Southern Baptist Frank Page can’t escape his past

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Some years ago, Frank Page reigned as the leader of the top-ranked Executive Committee (EC) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). But in 2018, he resigned from that plum position because of what he described as an “immorally inappropriate relationship” he’d had. Recently, someone realized this moral failure is still pastoring somewhere.

Or at least, he was.

Southern Baptists still aren’t ready to make the changes they need to make to effectively deal with sex abuse in their churches. They’re still way too happy to allow moral failures to lead them, as long as those moral failures come with a big name and connections. And when caught employing these moral failures, Southern Baptists just do exactly what control-hungry moral failures always do: They deny everything as they slink away, then find new groups who’ll put up with them.

An overview of SBC operations

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) operates as a collection of state-level Baptist collectives also called conventions. Each state-level convention contains a number of churches that have affiliated with the denomination.

Officially, each church and all the state-level conventions have more or less complete autonomy to run their business their own preferred way. Unofficially, local autonomy is a deflection—simply a way to claim plausible deniability. The SBC uses it as a way to ensure that individual churches don’t stray too far away from the SBC’s preferred take on Christianity.

You could consider the SBC itself as a sort of mother ship—a faraway general’s outpost giving orders to countless subordinates. Individual churches decide how much of their donations will go to their state-level convention, which then decides how much of it they want to send to the SBC mother ship.

With that money, the SBC runs a great number of denominational recruitment and education efforts. These include missionary outreach, seminary funding, printing, and more. Its top-ranked Executive Committee (EC) decides where that money will go each year.

In a very real sense, whoever runs the EC effectively runs the SBC. SBC Presidents? Oh, sure, they come and go like the tide. They don’t really matter at all. They last only one year before the next election, so they barely have any time at all to do anything to leave a mark on the behemoth that is the denomination. One of the only reasons they’re important at all is that they appoint a lot of people to various roles.

But the men (yes, always men—and with only a few exceptions, always white men) serving as the president and chairman of the EC? They last a lot longer, and their power and connections are exponentially greater as a result.

Frank Page: An overview of a powerful SBC leader

Born in North Carolina in 1952, Frank Page got an M.Div degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in 1980.

SWBTS matters enormously in the SBC landscape. It was one of the larger battlegrounds during the Conservative Resurgence. At the time Page attended it, Russell Dilday ran it. He seemed a kindly sort, at least from all that I’ve read about him. Ultraconservative schemers finally arranged Dilday’s firing in 1994. (Eventually, Paige Patterson took it over in 2003. He’d be there until his own scandalous past caught up with him.)

As soon as he’d graduated, Frank Page jumped into pastoring. He ran about half a dozen churches during his career.

In 2006, SBC-lings elected him to the presidency of their denomination. He’d reign from there until 2008. After that, he led a secretive, possibly vaporware group called the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force in 2009 (archive). Around 2010, he also directed the somewhat less-mysterious charity group Baptist Global Response (archive).

In other words, dude’s been busy.

But Frank Page’s most important role by far has been his run as the President and CEO of the EC. He won election to the role in 2010, and he was there until 2019.

Frank Page and the SBC’s faction warfare

All you need to know about where Frank Page fits into the SBC’s current faction warfare are his disgusting statements about SBC pastors’ sex abuse victims and advocacy groups and his utter unwillingness to do anything about the SBC’s sex abuse crisis.

His position on sex abuse marks him instantly as what I call an Old Guard member. This faction seeks to ignore the sex abuse crisis and to drill down even harder on doctrinal unity and conservative culture-war causes, which they erroneously believe will revive their failing recruitment stats.

I call their enemy faction the Pretend Progressives. Formed only fairly recently (about ten years ago), they are not actually progressive in any way. In fact, the factions differ very little in their beliefs and culture-war stances. But they know that they won’t get votes and win elections unless they pretend that they totally want to do something tangible about that sex abuse crisis.

Around 2016, this upstart faction began to win elections for that exact reason, using that exact strategy. They don’t actually want to change anything major about the denomination, which is an absolute requirement if the denomination’s leaders and members ever hope to successfully resolve this crisis. Nobody wants to make those changes. No, they just want to win elections and consolidate power—just like the Old Guard did decades ago!

By fits and shudders these days, the Pretend Progressives drag the SBC along. They have begun to make a few halting first steps toward considering the thought of perhaps making a move toward the initial intimations of dealing with the crisis. I’m positive that this entire faction hopes they will all be retired by the time someone has to actually do anything.

At least the Old Guard are honest about not wanting to change anything. But honesty is not a winning strategy these days. The flocks want tangible action here. Both factions had better hope that those flocks continue to demonstrate their willingness to wade through the SBC’s molasses-like bureaucracy to get it.

Frank Page and the temporary roadblock to power

By 2018, Frank Page had settled into a very cushy career as an SBC leader. He led the EC, he’d ruled as SBC President, and he’d led and directed a few big denominational efforts. He’d even served on Barack Obama’s Faith Council back in 2009 (archive)!

But then, suddenly, his own hypocrisy threw a roadblock in his path.

In March 2018, Page resigned from the EC. At the time, he said he was retiring. And as a reason for his retirement, according to a statement released by the chairman of the EC (archive), Page confessed to having had “an inappropriate relationship in the recent past.”

Around that same time, Page released a statement of his own:

“It is with deep regret that I tender my resignation from the SBC Executive Committee and announce my retirement from active ministry, effective immediately,” Page said in the satement. “As a result of a personal failing, I have embarrassed my family, my lord, myself, and the kingdom.”

“Top Southern Baptist leader finds new church after resigning over inappropriate relationship,” The Tennessean, February 14, 2020 (archive)

For a long time, nobody in the general public or warming SBC pews knew what this “inappropriate relationship” entailed. Eventually, in the SBC’s 2022 abuse report, we learned that Page only trickled out that truth after church gossip got out of control and another pastor confronted him about it.

The Executive Committee quickly decided that the whole thing was “a consensual affair with an adult woman” (from “The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee’s Response to Sexual Abuse Allegations and an Audit of the Procedures and Actions of the Credentials Committee,” p. 75). Nobody in the EC bothered examining the situation further. The EC chairman, Stephen Rummage, would later concede that maybe, just maybe, someone should have done that.

With the growing focus on SBC sex scandals (and their huge sex abuse crisis poised to erupt into national headlines in just one short year), though, even that trickle was already enough to get an Old Guard stalwart kicked out of the EC.

Don’t ever believe they’re ‘retiring’

Shortly afterward, Page un-retired and re-entered active ministry. Sure, the dude was pushing 70 by then, but he wasn’t really going anywhere. None of them ever do. That’d be like a top-level Amway Diamond retiring (archive). They can’t. The moment they stop hustling, their empire collapses like the cult of personality it truly is.

And when that empire collapses, the money train stops along with it.

So to nobody’s surprise, in 2020 Frank Page became the newest Lead Pastor of Pebble Creek Baptist Church in Taylors, South Carolina. Taylors is a nice drive northeast of Greenville. The church itself seems fairly small. I’d be surprised if more than a couple of hundred people belong to it. Still, it’s well-maintained in a charming Old South style.

Page appears in a July 2020 archive of the church’s leadership roster, along with a statement at the bottom of the page announcing Pebble Creek’s affiliation with the SBC.

Journalists noticed his new gig very quickly. By 2020, the SBC’s sex abuse crisis had taken center stage in national headlines and Christian websites alike.

How could any Christian leader who’d displayed such hypocrisy just jump right back into ministry like that? How could Frank Page be trusted to follow evangelical rules when he’d already broken them?

But something even worse was coming down the pike for Frank Page—and whoever’d made the decision to hire him at Pebble Creek.

A major SBC sex abuse report names Frank Page repeatedly

In May 2022, the SBC released a major report regarding sex abuse and its leaders’ nonstop covering-up of it. This report had taken years to get, all thanks to faction warfare. The Old Guard did not want it made at all, and they definitely did not want it released to the public. It took a Pretend Progressive SBC President to appoint the task force in 2021 and set it on its path.

(Related: What you need to know about the SBC’s 2022 sex abuse report)

If you thumb through the report, you’ll notice that Frank Page gets quite a few mentions in it. From page 40 (all page numbers refer to the PDF, not whatever’s printed on the page itself):

In his position as General Counsel, Mr. [Augie] Boto guided the EC’s response to sexual abuse allegations, advising the various EC Presidents under whom he served – Dr. Morris Chapman, Dr. Frank Page, and Dr. Ronnie Floyd.

“The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee’s Response to Sexual Abuse Allegations and an Audit of the Procedures and Actions of the Credentials Committee,” p. 40

From page 49:

On August 2, 2006, Ms. [Christa] Brown and leaders at the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) wrote to then-SBC President Dr. Frank Page and described how her alleged abuser was able to continue in ministry, even though the survivor had notified 18 Southern Baptist leaders in four different states. The letter requested an immediate investigation of her case, and called for the establishment of a review board to consider reports of clergy abuse.

“The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee’s Response to Sexual Abuse Allegations and an Audit of the Procedures and Actions of the Credentials Committee,” p. 49

But Christa Brown would be disappointed. In his reply, Frank Page, the President of the entire SBC, piously informed her about muh local aw-TOWN-uh-mee. He was, he declared, utterly powerless to act. But he’d maybe ask around. Maybe someone could hold some meetings about it, maybe:

Dr. Page stated that each Baptist entity is autonomous and separate, and that if abuse is covered up, it is the responsibility of that entity. Nonetheless, he stated that he would “meet with the officials of the Southern Baptist Convention to see if there is some way that we might provide this kind of assistance without infringing upon the autonomy of these state level or local level entities.”

“The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee’s Response to Sexual Abuse Allegations and an Audit of the Procedures and Actions of the Credentials Committee,” p. 50

[Narrator: And then nothing happened for almost 20 years.]

This 2022 report also notes Page’s 2018 resignation from the EC (p. 75). In addition, it mentions not only a 2007 article he wrote for Florida Baptist Witness in which he called sex abuse advocates and protestors “opportunistic,” but a 2014 article discussing it later in Baptist News Global (archive; BNG is not affiliated with the SBC, as far as I can tell). The writer of the 2014 article, Bob Allen, noted that Page pointedly refused to address his 2007 statements.

For Frank Page, the arc of justice was long indeed

Over the next year and a half, activists reminded SBC-lings about who Frank Page was and asked why he was still a pastor at any SBC church in the world.

After a great deal of commotion, Pebble Creek finally announced that Frank Page had apparently “decided to step away from public ministry” —yes, again!— “including his role as pastor at Pebble Creek Baptist Church.” Their statement, recorded on the official SBC website Baptist Press, declared their “eternal” gratitude for Page’s leadership over the past couple of years.

But I detect just a little hint of relief that Page is gone in their next paragraph:

“We are eternally grateful for the revitalization and missional efforts of Dr. Page’s leadership at Pebble Creek since 2019, affecting scores of people and other ministries.”

“Former EC president Page out as pastor of South Carolina church,” February 14, 2024 (archive)

Scores of people. I’d really hope that a church even the size of Pebble Creek might have more than 40 people affected by Frank Page’s “leadership.”

Though the church’s statement makes it sound like Page had made his decision a while ago, the writer at Baptist Press clearly believes it was an extremely recent decision—and one obviously made because of public outcry over a hypocrite and sex abuse shielder being allowed to pastor an SBC church again:

A video on the church’s Facebook account [here] shows Page leading the Wednesday evening Bible study on Feb. 7 and indicating that he would be leading further studies in the coming weeks.

“Former EC president Page out as pastor of South Carolina church,” February 14, 2024 (archive)

And then on February 11, the church’s associate pastor, BJ Simpson, had to announce that Frank Page was out like polyester casual suits. Not only that, but the church’s leadership had apparently also decided to withdraw their church’s entire affiliation with the SBC. Instead of the SBC symbol I mentioned earlier, they now list only an affiliation with the South Carolina Baptist Convention.

This is one of those state-level conventions in the SBC. It seems that a church can be a member of a state-level convention without being a member of the mother ship itself. I’m not sure how they’re squaring that one. In time, it could well be they’ll pull out of the state-level group too. To be sure, there are lots of other Baptist groups Pebble Creek could join.

And that’s the real problem for evangelicals, in terms of accountability for crimes and dark deeds.

What next for Frank Page?

As I said, never believe an evangelical leader when retirement gets mentioned. When they retire, the empire topples and the money train screeches to a halt. If they’ve already un-retired once as it is, that goes double. So what might be next for Frank Page?

In an evangelical world where even Paige Patterson still has a fanbase and career, I don’t think it’s possible for Frank Page to have anything but a soft landing from Pebble Creek. Their withdrawal from the SBC itself speaks to that reality.

What’ll happen as SBC predators and their protectors get outed is what’s already happened with several of them:

They’ll just skip away from the SBC.

We’ve seen it happen already in the case of Christian Watts (no, not that Chris Watts; this one’s a Baptist sex abuser). When sex abuse allegations got a little too close to home, he simply withdrew his church from the SBC.

He still lost his job, thankfully. Unfortunately, Watts wasn’t anywhere near the top ranks of the denomination. No soft landing for him! (As far as I can tell, he’s gone to ground.)

Unfortunately, this tactic works

The higher-ranked SBC hypocrites end up in non-SBC, independent evangelical groups, where they face even less oversight and accountability than the SBC offered. And oh, those groups are just thrilled to have these big-name Southern Baptist leaders joining up. It’d be like if Tom Brady took a job coaching a neighborhood kiddie football league.

Last summer, Patterson praised these independent evangelical groups (archive) for their superior focus on evangelism—which, if you remember, is the Old Guard’s entire emphasis.

And I suppose Patterson is right.

Like the Old Guard itself, they’re so incredibly focused on recruitment that they don’t care about the safety of the people already in their churches! Nor do they care if predators and their protectors attain leadership in their churches! Who cares? Not Jesus. He never told his capital-C Church to care about that. He just wanted them to recruit. Muh Grate Cuh-MISH-un, y’all! If everyone Jesuses properly, then nobody’ll get abused anyway!

For the Old Guard dreading exposure and expulsion, that lack of concern has got to be music to their ears.

Really, I’m only surprised we haven’t already heard that Frank Page has been snapped up by some independent evangelical church. Dude’s four years younger than Donald Trump, and Trump’s making noises about running for the presidency in 2024. The train’s still rolling, even if it’s creaky and slow. The empire’s still standing, even if it’s teetering. There’s still money to be found in this operation. And so I don’t think Frank Page is finished yet.