The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee has approved a $190 million SBC Cooperative Program budget proposal that includes $3 million earmarked off the top for legal costs stemming from sexual abuse claims.

The budget recommendation, approved Tuesday, will be voted on at the annual SBC meeting set for June 10-11 in Dallas.

Messengers at the 2021 meeting voted for an independent, third-party investigation of the Executive Committee’s handling of sexual abuse claims, to be paid for with Cooperative Program funds.

The Executive Committee has already spent about $13 million out its reserves and is now taking out a $3 million loan to cover the continuing legal costs expected this year.

“Decisions were made by the messengers in 2021,” said Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg. “Those decisions have consequences. Those consequences have costs. And those bills must be paid.”

Churches could take up an offering to pay the legal expenses, but the Executive Committee couldn’t ask for money to be given to it in competition with the Cooperative Fund, Iorg said.

It will reduce the percentage of funding for the denomination’s mission boards.

“The most challenging shortcoming of the offering approach is that we really don’t know what our future legal expenses are going to be.” Iorg said. “This is an estimated solution for next year’s budget.”

The Executive Committee building in downtown Nashville, appraised at more than $30 million, is up for sale but that sale likely will not happen in time to pay this year’s bills, Iorg said.

According to the Baptist Press, much of the $12.1 million spent on legal fees between 2020 and July 2024 involved the cases of former SBC president Johnny Hunt and former Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor David Sills.

“We have always paid and we will continue to pay indefinitely into the future legal costs of doing business in this culture, and those payments will be made from Cooperative Program funds,” Iorg said.

Asking for Cooperative Program funds for the legal expenses is “a controversial and difficult recommendation to make,” Iorg said. “No mission-centered Southern Baptist wants to take this action. I don’t. You don’t. None of us do.”

Meanwhile, Southern Baptist membership is at its lowest point since the 1970s.

At its height in 2006, the SBC had 16.3 million members. It is now down to 12,982,090, but remains the largest Protestant denomination in America.

It’s also the largest denomination in Alabama, where it once claimed more than one million members. That’s now down to 753,653 members in 3,164 Southern Baptist-affiliated churches in Alabama.