Welcome to the Conversations That Matter Podcast. I'm John Harris. I'm joined today with

Rod Martin. Rod Martin is one of the founders of PayPal, runs the Martin

Organization on the steering committee for the Conservative Baptist Network,

and is on the Executive Committee for the Southern Baptist Convention.

And he's going to talk to us a little bit today about what's going on in the SBC and maybe why you should

consider if you're a Southern Baptist staying in the denomination.

So Rod, thank you so much for joining me.

It's an honor. It's good to be here and very grateful. much for

you, it's an honor. It's good to be here and very grateful for you, John.

Yeah, well I appreciate it so much.

The hard work, the effort, I mean you're a busy guy

and you have dedicated yourself to the Southern Baptist convention, the politics of it.

You post a lot on social media. I know that that's the iceberg. I'm sure you're doing so much more behind the

scenes. And I think some people wonder why would you want to beat your head against a board,

you know, all the time, but this is something you care about and I know it can be stressful and discouraging but I just would like to hear you and I think everyone would like to hear you talk about why this matters so much to you.

Well it does matter very, very much.

And I can summarize that pretty easily in just pointing out that we have six seminaries that collectively

educate a third of the seminary students in North America.

And that's way more than just Southern Baptist. We have 50,000 churches, give or take.

There are 550,000 churches in America, so you do the math. A third of the seminarians coming through our six denominational

seminaries means we're affecting a lot more than just us.

And if you want those all those pastors, all those music ministers, all those different people

...