Southern Baptist Convention

Heritage

Organized in May 1845 at Augusta, Georgia, in a break with northern Baptists over slavery: the Triennial Convention's mission board had declined to appoint slaveholders as missionaries, and the southern churches formed their own convention rather than accept the ruling. That is the founding fact, and the convention itself has said so plainly — at its sesquicentennial in 1995 it adopted a resolution on racial reconciliation lamenting and repudiating its historic defense of slavery, confessing complicity in racism, and asking forgiveness of African American brothers and sisters. Between those two dates it became the largest Protestant body in the United States: 51,379 congregations in RCMS 2020, knit together by the Cooperative Program of unified giving (1925), two mission boards, and six seminaries, and reshaped by the conservative resurgence that began in 1979.

Theological family

Conservative evangelical Baptist, confessed in the Baptist Faith and Message (1925, revised 1963 and 2000): biblical inerrancy, believers' baptism by immersion, a regenerate church membership, and salvation through personal faith in Christ. The confession guides convention entities; it binds no congregation.

Who decides what

Radically congregational beneath a large cooperative superstructure: every church is autonomous, and the convention — messengers gathered annually — cannot direct any congregation on any matter. Cooperation is financial and missional, through the Cooperative Program; state conventions and local associations are likewise voluntary.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor will find anything from a rural church singing from hymnals to a multi-campus congregation with full production — with common marks: preaching at the center, an emphasis on personal decision, believers' baptism, and the Lord's Supper observed periodically as memorial.

What it has always cared about

Missions above all — the International Mission Board, the missionary heroines Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong whose offerings still carry the enterprise, and one of the largest disaster-relief networks in the country; evangelism as every church's work; seminaries that train more pastors than any American body; and the Cooperative Program as a machinery of shared sending.

Its gift to the wider church

The demonstration, at the largest scale American Protestantism has produced, that autonomous congregations can fund and sustain a global mission together — and, in 1995 and since, a hard public example of a church body attempting honesty about its own founding sin.

Commonly confused with

With "Southern" as mere geography — the convention spans all fifty states, and many member churches no longer carry Baptist in their names; with independent Baptists, who share much doctrine but reject convention ties; and with the National Baptist conventions, historically Black bodies with their own histories and records here.

Range of views inside it

Wide: Calvinist and non-Calvinist streams coexist with periodic friction; worship runs traditional to contemporary; churches differ on cooperation levels and cultural-political posture. The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 restricts the office of pastor to men, and disputes over its application continue precisely because congregations are autonomous.

Where Southern Baptist Convention churches are on the map

3,150 Southern Baptist Convention congregations appear on The Church Map, across 53 states.

• Texas — 255
• Georgia — 247
• Florida — 243
• North Carolina — 204
• Alabama — 194
• Tennessee — 188
• Kentucky — 173
• California — 144
• Virginia — 136
• Missouri — 132

Moments this body was part of

• 1845 — The Southern Baptist Convention forms

  When the national Baptist mission boards declined to appoint slaveholders as missionaries, southern churches withdrew and founded the Southern Baptist Convention at Augusta, Georgia in May 1845. In 1995, on its 150th anniversary, the SBC formally repented of its origin, resolving that it had defended slavery and asking forgiveness of African Americans.

  It took 150 years, but the convention said the words out loud: we were wrong. Repentance that specific is rare in institutional history, and it belongs in this story as much as the split does.

• 1949–2005 — Billy Graham and the crusade platform

  From the 1949 Los Angeles tent meetings to Madison Square Garden in 1957 — where the crusade ran sixteen weeks and Martin Luther King Jr. led prayer — Billy Graham preached to more people in person than anyone in history, and he did it on a platform every local church was invited to share. From 1953 he personally removed the segregating ropes at his southern crusades and thereafter refused to preach to a segregated audience.

  A Southern Baptist evangelist made cooperation across denominational and racial lines the visible norm of American evangelism for half a century.

• 1973 — Key 73: a continent called to Christ together

  More than 140 denominations and church bodies — evangelical, mainline, and dozens of Catholic dioceses — undertook simultaneous evangelism across North America in 1973 under the theme "Calling Our Continent to Christ." It was the broadest formal evangelistic cooperation in American history, and Catholic participation in a joint evangelistic year was without precedent.

  For one year, nearly the whole width of this taxonomy knocked on doors at the same time, on purpose.