Baptist governance is the purest form of congregationalism among the large Protestant families, and it explains both the tradition's energy and its fissility.
Each local church is autonomous and complete. It calls and dismisses its own pastor, admits and disciplines its own members, owns its own property and answers to no bishop, presbytery or synod. Decisions are taken by the members in a church meeting, often by simple majority. There is no court of appeal above it, because Baptists deny that any such court has authority.
Associations, conventions and unions exist and do a great deal, missions, seminaries, disaster relief, pensions, publishing, but their power over a member church is limited to one thing: they can decline to associate with it. A convention cannot order a congregation to do anything. It can withdraw fellowship, which is exactly how the Southern Baptist Convention has acted in recent years against churches with women serving as pastors and against churches judged to have mishandled abuse allegations.
Confessions are treated accordingly. Baptists write them, and describe them as statements of what a body currently believes rather than binding creeds, which is why Baptist confessions are revised. The Southern Baptist Convention revised its Baptist Faith and Message in 1963 and again in 2000, and the 2000 revision, restricting the pastoral office to men, and removing a clause about Christ as the criterion for interpreting Scripture, was the endpoint of the conservative resurgence of 1979 onward, a deliberate and successful campaign to change who appointed the convention's seminary faculty and agency heads.
Where there is no hierarchy, control is exercised through appointments and through withdrawal of fellowship, and the Baptist record shows both used to full effect.