Evangelist and author Daniel Ritchie will be nominated for first vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention during the 2025 SBC Annual Meeting this summer in Dallas. Matt Capps, lead pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Apex, N.C., told the Biblical Recorder that he plans to nominate Ritchie.
A native of Greensboro, N.C., Ritchie previously served as a student pastor at churches in North Carolina and Arizona before answering a call to become a vocational evangelist and speaker. Over the past 20 years, Ritchie has traveled the country speaking to churches, schools, camps, conferences, colleges, corporations, sports teams and more, according to his website at www.danielritchie.com. Ritchie also preached during the 2022 SBC Pastors’ Conference in Anaheim, Calif.
In My Affliction for His Glory, Ritchie shares his life story, which includes being born without arms and struggling with a sense of value and worth while growing up. “A man with no arms was never going to fit in a world where everyone has two arms,” Ritchie wrote. “But God had more in store for me than to be a victim of a life defined by the things that I was never going to be.”
Ritchie has been married to his wife, Heather, for 18 years, and the couple has two children. The Ritchies reside in Raleigh, N.C., where they are members of The Summit Church, a multisite congregation in the Raleigh-Durham area. The Summit Church reported an average worship attendance of 7,891 and 448 baptisms in 2023. The church reported $810,000 (2.45 percent) given through the Cooperative Program based on $33,061,224 in undesignated receipts.