What Makes Baptists Unique (And Why it Matters Now)

What makes Baptists Unique?

The answer to the question raised above lies in the concept of local church autonomy. It is rooted in the conviction that the New Testament gives strong evidence that churches should be elder led but congregationally governed.[1] This means that there is no human ecclesiastical authority higher than a local congregation—no bishop or gathering of bishops as in the United Methodist Church and no General Assembly as in the United Presbyterian Church. A second important conviction is that while local churches should not exist in isolation their association does not create a larger form of church. Baptists argue that the New Testament uses the word ekklēsia for local bodies of believers (overwhelmingly the most common use) and occasionally for all believers of all times and places (sometimes called the universal church); but the New Testament never uses ekklēsia for “church” in a denominational sense. There is no United Southern Baptist Church; there is a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) composed of more than 40,000 churches.

The structure of the SBC, with its limited authority, messengers, and voluntary cooperation is what helps to distinguish Baptists from other denominations. And recent controversies in the SBC only make sense when we understand this backdrop. Let’s examine these features of the SBC.

The SBC and the Extent of Authority

This Convention has no authority over any local church. It cannot dictate how a church worships, who it accepts as members, or who it calls as pastors. All such decisions are congregational matters. The Southern Baptist Convention has a budget each year, but it cannot dictate how much any local church must give toward that budget. It passes resolutions at the annual meeting each year, but those resolutions are not binding on any local SBC church; they simply express the convictions of the messengers who attended and voted on those resolutions. Even the term used to describe those who attend the convention is unique. They are not called “delegates,” for that would imply some type of authority that could then obligate the local churches to abide by the decisions reached by their “delegates.” Rather, those attending the annual meeting of the SBC and voting on the various matters before the Convention are called “messengers.” Churches send them to act on behalf of their local church, but they lack any formal representative power.

The SBC and Messengers

These messengers, sent from their local churches, are, in a technical sense, the Southern Baptist Convention when they gather for two days each year. Of course, they cannot make all the decisions necessary to direct all the entities created by Southern Baptists over the years. Still, these messengers, in true congregational fashion, are the highest human authority in the Southern Baptist Convention, and the authority of other individuals and groups flows from them.

Messengers elect a president, who is authorized to appoint a number of committees, most importantly a Committee on Committees. That committee in turn nominates a Committee on Nominations, which must be approved by the messengers. That Committee on Nominations nominates trustees for the various SBC entities (the International Mission Board, the North American Mission Board, Lifeway Christian Resources, six seminaries, Guidestone Financial Resources, and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission). The messengers must approve those nominated to serve as trustees. They then give these trustees the authority to govern the respective entities for which they are trustees.

The final power of messengers, voting for the president of the SBC, was crucial in the movement called the Conservative Resurgence of the 1980s-90s. During that time, churches, alarmed at the theological drift they saw in a number of their entities, sent messengers to vote for a president committed to changing the direction of those entities. Those presidents appointed persons committed to the same type of change to the Committee on Committees. That Committee nominated persons committed to this same type of change to the Committee on Nominations. In turn, these persons nominated other persons committed to change to the various boards of trustees of the SBC entities. These trustees were authorized to make the desired changes in the entities. But the whole process started on the grass roots level, with churches sending messengers committed to acting for change.

One final important group nominated by the Committee on Nominations and approved by the vote of the messengers is the Executive Committee. It does not have authority over any other entity or their Board of Trustees, but it is authorized to act in certain limited ways for the Convention throughout the year when the Convention itself is not in session. Because it represents and speaks for the Convention as a whole, it serves a valuable function in advising the individual entities in how they may cooperate with each other and with state conventions as well. But their power is limited to making recommendations and facilitating communication. Indeed, in recent years a number of important recommendations from the Executive Committee have been rejected and replaced by the messengers during the annual meetings.

The SBC and the Extent of Cooperation

With the lack of any centralized hierarchical authority, what holds the Southern Baptist Convention together and allows it to operate? Some have described it as a rope of sand. Certainly, there has been a large measure of theological agreement. In the past, there was a shared regional identity, and there has been a strong commitment to work together in national and international missions, in theological education, and in the production of literature and other resources. All these have produced a convention that operates by voluntary cooperation, with cooperation being close to a sacred word.

Conventions and earlier Baptist associations have, however, always reserved to themselves one right for local churches—the right to determine their own boundaries. They can say to a local church, “We cannot stop you from doing certain actions. But we can say that you cannot be recognized as a member of this body and do that action.” Until relatively recently, that right was seldom used. Churches who differed on significant matters rarely sought to join Baptist bodies. For a long time, the only requirement for a church to be considered as “a cooperating Southern Baptist church,” with the right to send messengers and vote on matters at the annual Southern Baptist Convention meetings was to give financially in support of Southern Baptist ministries. The rationale was that if a church gave to support missionaries who spread Baptist doctrine, seminaries who taught Baptist doctrine, and a publishing house that published literature supporting Baptist doctrine, they must be in significant agreement with Baptist doctrine.

But in the 1990s, two cooperating Southern Baptist churches acted in a way that moved the Convention to define its boundaries more carefully. One acted to ordain a practicing homosexual. The other performed a wedding ceremony for two gay men. In response, the Convention adopted a further requirement for recognizing a church as a cooperating Southern Baptist Church. It must be a church which “[h]as a faith and practice which closely identifies with the Convention’s adopted statement of faith.” It was understood that any churches that acted to “affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior would be deemed not to be in cooperation with the Convention.”[2]

In 2019, in response to the exposure of dozens of SBC churches covering up instances of sexual abuse, the Convention repurposed a committee called the Credentials Committee, charging it with the responsibility of hearing reports on churches who had not responded appropriately to charges of sexual abuse, especially those involving church staff members. Later, their charge was extended to churches not responding appropriately to cases of racism. This committee was charged with the responsibility of deciding whether or not a church’s action warranted finding them as no longer “a cooperating church.”

The SBC and the Extent of Cooperation in Recent Conversation

This set the stage for the most recent controversy. After some hesitations, the Credentials Committee and the SBC Executive Committee acted to rule five churches as no longer cooperating SBC churches because they employed women as pastors. When two of those churches appealed to the Convention itself, the decision of the Credentials Committee and Executive Committee was overwhelmingly affirmed by the messengers at the June 2023 Convention meeting.

This decision pleased many but alarmed others. The SBC statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message, is clearly complementarian, limiting the office of pastor to men. That position is also taught in SBC seminaries and supported by the overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists. But SBC churches with females as pastors have existed for decades. They were few and small, and there was no move to remove them from being cooperating churches. Perhaps it was the decision of a very large and prominent church, Saddleback Church, to employ women as pastors that moved the Convention to act.

But in any case, the decision to exclude these churches raises an important question for the future: How much theological agreement does the Convention want to require? In terms of the statement in the SBC Constitution, to what degree must a church’s “faith and practice . . . closely identify with the Convention’s adopted statement of faith”? How closely must it identify?

With increasing diversity in racial, ethnic, geographic and generational make-up, some of the elements that fueled voluntary cooperation may be waning. And, despite the conservative resurgence that did return the SBC to its theological roots in the 1990s, theological drift is always a possibility. The need for the future will be careful theological triage, in which we carefully think through what doctrines we must agree on to walk together, what doctrines we recommend but do not require, and what doctrines we recognize as those on which Baptists may disagree.

References

[1] See the evidence for congregationalism in Jonathan Leeman, Don’t Fire Your Church Members: The Case for Congregationalism (Nashville: B & H Academic, 2016) and John S. Hammett, Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2019), 145-72.

[2] This statement is from the SBC Constitution, found in Keith Harper and Amy Whitfield, SBC FAQs: A Ready Reference(Nashville: B & H Academic, 2018), 58.