This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on June 10, 2026.
The headlines each year going into the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting seem to focus on Southern Baptists’ latest attempts to put women in their place and keep them there. Whether they were voting to remove Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church from SBC membership, voting on the Law Amendment or this year’s “Truth and Unity” amendment proposed by Al Mohler, many outsiders have the idea the annual meetings are primarily about male power.
To be sure, all those attempts to institutionalize gendered authority and submission hierarchies are real and should be exposed. But as I’ve watched the annual meetings over the past few years, the primary focus of the meetings hasn’t been on male power but on spreading the gospel through missions.
On Tuesday morning this week, Paul Chitwood, president of the International Mission Board, announced they were sending 63 new Southern Baptist missionaries “to pursue lostness around the world.”
“Lostness is the world’s greatest problem,” Chitwood said. “The gospel is the only solution to that problem.”
“The reason Southern Baptists believe ‘lostness’ is the world’s greatest problem is that they believe in hell as eternal conscious torment.”
The reason Southern Baptists believe “lostness” is the world’s greatest problem is that they believe in hell as eternal conscious torment. As the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 states, “The unrighteous will be consigned to Hell, the place of everlasting punishment.”
In 2011, the SBC annual meeting passed a resolution “On the Reality of Hell” that rejected any views of hell as the annihilation of unbelievers or as a purifying process of universal restoration, and affirmed “the reality of a literal hell” as “conscious, eternal suffering.”
To put it bluntly, anyone who doesn’t bend the knee to Southern Baptist atonement theology will be sent to a literal lake of fire and brimstone to burn for eternity.
As former Reformed Baptist pastor Steve Lawson once described: “Those in hell are thrown almost as if they’re being thrown into an active volcano and find themselves submerged in the red-hot molten lava that is spewing out of the volcano, yet with this new body able to stay alive and not be consumed. People are literally baptized in fire. They are immersed in fire. They are swimming in fire. They are engulfed in fire, yet never able to swim out of the lake of fire. They are forever preserved in this lake of fire. They are drowning in fire with the wrath of God inflicting pain from the top of their head to the bottom of their feet to every extremity in their body forever and ever and ever. … They will be roasted alive, yet they will never be able to die.”
Funding missions to help people avoid that end is the heartbeat of SBC annual meetings.
With video clips of smiling people being baptized set to hopeful, celebratory music, the IMB promo video rejoiced in how “the gospel changes everything” by turning idolators into new worshipers.
But while celebration abounds, there’s an underlying gravity to the meetings that makes outsiders wonder: Do any of these Southern Baptists have any self-awareness for how horrible this worldview sounds?
Billions of burning souls
After Chitwood’s introduction, messengers were shown videos of their new missionaries sharing their stories and asking for prayer. Missionaries going to areas more hostile to Christianity had their identities hidden. But no matter where they were coming from or where they were going, many of their stories had two things in common: The number of people going to hell forever was overwhelming, and hardly any of the people would ever be given a chance to hear the gospel.