JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (ABP) -- Jerry Rankin, 67, has announced that he will retire next year after 17 years as president of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Rankin announced his plans to step down -- at the end of next July -- at a meeting of the agency's board of trustees Sept. 16 in Jacksonville, Fla., according to an IMB news release. A telephone press conference is scheduled for the morning of Sept. 17.

Rankin, a native of Mississippi and former Southern Baptist missionary to Indonesia, was elected president of the agency then known as the Foreign Mission Board in 1993. He succeeded Keith Parks, who retired as FMB president in 1992 after clashing with trustees over his refusal to endorse the "conservative resurgence" movement aimed at rescuing the denomination from a perceived liberal drift. Parks went on to lead the missions program at the fledgling Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a group of moderate Baptists disenfranchised by SBC conservatives.

“Everything I have done has been driven by an unequivocal sense of a call to missions, to make my life count and to make the greatest impact possible on reaching a lost world for Jesus Christ,” Rankin said, according to an IMB news release.

“For the second time in my tenure we are implementing a radical paradigm shift in organization and strategy,” he said. “This is not because of past failure and ineffectiveness but a vision of the changes needed to ensure relevance and effectiveness in the future.”

Rankin's tenure as IMB president was marked by sweeping organizational changes. It also included controversy. Some influential conservative leaders opposed his election, believing him to be too accepting of charismatic influences traditionally identified with Pentecostal or Assembly of God groups but not Baptists.

Four years ago IMB trustees voted, against Rankin's wishes, to tighten requirements for new missionaries to ensure that they understood baptism the same way many conservative Southern Baptist congregations do and to deny appointment to candidates who admit to using a "private prayer language," a form of speaking in tongues, in their personal devotions. At the time some observers interpreted the actions as a rebuke of Rankin.

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