Jerry Rankin

Jerry Rankin led the International Mission Board (IMB) from 1993 to 2010. The IMB is the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)’s primary agency for evangelism and church planting outside the US and one of the world’s largest missionary-sending organizations. During his tenure, Rankin oversaw major transitions within the organization that had broad implications for the SBC as well as for evangelical Christianity in general.

Rankin was born in 1942 in Tupelo. His family moved to Clinton three years later, where they were active in the First Baptist Church. At ten, Jerry made a profession of faith at a Billy Graham crusade in Jackson. He committed himself to Christian ministry soon afterward, preaching his first sermon at sixteen. Rankin attended Mississippi College, where he met his future wife, Bobbye Simmons. While at college, Rankin had his first experience in international missions, spending a summer as a short-term missionary to the Philippines. In 1965 he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, to attend Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, graduating in 1969.

The Rankins moved to Indonesia in 1970 as career missionaries with the International Mission Board (called the Foreign Mission Board until 1997). In 1987, after serving in other administrative roles, Jerry advanced to area director for Southern Asia and the Pacific, overseeing more than four hundred Southern Baptist missionaries working in the region. In this position, Rankin became a vocal critic of the IMB’s then-president, Keith Parks, whose efforts to refocus the mission board on evangelism and church planting among so-called “unreached people groups”—ethnolinguistic populations with few evangelical Christians—had generated significant conflict within the organization.

In 1992, Parks—facing pressure from activists within the Southern Baptist “conservative resurgence,” a movement to root out perceived theological liberalism within Southern Baptist entities—abruptly resigned. After a fourteen-month hunt for a successor, the search committee nominated Jerry Rankin, citing his record of independent thinking. Rankin’s nomination faced opposition from the same conservative activists who had opposed Parks. These activists wanted to appoint a movement insider and raised concerns about Rankin’s sympathy toward neo-charismatic practices, such as speaking in tongues.

Despite the opposition Rankin had shown to some of Parks’s policies, as president, Rankin broadened and deepened Parks’s efforts to prioritize missionary work to unreached people. In 1997, Rankin announced the “New Directions” reorganization, which made evangelism to these groups a primary objective for all parts of the organization. This strategic shift coincided with moves toward greater cooperation with other evangelical missions agencies to facilitate access to and engagement with hard-to-reach populations. In an effort to establish a truly global strategy for the IMB, New Directions curbed the autonomy missionaries had over budgets and evangelistic strategies and centralized administrative authority at the IMB headquarters. Subsequent reorganizations in 2003 and 2009 deepened these reforms and resulted in the reallocation of resources out of traditional mission fields like Brazil and Nigeria and into new priority areas in Asia.

Throughout his tenure, Rankin faced opposition from the denomination’s right, which saw him as too independent and viewed the reforms he initiated—especially those that brought the organization closer to non-Baptist missions agencies—as opening the door to theological deviation in churches started by the IMB. After years of behind-the-scenes conflict, this tension became public in 2005 when a group of IMB trustees with ties to conservative leader Paige Patterson pushed through a policy that prohibited new missionaries from using a “private prayer language”—speaking in tongues as part of their prayer life. This move was widely seen as an attempt to embarrass Rankin into resigning.

Jerry Rankin retired from the IMB in 2010 and the Rankins returned to Clinton. Since retirement, he has continued to be active in international missions, as well as on the campus of Mississippi College, which honored him as their alumnus of the year in 2021. Bobbye Rankin passed away in 2023.