Southern Baptist Convention

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The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is an association of Baptist congregations and churches based in the United States that supports Baptist churches around the world. The term Southern Baptist Convention refers to both the denomination and the annual delegate meeting.

The SBC is the largest Baptist group and the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. In 2017, it comprised more than 47,500 congregations with 15 million members in all fifty American states. It maintains nearly 9,000 missionaries, including around 5,300 in the United States and around 3,700 abroad. Since 1990, the percentage of Southern Baptists in the total American population has decreased.

Most of the communities the SBC has in the southern states , where they have exercised considerable influence in the past. To date, there is little or no legal gambling in some southern states, and in many counties there, the trade in alcohol or the drinking of alcohol in public is prohibited - in part due to the work of the Southern Baptists.

As Baptists are convinced of the principle of the independence of the local church, the SBC is more of a cooperative in which the churches pool their resources than a body with administrative control over the local churches. It maintains an administrative center in Nashville , which has no authority over the affiliated associations, communities or members. The churches and members are also not bound by their “ creed, ” Baptist Faith and Message .

history

Founding and 19th century

Baptists came to the southern states in the late 17th century. The first Baptist Church of the South was organized in Charleston, South Carolina . The director was William Screven, a preacher and shipbuilder who had come from Maine in 1669. The main contribution to the spread of Baptism in the southern United States was made by the zealously evangelizing Separate Baptists . The first associations formed in the south were the Charleston Association (1751) and the Sandy Creek Association (1758). Southern Baptists participated in the founding of the first national Baptist association in 1814, the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions (better known as the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions or the Triennial Convention as they are all gathered for three years).

In the 1830s, the abolitionist movement also gripped the Baptist communities in the northern states , while the Baptists in the southern states mostly defended slavery . The disagreements between Northern and Southerners over the slave issue became evident in the Triennial Convention of 1841 and also captured the American Baptist Home Mission Society, founded in 1832 and responsible for domestic missions . Both the Triennial Convention and the American Baptist Home Mission Society declared their neutrality on the slave issue. But some Southern Baptists were not convinced by the protestations. They knew that some of the leading figures at the Triennial Convention, as well as the Home Mission Society, were abolitionists. To clarify (and challenge) the Home Mission Society's stance, the Georgia Baptist Convention proposed that the Home Mission Society appoint slave owner and elder James E. Reeve as a missionary ("Georgia Test Case"). The board of directors of the Home Mission Society rejected this in October 1844, among other things on the grounds that someone who continued to keep slaves could not be commissioned as a missionary.

The slave question has been the main cause of the division among Baptists in the United States; the "Georgia Test Case" gave the occasion. Another source of discontent in the southern churches was that, in their opinion, the Home Mission Society was unwilling to send adequate numbers of missionaries to the southern states.

Eventually the tensions led to the break; the “Georgia Test Case” broke the barrel. The Southern Baptist Convention was organized at a gathering of delegates from the southern congregations from May 8-12, 1845 in Augusta, Georgia . Its first president was William Bullein Johnson (1782–1862), who had already chaired the Triennial Convention in 1841.

The Baptists of the North and those of the South sought different forms of organization. The Baptists of the North preferred loosely structured communities of individuals who paid annual dues, with each community oriented towards a specific service. The Baptists of the South, on the other hand, preferred an amalgamation of congregations, organized at the state level, under the roof of a common church.

19th and 20th centuries

In 1991 the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) separated from the Southern Baptist Convention. The cause was the takeover of the church leadership by conservative theologians. As a result of their strategy, conservative theologians obtained a majority in the SBC in several elections in order to push their candidate through. These presidents then appointed Conservative theological representatives to make decisions within the SBC. Frustrated moderate and liberal Baptist theologians met in Atlanta , Georgia in 1990 and organized the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship .

In October 2004, due to differences of opinion, the SBC withdrew from the Baptist World Alliance ( Baptist World Alliance , BWA).

In the summer of 2012, around 7,700 SBC delegates elected Fred Luter as president. This was the first time a black chairman of the church union became. In May, 86 percent of pastors said in a poll that it would be good if a black man were at the top. At the age of 21, Luter found faith in Jesus Christ after a serious motorcycle accident. Luter's successors as president of SBC were Ronnie Floyd (2014-2016), Steve Gaines (2016-2018) and James David Greear (since 2018).

The SBC is the origin of the chastity project True Love Waits ( "True Love Waits", TLW ).

Turning away from racism

In June 1995, on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the association, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a "Resolution on the Reconciliation of the Races". In it, the Southern Baptists declare that racism is contrary to the Gospel and sin, they complain about the wrong done and its dire consequences, they confess their guilt and ask for forgiveness from African Americans .

Beliefs of the SBC

The general theological direction of the churches in the Southern Baptist Convention is set out in the document Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M) . This document was drafted in 1925, heavily revised in 1963 and then in 2000, with the 2000 revision giving rise to considerable differences of opinion.

BF&M is not understood as a "creed" in the sense of the Nicea creed - the members and the affiliated churches are not bound by it. Only employees of the organs of the SBC, that is, the professors at the six theology seminars and the missionaries of the two mission organs, the International Mission Board (IMB) and the North American Mission Board (NAMB), have to sign these articles of faith. Nevertheless, many of the churches of the SBC have adopted the BF&M as their Statement of Faith or Statement of Doctrine instead of formulating their own. Although the BF&M is not a “creed,” missionaries entering the service of any of the SBC's mission societies are expected to make a statement that their actions, teaching and preaching are in accordance with the BF&M . This statement has also been the subject of controversy.

On June 14, 2000, the representatives of the SBC voted in a vote in the context of the document BF&M that the role of the pastor according to the biblical interpretation is only intended for men and rejected the ordination of women . However, this vote on this question of faith is only an expression of the majority opinion in the SBC and individual congregations within the SBC may appoint women as pastors if they want to. A study found that within the SBC, less than 0.1% of churches (35 out of 40,000 congregations) had a female pastor.

Politically, the SBC is close to conservative positions and has mostly supported the candidates of the Republican Party in elections since the last third of the 20th century .

In autumn 2002, the SBC endorsed the Iraq war . Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Freedom, drafted the so-called country letter , an open letter to President Bush, a military operation in accordance with the doctrine of just war of the church father Augustine justified. Other evangelical figures followed suit with this letter. After the invasion, she sent several American and Iraqi missionaries to the country in the Middle East, several of whom were murdered by terrorists near Mosul in May 2004 after working on a hydraulic engineering project .

Important figures of the Southern Baptists

See also

Portal: Baptists  - Overview of Wikipedia content on the topic of Baptists

literature

in order of appearance

  • Grady C. Cothen: The new SBC. Fundamentalism's impact on the Southern Baptist Convention . Smyth & Helwys, Macon 1995, ISBN 1-57312-025-1 .
  • Carl L. Kell: In the Name of the Father. The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention . Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 2001, ISBN 0-8093-2220-X .
  • Barry Hankins: Uneasy in Babylon. Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture . University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa 2002, ISBN 0-8173-1142-4 .
  • Carl L. Kell: Exiled. Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War . University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 2006.
  • Joe Early (Ed.): Readings in Baptist History: Four Centuries of Selected Documents . B & H Publishing Group, Nashville 2008.
  • Robert E. Johnson: A global introduction to Baptist churches . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-87781-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Fast facts about the Southern Baptist Convention , accessed April 6, 2019.
  2. ^ Baptist Press, Southern Baptist Convention: Annual Church Profile & more of the SBC story , November 9, 2018, accessed April 6, 2019.
  3. ^ Robert E. Johnson: A global introduction to Baptist churches . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, p. 150.
  4. ^ The Georgia Test Case and the Alabama Resolutions . In: Joe Early (Ed.): Readings in Baptist History: Four Centuries of Selected Documents . B & H Publishing Group, Nashville 2008, pp. 100-103, here pp. 100-101.
  5. ↑ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene D. Genovese: The mind of the master class. History and faith in the Southern slaveholders' worldview . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2005, ISBN 0-521-85065-7 , p. 478.
  6. ↑ Carl L. Kell: Exiled. Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War. University of Tennessee Press, 2006.
  7. ↑ Carl L. Kell: In the Name of the Father. The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention . Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 2001.
  8. ↑ Barry Hankins: Uneasy in Babylon. Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa 2002.
  9. ↑ A black man leads the Southern Baptists . idea , July 3, 2012, accessed April 6, 2019.
  10. ^ Southern Baptist Convention: Resolution On Racial Reconciliation On The 150th Anniversary Of The Southern Baptist Convention , June 1995, accessed April 6, 2019.
  11. ↑ Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M) at wikisource.org
  12. ↑ The "Land Letter" , accessed on April 6, 2019.