Southern Baptist Convention

The Southern Baptist Convention does not describe its own founding as an accident of geography. It was organized in May 1845 at First Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, after the American Baptist Home Mission Society, then the cooperative body funding Baptist missionaries nationwide, refused to commission a missionary who owned enslaved people. Rather than accept a mission board that would not appoint slaveholders, Baptist delegates from the southern states withdrew and formed their own convention explicitly to continue supporting missionaries who held enslaved people as property.

For 150 years the Convention's own official histories treated this founding largely as a matter of regional organization. That changed in 1995, when delegates meeting for the Convention's sesquicentennial adopted a formal Resolution on Racial Reconciliation, stating plainly that Southern Baptists had failed, in many cases, to support, and had often opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African Americans, and repenting of racism in all its forms. The resolution named the 1845 founding itself, over the refusal to commission a slaveholding missionary, as the origin the Convention was asking forgiveness for.

The Southern Baptist Convention is today the largest Protestant denomination in the United States by membership, its early defense of slavery long since repudiated in its own official record even as the Convention it produced has grown into a body many times the size of the mission societies it once broke from.

No Southern Baptist congregation answers to a bishop, a presbytery or the Convention itself. Each local church is fully self-governing, calling and dismissing its own pastor, owning its own property and setting its own membership standards, a principle Baptists have called soul liberty since the movement's seventeenth century English beginnings. What binds tens of thousands of such congregations into a single recognizable denomination is not authority but cooperation: churches voluntarily contribute to the Cooperative Program, the Convention's shared funding mechanism for missions, seminaries and disaster relief, and send messengers to the annual Convention meeting, which can set denominational policy for its own agencies but cannot compel any individual church to follow it.

Shared doctrine is expressed the same voluntary way, through The Baptist Faith and Message, first adopted in 1925 and most recently revised in 2000. Unlike the creeds of older traditions, it is offered as a consensus statement rather than a binding test of orthodoxy for member churches, though Convention seminaries and mission agencies require their own employees to affirm it. The 2000 revision states that the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture, a position the Convention has increasingly enforced in recent years through its Credentials Committee, which reviews whether individual churches remain in friendly cooperation with the Convention's own confession, including this restriction.

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.