The national convention maintains a central administrative organization in Nashville, Tennessee. Its executive committee exercises authority and control over seminaries and other institutions owned by the national convention.

The national convention had around 10,000 ethnic churches as of 2008. Commitment to the autonomy of local churches was the primary force behind its executive committee's rejection of a proposal to create a convention-wide database of clergy accused of sexual crimes against congregants or other minors in order to stop the "recurring tide" of clergy sexual abuse within affiliated congregations. A 2009 study by Lifeway Christian Resources, the convention's research and publishing arm, revealed that one in eight background checks for potential volunteer or church workers revealed a history of crime that could have prevented them from working.

The denominational statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message,

Annual meeting

thumb|upright=1.15|President [[Jimmy Carter addressing the SBC in Atlanta in 1978 (in 2000, Carter broke with the SBC over its position on the status of women)]]

The annual meeting (held in June over two days) consists of delegates (called "messengers") from cooperating churches. The messengers confer, determine the convention's programs, policies, and budget, and elect the officers and committees. Each cooperating church is allowed up to two messengers regardless of the amount given to convention entities and may have more depending on the amount of contributions (in dollars or percent of the church's budget), but the maximum number of messengers permitted from any church is 12.

Missions and affiliated organizations

Cooperative Program

The Cooperative Program (CP) is the organization's unified funds collection and distribution program for the support of regional, national, and international ministries; contributions from affiliated congregations fund the CP.

In the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008, the local congregations of the denomination reported gift receipts of $11.1 billion. From this they sent $548 million, approximately five percent, to their state Baptist conventions through the CP. Southern Baptist Disaster Relief provides many different types: food, water, child care, communication, showers, laundry, repairs, rebuilding, or other essential tangible items that contribute to the resumption of life following the crisis—and the message of the Gospel. All assistance is provided to individuals and communities free of charge. SBC DR volunteer kitchens prepare much of the food distributed by the Red Cross in major disasters.

Southern Baptist Association of Christian Schools

The SBC has various primary and secondary schools affiliated with the Southern Baptist Association of Christian Schools.

Universities and colleges

thumb|221x221px|Sheila and Walter Umphrey Law Center, [[Baylor University in Waco, Texas, affiliated with the convention through the Texas Baptists]]

The SBC has several affiliated universities.

Seminaries

thumb|[[New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary's chapel]]

The national convention directly supports six theological seminaries devoted to ministry preparation.

  • Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky (1859, originally in Greenville, South Carolina)
  • Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas (1908, originally part of Baylor University in Waco, Texas).
  • New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, Louisiana (1916, originally New Orleans Baptist Bible Institute)
  • Gateway Seminary, Ontario, California (1944, initially in Oakland, California, and formerly called Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary)
  • Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, North Carolina (1950)
  • Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri (1957)

Other organizations

Other notable organizations under the national convention include:

  • Baptist Press, the nation's largest Christian news service, established by the convention in 1946;
  • Baptist Collegiate Network, the college-level organization operating campus and international missions typically known as the Baptist Student Union and Baptist Collegiate Ministries;
  • GuideStone Financial Resources (formerly called the Annuity Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, and founded in 1918 as the Relief Board of the Southern Baptist Convention), which provides insurance, retirement, and investment services to churches, ministers, and employees of affiliated churches and agencies (it also provides these services to non-SBC churches and church members);
  • LifeWay Christian Resources, founded as the Baptist Sunday School Board in 1891, one of the nation's largest Christian publishing houses, which previously operated the "LifeWay Christian Stores" (formerly "Baptist Book Stores") until closing physical stores in 2019;
  • Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (formerly known as the Christian Life Commission of the SBC), dedicated to addressing social and moral concerns and their implications on public policy issues from city hall to Congress and the courts; and
  • the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, in Nashville, Tennessee, the official depository for the denomination's archives and a research center for the study of Baptists worldwide. The SBHLA website includes digital resources.

Controversies

From its establishment to the present day, the organization has experienced several periods of major internal controversy.

Landmark controversy

In the 1850s–1860s, a group of young activists called for a return to certain early practices, or what they called Landmarkism. Other leaders disagreed with their assertions, and the Baptist congregations became split on the issues. Eventually, the disagreements led to the formation of Gospel Missions and the American Baptist Association (1924), as well as many unaffiliated independent churches. One historian called the related James Robinson Graves—Robert Boyte Crawford Howell controversy (1858–60) the greatest to affect the denomination before that of the late 20th century involving the fundamentalist-moderate break.

Whitsitt controversy

In the Whitsitt controversy of 1896–99, William H. Whitsitt, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, suggested that contrary to earlier thought, English Baptists did not begin to baptize by immersion until 1641, when some Anabaptists, as they were then called, began to practice immersion. This went against the idea of immersion, which was the practice of the earliest Baptists, as some Landmarkists contended.

American Civil War

During the 19th and most of the 20th century, the organization, reflecting Southern attitudes toward politics, supported white supremacy, racial segregation, the Confederacy, and the Lost Cause. The organization also denounced interracial marriage as an "abomination", citing the Bible. In the 1970s, other convention seminary professors came under suspicion of liberal Christianity.

In response to these events, a group of pastors led by Judge Paul Pressler and Pastor Paige Patterson campaigned at conferences in churches for a more conservative direction in Convention policies. This group's candidate, Adrian Rogers, was elected Convention president at the 1979 annual meeting. After the election, the organization's new leaders replaced all Southern Baptist agency leaders with people who said they were more conservative. Its initiators called it a "Southern Baptist Convention conservative resurgence", while its moderate opponents called it a "fundamentalist takeover".

Russell H. Dilday, president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1978 to 1994, said the resurgence fragmented Southern Baptist fellowship and was "far more serious than [a controversy]", calling it as "a self-destructive, contentious, one-sided feud that at times took on combative characteristics". Since 1979, Southern Baptists had become polarized into two major groups: moderates and conservatives. Reflecting the conservative majority votes of messengers at the 1979 annual meeting of the SBC, the new national organization officers replaced all leaders of Southern Baptist agencies with presumably more conservative people (often dubbed "fundamentalist" by dissenters).

In 1984, this group was heavily involved in passing a resolution excluding women from pastoral leadership. A group of moderate churches criticized the denomination for the same reasons, as well as opposition to women's ministry, and founded the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991.

In 2019, after the scandals of sexual abuse accusations involving the deacon Paul Pressler and sexual abuse cover-ups involving former president Paige Patterson, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary removed the stained-glass windows from the MacGorman Chapel opened in 2011 depicting them as actors of a "conservative resurgence".

Marriage

Since 1976, the Convention has adopted 22 resolutions supporting only marriage between a man and a woman and opposing same-sex marriage.

Since 1992, the national convention has "disfellowshipped" various churches that support LGBTQ inclusion. In 2018, the District of Columbia Baptist Convention was disfellowshipped for this reason.

On June 10, 2025, at the annual meeting in Dallas, the convention voted overwhelmingly in favor of working to overturn the legal right to same-sex marriage. It was the first time the SBC had asked representatives of its member churches to do this.

Critical race theory

By November 2020, the six convention seminary presidents called critical race theory "unbiblical". They emphasized the importance of not turning to secular ideas to confront racism. Four African American churches left the SBC over the leadership's charged statement on the issue.

See also

  • List of Baptist denominations
  • List of Southern Baptist Convention affiliated people
  • List of the largest Protestant denominations
  • Evangelicalism in the United States
  • Southern Baptist Convention Presidents
  • Christian views on slavery
  • Christianity in the United States
  • Religion in the United States

Notes

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

Further reading

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  • Barnes, William. The Southern Baptist Convention, 1845–1953 Broadman Press, 1954.
  • Eighmy, John. Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists. University of Tennessee Press, 1972.
  • Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists: Presenting Their History, Doctrine, Polity, Life, Leadership, Organization & Work Knoxville: Broadman Press, v 1–2 (1958), 1500 pp; 2 supplementary volumes 1958 and 1962; vol 5. Index, 1984
  • Farnsley II, Arthur Emery, Southern Baptist Politics: Authority and Power in the Restructuring of an American Denomination; Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994
  • Flowers, Elizabeth H. Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power Since World War II (University of North Carolina Press; 2012) 263 pages; examines women's submission to male authority as a pivotal issue in the clash between conservatives and moderates in the SBC
  • Fuller, A. James. Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South (2002)
  • Gatewood, Willard. Controversy in the 1920s: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and Evolution. Vanderbilt University Press, 1969.
  • Harvey, Paul. Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925. University of North Carolina Press, 1997
  • Hill, Samuel, et al. Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (2005)
  • Hunt, Alma. Woman's Missionary Union (1964) Online free
  • Kell, Carl L. and L. Raymond Camp, In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
  • Kidd, Thomas S. and Barry Hankins. Baptists in America: A History. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • Leonard, Bill J. God's Last and Only Hope: The Fragmentation of the Southern Baptist Convention. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990.
  • Lumpkin, William L. Baptist History in the South: Tracing through the Separates the Influence of the Great Awakening, 1754–1787 (1995)
  • McSwain, Larry L. Loving Beyond Your Theology: The Life and Ministry of Jimmy Raymond Allen (Mercer University Press; 2010) 255 pages. A biography of the Arkansas-born pastor (b. 1927), who was the last moderate president of the SBC
  • Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of 20th Century Evangelicalism. Oxford University Press, 1980.
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  • Scales, T. Laine. All That Fits a Woman: Training Southern Baptist Women for Charity and Mission, 1907–1926 Mercer U. Press 2002
  • Smith, Oran P. The Rise of Baptist Republicanism (1997), on recent voting behavior
  • Spain, Rufus B. At Ease in Zion: A Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865–1900 (1961)
  • Sutton, Jerry. The Baptist Reformation: The Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention (2000).
  • Wills, Gregory A. Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785–1900. Oxford University Press, 1997
  • Yarnell III, Malcolm B. The Formation of Christian Doctrine (2007), on Baptist theology