The steps the SBC took to address the sexual abuse crisis is as much of a movement as I've seen the convention make in one annual meeting. That's a credit to the elected leadership making sure the issue was brought to the forefront and addressed. They did as much as the polity would allow, but beyond that, with the understanding that the SBC is a denomination made up of independent, autonomous churches, they provided some real incentive and motivation for churches to follow steps to prevent further abuse and to really clean this mess up.
Up until last June, the SBC has been an oligarchy for more than three decades. A few people called all the shots, stacked the boards and committees and there was no real leadership so the denomination stagnated. All of that changed just prior to last year's convention and it appears that some real leadership has been pulled up into the vacuum. It is the SBC, which means that it is always prone to be thrown backward, and those boards and committees are still stacked with the obedient lackeys of the previous oligarchs. But they made some progress this year.
For a decade now, the SBC has joined the ranks of declining denominations, and the decline in membership is serious. More than a million church members have left the rolls of the denomination in a decade. The churches are reaching and baptizing about half of the annual total that was occurring when the resurgence first ran a candidate in 1979. There's a big disconnect in there somewhere. Denominational leadership hasn't been successful at geting a whole lot of churches to follow along for a couple of decades now. Convention attendance has fallen to record lows. Giving executive leadership in the denomination as a reward for service in the resurgence led to decades of ineffective leadership. Adrian Rogers warned against doing that, but no one had much of a backbone to say "boo" to anyone. If there are enough pastors left like J.D. Greear, and David Platt, who still care about the denomination, they might be able to stabilize it, but I don't think they're going to prevent it from going the way of the mainline denominations.