SBC Jobs: How Southern Baptist Pastors Find Their Next Church

Searching for SBC jobs is harder than it should be. The Southern Baptist Convention has more than 47,000 cooperating churches, and every one of them is autonomous. There is no central personnel office, no bishop assigning men to pulpits, and no single master list of every open position. A church in rural Alabama and a church in suburban Dallas can both be looking for a pastor on the same Tuesday and neither one will know about the other's search.

That autonomy is a feature theologically. It's a headache practically. So if you're a Southern Baptist pastor looking for your next church, here's where the openings actually live.

Start With Your State Convention

This is the piece most men skip, and it's usually the most productive. The SBC operates through 41 state conventions, and many of them employ a director of missions or church services staff whose job includes helping churches in transition find candidates. Some maintain public job boards. Others keep an internal résumé file that only gets shared with pulpit committees who ask.

Georgia Baptist Mission Board, Texas (both the BGCT and SBTC), Florida Baptist Convention, and the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina all run listings pages of some kind. Quality varies wildly. Some are updated weekly, some look like they were last touched during the Bush administration.

Call the office. Don't just check the website. Ask whether they keep a résumé file, ask who handles pastoral placement, and get your information into their hands. A phone call to a state convention staffer who knows twelve churches without a pastor is worth more than a month of refreshing job boards.

Local Associations

Below the state convention sits the local Baptist association, and this is where the informal network really operates. Associational missionaries know which churches are struggling, which ones just lost a pastor, and which ones are about to. Most vacancies get filled through these relationships before anything is ever posted publicly. If you have a region in mind, find the association covering it and introduce yourself to whoever leads it.

Seminary Placement Offices

The six SBC seminaries all run some form of placement or church relations service, and churches contact them directly when they're searching:

• Southern Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, through their Church Connect service.
• Southwestern (SWBTS) in Fort Worth.
• Southeastern (SEBTS) in Wake Forest, which runs a well-maintained placement portal.
• Midwestern (MBTS) in Kansas City, which also sponsors The Gospel Coalition's job board.
• New Orleans (NOBTS) and Gateway in Ontario, California.

You generally don't have to be an alum to be listed, though alumni get priority at some schools. Worth checking even if you trained elsewhere. Our list of Reformed seminary job boards covers these alongside the Presbyterian and independent schools.

SolaJobs

SolaJobs is a bible-based job board, and a large share of the churches posting on it are Southern Baptist. That overlap isn't accidental. The confessional recovery that's been reshaping the SBC over the last two decades means a lot of the churches now hiring for expositional preaching, plurality of elders, and meaningful membership are SBC churches that would have looked very different in 1985.

So while SolaJobs isn't an official SBC board per say, but it's a good fit if you're a Southern Baptist who cares about that kind of church. You can filter listings by denomination, role, and state, which the state convention pages generally don't let you do. Posting is free for churches, which keeps smaller congregations on it rather than only the ones with a search budget.

The board reaches over 5,000 church job seekers a month. If you're the one hiring rather than the one applying, that's a reasonable audience for a pastoral search.

Browse church jobs on SolaJobs

Other Places SBC Openings Show Up

• Church websites. Obvious, underused. Most pulpit committees post the opening on their own site first and only go wider if nothing comes of it. The SBC's Church Search tool at sbc.net lets you find cooperating churches by location, which gives you a list to work through if you're targeting a specific area.
• Baptist state papers. The Alabama Baptist, Baptist Press, Biblical Recorder, and similar outlets still carry classified listings, and older congregations often advertise there and nowhere else.
• Founders Ministries and 9Marks networks. If you're Reformed Baptist specifically, these networks connect churches with like-minded candidates. See our piece on the 9Marks job board for what's actually available there.
• The Gospel Coalition job board. Free to post, sponsored by Midwestern, and heavy on SBC listings. Covered in our guide to TGC jobs.
• Denominational entities. The IMB, NAMB, Lifeway, and the ERLC hire staff regularly, including plenty of roles that aren't pastoral. Church planting through NAMB's Send Network is a separate track worth considering if you're open to it.

What the SBC Search Process Actually Looks Like

Because the local church is autonomous, a pulpit committee of laypeople usually runs the search. They're volunteers. Most of them have never done this before and won't do it again. That shapes everything about how the process goes.

• It's slow. Six to eighteen months is normal for a senior pastor search. Silence for six weeks after you submit doesn't mean rejection, it means the committee met once and hasn't met again.
• Your résumé goes to a committee, not a professional. Write for people who love their church but don't know ministry vocabulary. Skip the jargon.
• Sermon audio matters more than anything on paper. Have three recent sermons ready, unedited, from a normal Sunday. Not your best conference message.
• The trial sermon and church vote are still standard. Most SBC churches will bring you in "in view of a call" and vote. It's public and it's a real vote, so don't treat the final step as a formality.
• Ask about the last three pastors. How long did each stay, and why did each leave? The answer tells you more about the church than the job description will.

Practical Advice

• Be clear about where you stand. The SBC covers a lot of theological ground. Calvinism, complementarianism, elder plurality, and cooperation questions all vary church to church. Say what you believe early. A church that would have been a bad fit is better discovered in month one than month nine.
• Search several sources at once. No board has everything. State convention, association, seminary placement, SolaJobs, TGC, and the websites of churches in your target area. Set up alerts where you can.
• Tell people you're looking. Most SBC pastorates are filled through relationships. Former professors, your association's director of missions, pastors you trained with. That network surfaces openings that never get posted.
• Read the church's constitution and bylaws before the second interview. Governance structure, who hires and fires staff, and how deacons function will tell you what your actual authority would be.

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SolaJobs lists ministry positions from Reformed churches and organizations, many of them SBC. Browse open positions or post a job for free.