The Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday opened its annual meeting, the first of the #MeToo era, amid a slew of recent scandals related to its treatment of women.

There's a lot on the agenda. The most contentious item: Delegates, called messengers, will vote on a resolution that acknowledges that male leaders and other members of the nation's largest evangelical denomination have "wronged women, abused women, silenced women, objectified women" throughout the church's history.

The draft resolution comes amid the turmoil of several sexual misconduct allegations. Last month, a longtime leader, Paige Patterson, was fired as president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas following his response to two rape allegations years apart from students. Patterson, who had been slated to give the featured sermon at the national meeting, was also accused of making inappropriate comments about a teen girl's appearance and arguing that women in abusive relationships should almost always stay with their husbands.

Patterson is the most prominent of the convention's #MeToo cases. He withdrew from the meeting last Friday after pressure from other leaders in the church.

And in March, the head of the convention's executive committee, Frank Page, resigned over what the church described as a "morally inappropriate relationship in the recent past." That same month, Andy Savage, a pastor in Memphis, resigned after acknowledging he had been involved in an inappropriate "sexual incident" with an underage high school student 20 years ago when he was a youth minister.

Advocates who hope to see a greater role for women in the church are planning a protest rally outside the convention center on Tuesday afternoon. Organizers want the denomination to create a database of clergy sex offenders, and require all pastors and seminarians to undergo training on addressing domestic abuse and sexual assault.

On Tuesday, shortly after the two-day meeting kicked off with songs and prayers, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, delivered remarks, calling it a "deep honor to welcome the Southern Baptist Convention to a God-fearing state."

He thanked Southern Baptists for their assistance in recent tragedies in Texas, including Hurricane Harvey, which killed dozens and left Texas and Louisiana reeling after it hit last September.

The governor, who uses a wheelchair, also spoke of the accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down at 26 when lightning struck a tree that fell on him and crushed his vertebrae. The experience brought him "closer to God," he said.

On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence, who has called himself an "evangelical Catholic," is scheduled to speak, the Southern Baptist Convention said in a surprise announcement a day before the meeting began.