The Southern Baptist Convention Has a Problem with Power

The denomination is robbing local churches of their identity and calling

I tell people sometimes that my family was Southern Baptist before Southern Baptist was a thing. What I mean is that the Turner clan in north Georgia embraced the spirit, culture and beliefs of what only later was called Southern Baptist before the Southern Baptist Convention itself came into being. You can see the marker commemorating the birth of the SBC in 1845 at the corner of Greene Street and Jackson Street in Augusta, Georgia. You can read the gravestones of my ancestors going back decades earlier in the cemetery behind Oak Grove Baptist Church in Blairsville, Georgia. For my family and many others like us, the local church has always come before the national denomination.

My father and mother knew both local and national dimensions of Southern Baptist life, growing up in small churches at opposite ends of the state before attending the same Southern Baptist college, Truett-McConnell Junior College in Cleveland, Georgia. Dad was a baseball player while mom was a music major but they somehow found each other and within a few months knew that they would be married. Their marriage wouldn’t have happened apart from the local church environment that both came out of.

Their lives never strayed far from that religious heritage. As the years went by, with three sons and promising careers, they somehow found time to work part-time in Southern Baptist churches, my father as a music director and my mother as organist and pianist. Indeed, my faith was formed in and by the churches that my parents served through my childhood and student years. I can still name every one of them. Hilton Terrace Baptist Church followed by Beallwood Baptist Church, both in Columbus, Georgia. When we moved to Atlanta, my parents took their accustomed positions first at Orchard Knob Baptist Church and later at Second Baptist Church of Forest Park, Georgia. Much later, when my mom died in a car accident, she was buried in the cemetery of Salem Baptist Church in Mcdonough, Georgia, the church where she and dad had settled in retirement.

When I began studies at the University of Georgia, my denominational background led me to join the Baptist Student Union where I spent a glorious couple of years as part of a singing group. We travelled to churches across the state for concerts, retreats and anything else the host congregations asked us to do. I think sometimes that I’ve visited more Southern Baptist churches than many denominational executives. It was in the middle of my travels that I felt called into the pastorate, something that didn’t surprise anyone.

My next step was a Southern Baptist pastoral education, so off I went to Southern Seminary, the oldest and best known of our denomination’s six seminaries. Over the span of several years I earned two degrees, the Master of Divinity and the Doctor of Ministry. More importantly I met my wife, who was also studying for the ministry and had as long and deep a Southern Baptist heritage as I did. We were married by her father, a Southern Baptist pastor, at the First Baptist Church of Bamberg, South Carolina.

Following graduation, my wife and I began our full-time ministry serving local Southern Baptist churches, first in South Carolina then in North Carolina and now back in South Carolina. Through the decades of our long ministry, we’ve witnessed more demonstrations of God’s grace at work in local congregations than I have time and space here to describe. If Jerry Garcia described his time with the Grateful Dead as a “long strange trip” I would describe my life as an SBC pastor as a “full rich journey.” Foundational to it all has been the grace, generosity and depth of the Southern Baptist congregations I’ve known. No other group has the unique mixture of love for the Bible, passion for evangelism and missions, flair for the dramatic, revivalist fervor, appreciation for preaching and blue-collar ethic (even among those who are professionals). Southern Baptist people are my tribe and Southern Baptist churches are my love language. I’ve cherished every moment with them; well, to be honest, I’ve cherished some moments more than others but on balance I wouldn’t change anything.

When I think back over the churches I’ve known, the image that comes to mind is the tidal pools strewn like jewels across the rocky Maine coastline. Filling depressions in the rock when the tide receeds, the pools undergo some sort of biological magic that makes them self-sustaining. Seaweed, seagrasses and algaes—in shades of blue, green and red—grow in the pools as they do in the open ocean, only in miniature. Blue mussels line the edges while tiny green crabs make their way across the bottom. A minnow or two may hide beneath the seaweed, waiting for a morsel to drift across their path. The pools resemble nothing so much as a perfectly arranged aquarium, each one being a self-contained ecosystem. I discovered the tidal pools years ago while on vacation at Acadia National Park and have never been able to forget them. Now I know why. They’re the perfect representation of the unique beauty and status of local churches: each one delicately balanced and complete, each one having its own beauty and place.

At least that’s the way it used to be. But, today, Southern Baptist churches with all their quirky beauty and unique personalities are in grave danger. Not so much because of the overall trend of church decline (although that plays a role) but because the Southern Baptist Convention as a whole no longer recognizes local church autonomy; no longer values local church identity; no longer nutures local church initiative. Instead, our denomination has become a sprawling, religious corporation in which executives at the top determine the agendas and set the direction for local congregations.

Today’s Southern Baptist Convention has a problem with power. Local churches—which may still exist in name—in fact are being overtaken (a better word might be “consumed”) by the dominating leadership and financial appetite of the larger denomination. Another way of understanding where we are is to return to the tidal pool illustration I used earlier. Alongside the tidal pools that are fully alive with their ecosystems intact there are other tidal pools in a far different situation. For whatever reason—an improper balance between the various elements the pools contain, the work of predators like seagulls, a change of weather—these other pools are little more than mud puddles. Motionless and still, without diversity or loveliness, united only by the same dull, lifeless color of sand and silt.

Our crisis has its roots in a wide variety of decisions and trends but two seem to have a special impact on the loss of local church autonomy. The first is the way the Baptist Faith and Message (our denominational statement of doctrine) is being used as an instrument of control. The second is the financial initiative known as the Great Commission Resurgence.

The Baptist Faith and Message

Baptists don’t believe in creeds but we do believe in confessions of faith. The difference between the two is that creeds are definitive and must be believed while confessions are descriptive and may be believed. For example, the Nicene Creed has historically defined the essentials of the Christian faith, including the doctrine of the Trinity. To be a Christian of any denominational persuasion requires a belief in the Trinity as expressed in the Nicene Creed, something that even Southern Baptists agree on. Confessions on the other hand are general statements of doctrinal conviction that express the distinctives of particular faith traditions. The Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, is the historic statement of doctrine for, especially, Reformed denominations. Its adherents would agree that you can be a Christian without accepting all the doctrinal points the confession lays out (like predestination); just not a good one.

Southern Baptists have generally steered away from creeds or confessions because we believe the Bible should be our only standard for belief and sole definition of doctrine. But over time we’ve adopted a couple of editions of a confession that we call “The Baptist Faith and Message” as a means of more clearly delineating our doctrinal stance on critical issues. The first edition was approved by the SBC annual conference in 1963 and found wide-spread support as a general statement of what we believe. The second edition was adopted in 2000 and brought more clarity to key SBC doctrines. Neither was intended for use as a defining doctrinal document because, as Southern Baptists, we’ve never regarded confessions in that light. But over the last few years, that stance has changed as the BF&M 2000 has become a flashpoint in what it says regarding women serving as pastors. The source of disagreement is found in Article 6, The Church: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” I don’t have time in this essay to dig down into the biblical stance of women in church leadership (I’ll be happy to do that later). My goal instead is to point out how the topic has become an inflection point for conflict and an instrument of centralized control within the SBC.

The matter of women pastors came to a head at our annual conference in 2022 when Saddleback Church in Los Angeles was voted out of the SBC by a large majority of messengers (that’s what we call delegates from the churches) for ordaining women into the pastoral role. Regardless of what you may think of women serving as pastors, throwing a church out of the SBC over an issue unrelated to moral failure or major doctrinal error had never before been done. On a deeper level, what the SBC did with Saddleback Church was to treat our “Confession” as a “Creed” for determining who’s in our fellowship and who’s out. Just this week, it was reported that the Executive Committee (the main administrative body of the SBC in between annual meetings) has taken matters even further by announcing that it planned at the next annual conference to bring a motion to expell 1000 churches from the SBC for the crime of having female staff members with the word “pastor” in the their job title.

We opened Pandora’s Box with the Saddleback Church vote, and now the drive to control has taken on a more ominous direction. Our denominational leadership is now looking to the Credentials Committee, the group charged at the annual convention to make sure messengers are duly authorized by their churches, to certify only those messengers who come from churches in alignment with the BF&M 2000. Not just regarding women pastors but other topics as well. In other words, the local church is no longer in charge of its own messengers. The denomination itself has stepped in to ensure that only churches that agree with it may be allowed to participate.

The Great Commission Resurgence

A second sign of the centralized control that’s eroding Southern Baptist churches is something called the Great Commission Resurgence (GCR). Now before I jump down this rabbit hole, let me warn you that while it’s dense and complicated, few recent developments in the SBC so perfectly captures the way our denomination is forgetting the priority of the local church.

Like almost all of our denomination’s initiatives and programs, the GCR began with what was publically communicated as a desire to call the SBC back to a focus on evangelism and missions. Initiated in 2009 by President Johnny Hunt, the GCR rolled through various committee meetings (whose deliberations for unknown reasons were sealed for fifteen years) before it was finally adopted by the SBC in 2010. The seven points of the GCR were:

Getting the Mission Right

Making Our Values Transparent

Celebrating and Empowering Great Commission Giving

Reaching North America

Reaching Unreached and Underserved People Groups within North America

Promoting the Cooperative Program and Elevating Stewardship

The Call of the Nations and the SBC Allocation Budget

While the call to a new focus on missions and evangelism is laudable, the substance of the proposal is purely financial (3 of the 7 points focus on finances). And here’s where things get sticky.

The funding mechanism for the entire SBC structure is called the Cooperative Program (CP), an ingenious method of tying local church budgets to the several layers of larger denominational entities. The first layer is the local church, which designates a portion of its annual budget to the CP within its respective state. The second layer is the state convention (there are 41 separate state or regional conventions). Each state convention then chooses how much of the CP money from its constituent churches remains in state in order to fund its own ministries and how much may be forwarded on to the third layer, the national ministries of the SBC as a whole. That’s where the money is pooled in order to fund primarily the missions initiatives that our denomination is known for: the International Missions Board (IMB) and the North American Missions Board (NAMB). A smaller amount of the CP funds goes to our six seminaries. The system works well, generating about $200 million per year for the national SBC.

A few years ago, a group of leaders at the national level came up with a scheme to get more money out of the states beyond what the states were already giving through normal CP channels. Giving it the grand title of “Great Commission Resurgance" (Southern Baptists love program titles with biblical words because it makes any opposition sound unbiblical), the leaders proposed that each state lower the proportion of CP money kept within their state and raise the proportion sent on the national level. For example, if a state had been practicing a 60/40 split, the GCR called for a change to a 50/50 split. The presssure was enormous and within a short period of time the scheme succeeded. The net result was that the state levels suffered while the national level prospered. In plain language, the centralized beauracracy trumped local control, the same principle that’s being applied throughout SBC life.

Whatever you think of the GCR, two things are evident. First, it was a top-down initiative. The leaders of the convention proposed and pushed through the intiative and the state conventions were then brought to heel. Second, the net impact of the GCR was a transfer of funds from the local level (in this case, the local churches that make up each state convention) to the national level. It consolidated the flow of funds in a way that prioritized the national over the local levels of SBC life. While many state conventions seem now to be returning to more normal funding patterns, the damage was done. The GCR amounted to a power grab at the expense of local churches. In a day of tightening financial resources, we can expect more of the same thing.

Today, we’re seeing the inexorable drive toward a centralized authority structure within the SBC. We have a centralized funding mechanism called the Cooperative Program. We have a centralized bureaucracy called the Executive Committee overseeing the system. We have an expectation of centralized support for all the centralized agencies. We have a centralized creed called the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 being used as a club to keep unruly churches in line. To a denomination that was cobbled together from small churches with a common interest in gospel ministry and a love of freedom, the drive to invest power in a small circle who will tell us what to do, how to do it and who we can do it with is a far reach.

The SBC was conceived, founded and built on local churches cooperating for the sake of the gospel. Somewhere along the way, it’s become a massive organization dedicated to bringing local churches into conformity with its own bureaucratic wants and needs. That’s a mistake grown large enough to threaten the SBC’s continued existence. The answer is to return to our roots and focus on the health and mission of the churches that make up the denomination.