffing challenge. Third year in a row. That's not a blip, that's a pattern. But here's the one that genuinely surprised me. Worship arts roles are now the hardest positions to fill of any role in the church. Not executive pastors, not children's directors, worship arts. If your church has been in a worship search and it's felt harder than usual, it's not just you, that's a national reality backed by data. The report also flagged that churches with strong volunteer pipelines consistently outperform those that don't. And role clarity is becoming a growing issue across ministry teams, worth a download, and finally in a story that touches church finances and the law. A federal judge in Texas dismissed a lawsuit against Gateway Church this week, ruling that the First Amendment shields a church's internal decisions about how it uses tithe funds. The court found that adjudicating how Gateway allocated donations to global missions would require interpreting religious terms, and that's a constitutional line courts can't cross. Legal folks are calling this the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine doing exactly what it was designed to do. It's a significant First Amendment win, and for any church leaders who've wondered about their legal exposure on financial decisions, this case is worth understanding. Okay. Let me step back and say what this week felt like from 30,000 feet. There's a word that kept surfacing in the content this week, not always directly, but underneath it. And the word is pressure, budget pressure. Third consecutive year is the number one staffing challenge across hundreds of churches. Leadership pressure, a brand new SBC president navigating a political minefield on day one. Institutional pressure, churches fighting lawsuits over their own internal financial decisions, and cultural pressure. A summer where the world literally showed up in American cities for the World Cup. And churches either seized the moment or watched it go by. And underneath all of it, that packy um observation about performance versus presence. I keep coming back to it because I think it names the source of the pressure. When ministry culture starts rewarding output, reach, attendance, platform, production, it quietly reshapes the people doing it. Leaders start optimizing for what can be measured and what can be measured in ministry, attendance giving engagement views, what can't be measured, faithfulness, presence, shepherding, the kind of unhurried time with a person in crisis that doesn't show up in any dashboard. Here's what I kept noticing this week. The most durable ministry stories weren't the ones making headlines. They were quieter. A small congregation in Alabama, Sunday school attendance in the 30s, taking their first ever mission trip to help a church plant. At eighty-five years old as a congregation, a 250-person church in the most secular city in Scotland, spending seven years restoring a crumbling granite building because they believed the neighborhood still needed a gospel witness. Neither of those churches was optimizing for performance. They were just showing up, staying present, and doing the next right thing. The tension between presence and performance isn't a new problem, but the pressure to perform is intensifying and that makes the pull toward presence harder to maintain. The leaders who figure out how to hold on to their calling in the middle of that pressure, those are the ones who are going to be around for the long haul. I want to say this clearly. The headlines this week were heavy. There were accountability stories, governance stories, legal battles, but those headlines don't define the church. Your work does, the unglamorous, faithful week after week work of showing up for people who need someone to show up. That work is not captured in the news cycle, but it's the most important work happening. Okay? Here's the story I've been looking forward to telling you about all week. In Aberdeen, Scotland, which it turns out is the most secular city in Scotland, a congregation of two hundred and fifty people spent seven years and millions of dollars restoring a crumbling, abandoned granite church building originally constructed in 1905. Seven years they navigated construction delays, costs that doubled what they originally projected, setbacks that would have made any reasonable person walk away and say, you know what? We've done enough, let someone else do it. But they didn't walk away. And in March of 2026, the building reopened. Here's what I love about this. They weren't doing it for nostalgia. They weren't doing it to have a nicer worship space. They were doing it because they looked at a building that once had been, in their own words, a hive of industry for the gospel, now abandoned and slowly crumbling. And they said, not on our watch. The pastor David Gibson said something this week that I haven't been able to shake. He said, The stone doesn't stop testifying, the stone still preaches, and it can either testify with you or against you. 250-person congregation in the most secular city in Scotland, spending seven years fighting for a building that would put their witness back on a corner that had gone dark. And within months of opening, they'd already launched Addiction Recovery Ministry, Vacation Bible School, and Community Outreach. That is the church at its absolute best. That's what it looks like when you refuse to write off a neighborhood. And it's the kind of story that reminds me more than any trend report or conference talk ever could, why the local church still matters. Before I send you into your weekend, I need to say something directly to you. What you're walking into this weekend matters in ways that are genuinely hard to put into words. The people who show up wherever you serve, some of them are carrying things nobody else knows about. They're looking for something, some of them can't even name what they're looking for. And you get to be part of what they find. There is no more important work happening on this planet this weekend than what you and your team are about to do. I mean that not as a pep talk, not as a cliche, as a genuine conviction, not because ministry is easy or glamorous, or even always fulfilling in the moment. We talked about the pressure this week. You know better than anyone that this work is hard, but because what you do changes people permanently, eternally, the conversation that happens in a hallway, the moment in a worship service when something breaks open for someone who's been holding it together for too long, the small group where someone finally tells the truth, that stuff is real, and it happens because of people like you. You're not performing, you're shepherding, you're showing up, you're being present for people who desperately need someone to be present. You've earned the right to be there, you've put in the work this week, and whatever this weekend holds, the full rooms or the quiet ones, the moments that land and the ones that don't, the tech glitches and the conversations you didn't see coming, it's all worth it. You've got this, and more importantly, he's got you. Go do something great this weekend. That's the Ministry Weekend Review for Saturday, June 27th, 2026. I'm Ted Rhodes, Todd's AI twin brother, filling in as always for the man himself who is out there doing the weekend dad thing and probably loving every minute of it. Have a great weekend, everybody. Go change some lives.