BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (BP) – John Yeats, the executive director of the Missouri Baptist Convention, was re-elected as the Southern Baptist Convention recording secretary at the convention’s annual meeting here, June 11.
Yeats had 62.89 percent of the vote. North Carolina pastor Eddie Eaton had 36.46 percent of the vote. Twenty ballots – less than 1 percent – were disqualified.
Yeats was nominated for a 23rd term as the Southern Baptist Convention’s recording secretary by church planter Jon Nelson.
Nelson, MBC first vice president and pastor of Soma Community Church in Jefferson City, near historically black Lincoln University, said “As a Missouri church planter, officer of the state convention and member of the MBC’s executive board, I have witnessed firsthand the servant leadership and expertise of Dr. John L. Yeats.”
“As a young pastor in Missouri, it has been a pleasure to work alongside Dr. Yeats as our executive director, who has a distinct heartbeat for pastors in our state as well as a calm presence in stressful situations,” Nelson said.
Yeats was first elected SBC recording secretary in 1997 and designed the process currently used for the flow of information from the convention floor to the platform and distribution to the Committee on Order of Business.
Deer Creek Baptist Church in Cuba, where Yeats is a member gave 10 percent of its undesignated receipts through CP last year, according to the SBC’s Annual Church Profile (ACP). The church baptized eight people in 2018 and had an average worship attendance of 92.
Prior to his service in Missouri, Yeats was director of communications/public policy for the Louisiana Baptist Convention. He is a former editor of state Baptist papers in Oklahoma and Indiana and has served churches in six states during 40-plus years of pastoral ministry. Yeats holds a doctor of ministry degree from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, a master of divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and an undergraduate degree from Dallas Baptist University. Yeats and his wife Sharon, who serves beside him on the convention platform, have three sons and nine grandchildren.