Southern Baptists will assemble next month at their annual meeting, and one of the items for debate will be a motion to increase baseline financial transparency amid a crisis of trust.

Rhett Burns, a pastor at First Baptist Church of Travelers Rest, South Carolina, remarked in comments to The Sentinel that he believes the financial transparency effort will help to restore trust among members of the largest Protestant association of churches in the United States.

The minister said in an open letter to attendees of the upcoming annual meeting in Dallas, Texas, that his motion would require Southern Baptist Convention entities to release 990-level financial information to churches, mimicking the standard financial disclosure already expected of nonprofit organizations which report to the federal government and to the broader public.

The report to Southern Baptist churches would include program-level financials, senior executive compensation, conflicts of interest, top contractors, and legal expenditures.

“This is a normal, simple, industry-standard level of financial transparency that we are currently not meeting,” Burns said. “But all of that is in service of a larger goal, which is restoring trust in our convention so that our partnership in the Great Commission can thrive into the future.”

Burns said that even as he believes the “current crisis of trust is threatening our mission,” some leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention have voiced critiques of his motion, many of which he believes neglect to “actually deal with the scope and the facts of 990-level transparency.”

“I’ve heard arguments against ‘total transparency,’ the idea of giving everyone all the same information that trustees have. But I don’t know of anyone asking for that. I’m not,” Burns continued. “I’ve heard arguments stating all sorts of things that are just not true: things like 990-level transparency will threaten tax-exempt status or that it will put missionaries in danger.”