Each church should send the maximum number of messengers allowed to the 2020 Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Orlando in June, SBC Executive Committee president Ronnie Floyd told Baptist Press Jan. 14.

“I want to encourage every Southern Baptist church to send messengers to our 2020 Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Orlando, Fla., on June 9-10,” Floyd said in advance of the opening of online registration Feb. 1 at sbcannualmeeting.net.

“I am calling upon our pastors and church leaders from our churches to do all they can to bring their full contingent of messengers to Orlando,” Floyd said. “This will be a historic convention that casts a big vision for our future together.

“I deeply believe the more people we can have attend our annual meeting each year,” he said, “the more we will be able to mobilize our work together across the world as Southern Baptists.”

The meeting, themed “Gospel Above All. Always,” has already drawn a higher hotel registration to date than previous meetings, said William Townes, SBC EC chief financial officer. He tabulated hotel registration to date for SBC 2020 at 2,132, compared to 1,327 at the comparable time last year for SBC 2019.

“We are very pleased that current hotel bookings are far outpacing the prior year,” Townes told BP Monday (Jan. 13). “Based on these strong reservation [numbers], we anticipate we will have between 11,000 and 13,000 church messengers represented with more than 15,000 attendees in total.”

Each church is allowed a minimum of two messengers, with other criteria determining an allowed messenger count as high 12 per church.

Hotel rooms are still available at sbcannualmeeting.net for the meeting at the west concourse of the Orange County Convention Center.

Watch Floyd’s video invitation to SBC 2020: