As some drop ‘Southern’ from name, Southern Baptists seem to be moving forward

According to the Washington Post’s religion writer, Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Southern Baptist Convention churches are increasingly dropping the “Southern” part of their name.

The SBC, as the denomination is often called, is not officially renaming itself.

But SBC churches are autonomous, and many Southern Baptist leaders are rebranding themselves as “Great Commission Baptists,” both as a reflections of “the racial reckoning underway in the United States,” Bailey writes, “and because many have long seen the ‘Southern Baptist’ name as too regional for a global group of believers.”

As a former Southern Baptist myself, raised as the son of a Southern Baptist preacher, I see this change in names as simultaneously laudable and overdue.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, with 50,000 congregations and 14.5 million members.

It was formed in 1845 when Baptists in the South split with Northern Baptists over slavery. Those earliest Southern Baptists not only defended slavery, but their successors supported segregation for generations to come.

My family’s Southern Baptist story is almost comical. My dad was raised in another Baptist sect so conservative that when he moved to the SBC his mother, particularly, thought he’d become a raving liberal, if not an all-out reprobate. If you perceive the Southern Baptists as liberals—well, I have no words adequate to address that.

I left the Baptists in my early 20s to become a Pentecostal. But I remain grateful for a number of teachings I learned from them that have stood me in good stead, that I defend and treasure:

▪ Priesthood of the believer. The Baptists said Christians didn’t need priests or any other human hierarchy to mediate between them and God. Every believer was a priest who enjoyed direct, unconditional access to the Lord. All Christians were free to make up their own minds, say their own prayers and form their own consciences without interference from anybody.

▪ Primacy of Scripture. Studying the Bible continues to be among the great passions of my life. I received that love from the Baptists. To them, the Bible was God’s ultimate word on most everything. We were encouraged to know that word inside out.

▪ Separation of church and state. Having been the objects of government persecution in their early years, Baptists held that anytime a church got mixed up with the state, or vice versa, both institutions were bound to be corrupted.

▪ Security of the believer. Baptists said if you’d ever been truly converted to faith in Jesus, you could never be separated from him. It was the Lord himself who, through his grace, held you fast. I adhere to that and thank God for it.

All these things said, there were a couple of other dimensions to the Southern Baptist faiths that bothered me a lot:

▪ Rejection of the Holy Spirit’s gifts. I’m told many Baptists have modified their views on this in the years since I left. I hope so.

But in the 1970s my dad was instantly healed of Stage 4 cancer after he was prayed for. I was astonished to discover that largely our fellow Baptists rejected his healing outright. A popular doctrine held that all miracles had ceased in the First Century.

I found this view ridiculous. To me, it was as if these folks were determined to prove the Lord wouldn’t possibly do what he obviously had just done. My idea was that God—being, after all, God—wasn’t bound by our preconceptions. He was free to act as he pleased and didn’t need our permission. (My father lived another 35 years without a recurrence of cancer and died in his 80s.)

▪ Racial prejudice. The SBC’s birth in slavery and its coming of age in the Jim Crow South shaped its attitudes on race.

The denomination has tried in recent decades to mend that. As Bailey reported, in 1995 the convention issued a formal apology for its complicity in slavery and racism.

I remember that apology. It appeared way too little, way too late. I told somebody the SBC had discovered the civil rights movement—40 years after the rest of the country.

But the SBC has lived up to its apology. Twenty percent of the denomination’s churches now are led by pastors of color, including 63 percent of new churches launched last year. Dropping the “Southern” from churches’ names is another step in the proper direction.

I’ve always considered Southern Baptists my kin—literally, figuratively and spiritually. As families do, this one bequeathed me a mixed heritage. There was more good in the family than bad, though.

On the issue of race, I think the SBC is trying. Its efforts seem genuine.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 3:02 PM with the headline "As some drop ‘Southern’ from name, Southern Baptists seem to be moving forward."