(RNS) — Steve Gaines, a Tennessee megachurch pastor who served as Southern Baptist Convention president from 2016 to 2018, died Friday (March 20), his former congregation announced. He was 68.
“It’s with a heavy heart that we share with you the passing of our beloved Pastor Emeritus, Dr. Steve Gaines,” Bellevue Baptist Church said in a post on its Facebook page. After a two-year long battle with cancer, Bro. Steve stepped into eternity earlier this afternoon, and he is now fully healed in the presence of the Lord.”
Gaines led Memphis-area church, one of the SBC’s largest congregations, for 19 years. He stepped down as the congregation’s pastor in 2024, 10 months after being diagnosed with kidney cancer.
Gaines was born December 31, 1957 in Corinth, Mississippi, and grew up in Dyersburg, Tennessee, according to Baptist Press, an official SBC publication. He earned degrees at Union University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and pastored churches in Tennessee and Texas while in school.
He was elected president of the SBC in 2016, during a period of relative calm in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. After two rounds voting by the messengers, as the Baptists call the delegates to their annual meeting, neither Gaines nor North Carolina megachurch pastor J.D. Greear, had the 2,413 votes needed to win the presidency. Both men offered to bow out, but Greer, who trailed by 104 votes, eventually dropped from the ballot and Gaines became SBC president. (Greear was elected two years later.)
Steve Gaines, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, gives a Common Ground Testimony dur …