The Southern Baptist Convention
Now, a significant part of missions and outreach in our church involves a partnership with the Southern Baptist Convention. So before we finish up today, I’d like to give you an overview of what that partnership looks like, since so many people who take this class tend to be new to the SBC. To do that, I’ll answer a few questions that we normally get.
1. What does it mean to be a Southern Baptist Church?
A Southern Baptist church is a local church that has voluntarily chosen to be “in friendly cooperation with, and contributing towards the causes of, the Southern Baptist Convention.” This may sound a bit strange to some of you, so let me be clear that we mean no disrespect with this language, and we’re not using it to keep us at arm’s length from the Convention, it’s simply the official language of the SBC Constitution. It means that every Southern Baptist Church is completely autonomous. It doesn’t take orders from the SBC, it can be in friendly cooperation when it wants, and disassociate itself when it wants. That means that the Southern Baptist Convention isn’t a church, but is rather comprised of thousands of local churches that cooperate together for the primary purpose of missions and evangelism. It is a parachurch organization to serve churches. And, frankly, if you use the term “denomination” in the way that most people use it—as a body with authority over churches, that makes decisions that are carried out in all its churches—as is the case with Presbyterian churches, Anglican churches, Lutheran churches, and many others—then the SBC isn’t really even a denomination either. It’s basically a big pot of money that many different churches contribute to that goes to fund missions and seminaries, and a few other things.
So when we say the words “in friendly cooperation with?” we mean that we have a shared theology and vision for missions and evangelism. And when we say “contributing towards the causes of…,” it simply means that we financial support to the work of the Convention.
2. Where did the SBC come from?
The SBC emerged out of the need to better support and facilitate missions, both here in North America and around the world. So in 1814, independent Baptist churches from South Carolina to Massachusetts came together to form the first national Baptist organization in America. It became known as the Triennial Convention because it met every 3 years, and its purpose was to coordinate the funding of international missionaries like Adoniram Judson, the famous missionary to Burma.
In 1845 this association of churches and the Convention they founded split over 2 issues:
Should a central sending board, or local sending boards send missionaries? Secondly, and more significantly, over the issue of slavery. The specific question that brought this to a crisis was “could slaveholders be sent as missionaries?”
Sadly, most of the Baptists (as well as Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian) churches in the south, didn’t believe slavery was morally wrong. However, most northern churches, Baptist and non-Baptist alike, correctly understood that American slavery was an abomination and antithetical to the gospel. At about this time, almost all of the major Protestant denominations split on north/south lines, including Baptists, over the issues of slavery and secessionism, with the southern churches in our case forming the Southern Baptist Convention. At the end of the war some of these splits were reversed and denominations reunified, but in the case of the SBC the rift remained permanent due to theological disagreements with what became the more theologically liberal Northern Baptist Convention (today’s ABC – American Baptist Churches, USA).
Fortunately, the SBC has since publicly repented and apologized for its past position, declaring that church members must, “unwaveringly denounce racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin” and “repent of racism of which we have been guilty whether consciously or unconsciously.”
But that was only one of two big crises that has shaped the SBC. As American churches moved from the 19th into the 20th century, theological liberalism—a denial of the authority and truth of the Bible—began to grow in most major denominations, including the SBC. By the 1970s SBC pastors were being trained in SBC seminaries by professors who denied core gospel doctrines like the divinity of Christ, the necessity of faith in Him for salvation, the authority of the Bible and more. Like the racism before it, if this had continued, CHBC would likely not be an SBC church today. But, again, in God’s mercy a change occurred.
Beginning in the 1980s there was something of a grass-roots rebellion in the SBC, something not seen in other major US denominations, and the congregational polity of the SBC churches made this possible. Over time the seminaries and sending boards were reformed, which meant that for the SBC, money was now supporting missionaries and seminary professors who would not actively work against the gospel. And so today we are especially excited about how our money is used for pastoral training and for missions—and their partnership with us as we send out missionaries with them and send our young men to their seminaries for training.
And that’s really why we continue to be in not just friendly but enthusiastic cooperation with them. A church of our size would have great difficulty sending out the number of missionaries and pastoral trainees as we do with the budget that we do if we had to do this all on our own. But because there are 40,000 SBC churches out there contributing to the same institutions—many of which are too small to have their own missionaries, for example—we are able to benefit from this partnership, and contribute to it, in some very unique ways. It’s yet another example of how churches cooperating together can accomplish so much more for the gospel than they could do on their own.
