Two controversy clusters run through the Southern Baptist Convention's own documented record, and both carry the Convention's own response alongside the finding.
The Convention was organised in May 1845 at Augusta, Georgia, after the American Baptist Home Mission Society refused to commission a missionary who owned enslaved people; Baptist delegates from the southern states withdrew specifically to keep supporting missionaries who held people as property. For a century and a half the Convention's own histories treated this mainly as regional organisation. That changed on the sesquicentennial in 1995, when delegates adopted a formal Resolution on Racial Reconciliation, naming the 1845 founding directly, repenting of racism and apologising to African Americans.
The second cluster is the 2021 to 2022 sexual abuse investigation. The Convention's own Sexual Abuse Task Force commissioned Guidepost Solutions, an outside investigations firm, to examine the national Executive Committee's handling of abuse allegations from January 2000 through June 2021. Guidepost's 288 page report, released May 2022, found the Committee had secretly maintained an internal list of accused pastors and workers while its leaders told survivors and the public no such list existed, and that its leadership was focused chiefly on limiting the Convention's own legal liability. The finding concerns the national Executive Committee; the Convention's roughly 47,000 member churches are each self-governing and not centrally supervised.
Commissioning that outside investigation of its own leadership is the Convention's documented response. This record does not yet carry a further reform account beyond the report's own commissioning and findings.