Steve Gaines, who served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2016 to 2018, has entered hospice care. The announcement came this week in a letter from Ben Mandrell, the current pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova, Tennessee, where Gaines served as lead pastor beginning in 2005.

According to the Christian Post, Gaines was diagnosed with kidney cancer in November 2023. For much of the time since, his public updates reflected a man fighting with both faith and medicine, and seemingly winning.

A Fight Waged in Faith

In March 2024, Gaines appeared in a video telling his congregation that his condition was improving. He credited "some great doctors" and offered a characteristically defiant assessment of where things stood:

"I still have cancer, but it's really, really going away, and I'm grateful to God for miracles and medicine."

He reported that his most recent PET scan at the time showed "no more polyps of cancer in my lungs," though he also disclosed that myasthenia gravis, a condition causing severe muscular weakness, "has been re-enacted."

Even then, Gaines made clear he wasn't conceding anything. He pointed to Psalm 118:17 and told his church plainly:

"My treatments are going well. I received a good PET scan report this last week, but regardless of what tests show, my faith is in the Lord and in His Word, where He has told me from Psalm 118: 17, 'I will not die.'"

Then he added, with the kind of pastoral humor that endears a man to a congregation: "Now, I'm going to die one of these days, but not from this."

That confidence carried him through the months that followed. In September 2024, Gaines told his congregation he was stepping down as senior pastor to focus on itinerant preaching. He was explicit that the resignation was not for health reasons.

A Church in Transition

Mandrell, who also serves as chief executive officer of Lifeway Christian Resources, replaced Gaines as lead pastor. In July 2025, a clear majority of Bellevue Baptist's congregation voted to formally select Mandrell for the role. Gaines received the title of pastor emeritus.

Now, Mandrell has the difficult task of shepherding a congregation through the decline of the man who led them for nearly two decades. In his letter earlier this week, Mandrell struck the right tone, honoring Gaines without sentimentalizing the moment:

"Steve has faithfully served the Lord and shepherded so many people through the years. He's been a great pastor, mentor and friend. Let's honor him and his family by lifting them up before the Lord."

He asked the church to pray for Steve, for Donna, and for their entire family, "that the Lord would surround them with His peace, comfort, and strength."

A Life of Consequence

Gaines's fingerprints on the Southern Baptist Convention extend well beyond his two one-year terms as president. He served on the committee to revise the Baptist Faith & Message in 2000, a foundational doctrinal document for the nation's largest Protestant denomination. His nearly two decades at the helm of Bellevue Baptist placed him at the center of one of the SBC's most prominent congregations.

Something is clarifying about a man who, when told he had cancer, responded by pointing to Scripture and telling his church he intended to outlast it. That is not denial. That is the kind of conviction that builds institutions, fills sanctuaries, and sustains communities through seasons far darker than any policy debate.

The Southern Baptist Convention has weathered no shortage of internal conflict in recent years. Debates over leadership, doctrine, and direction have tested the denomination's cohesion. But moments like this one have a way of cutting through the noise. A pastor who gave decades of his life to the church is now in hospice. The theology he preached is either real to the people who heard it, or it isn't.

For Gaines, it clearly is. And for the congregation at Bellevue Baptist, the weeks ahead will be a testament to whether the faith their pastor taught them holds when it costs something to believe it.