Outgoing Southern Baptist Convention President Steve Gaines, a former Birmingham-area pastor, handed off the gavel to incoming President J.D. Greear as the annual SBC meeting closed Wednesday in Dallas.

As the 2018 Southern Baptist Convention ended, a sign behind the stage flashed "See You in Birmingham - 2019."

The next time the Southern Baptist Convention meets, it'll be in Birmingham at the Legacy Arena. That will be June 11-12, 2019.

More than 9,000 Southern Baptists are expected to converge on Birmingham next year for the convention and its related meetings.

Greear, senior pastor of The Summit Church in Durham, N.C., will preside at the meeting after being elected president on Tuesday. Greear, 45, has been pastor for 16 years at The Summit Church, where worship attendance has gone from 610 in 2002 to just under 10,000 now. Gaines, former pastor of Gardendale's First Baptist Church and now pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, just completed his second one-year term as president. Presidents can only serve two consecutive terms.

The Southern Baptist Convention is an annual two-day meeting held on a Tuesday and Wednesday in June that votes on the business of the 15-million-member denomination. It will be preceded on Sunday and Monday, June 9-10, 2019, by the Southern Baptist Pastors' Conference, a gathering of the denomination's pastors.

The Rev. Danny Wood, pastor of Shades Mountain Baptist Church in Vestavia Hills, will oversee that event as president of the Pastors' Conference. He was elected president on Monday in Dallas.

The Southern Baptist Convention requires an arena with a minimum seating capacity of 16,000. The Legacy Arena can seat about 18,000. The committee that picks host cities also chooses cities with at least 3,000 rooms within 2 miles of the convention center.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the convention routinely drew crowds of more than 20,000. The 1985 convention drew 45,519 in Dallas, and attendance was 40,987 in Atlanta in 1986 and 38,403 in 1990 in New Orleans. Attendance has dropped off in recent years and is usually below 10,000, but the convention is coveted by many cities.

Birmingham hasn't hosted the Southern Baptist Convention since 1941, when it drew 5,884 messengers. Alabama has hosted it six times since the denomination's founding in 1845 in Augusta, Ga., after a split with northern Baptists over the issue of whether slaveowners could serve as missionaries.

Montgomery hosted the Southern Baptist Convention in 1855, Mobile in 1873, Montgomery in 1886, then Birmingham in 1891, 1931 and 1941.