America’s Southern Baptists: Who They Are

Southern Baptists have been hard to ignore in recent years. Jimmy Carter called attention to them by his regular church and Sunday school attendance and his talk of being “born again.” And their noisy family feud over control of their convention has captured headlines in both the religious and secular press.

Who are the Southern Baptists? And why are they so much in the news? What is their impact on American culture? And what is the culture’s impact on them?

Though they still use a regional name, Southern Baptists have long since become a national body. In the early 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention overtook the United Methodists as the largest Protestant group in America. In 1987, it reported 14,730,000 members in more than 37,000 local congregations scattered throughout the United States.

At the end of 1987, the convention’s Foreign Mission Board supported 3,839 missionaries in 115 nations, while the Home Mission Board had 3,746 home missionaries stationed throughout the United States.

The convention sponsors six theological seminaries, which enroll more than 20 percent of all students in all the accredited seminaries in America; and it maintains about 60 colleges and universities. For its various ministries beyond the local church, the convention received about $240 million for the year ending September 30, 1987. And last year, SBC churches baptized 338,495 new converts, the fewest in several years.

Southern Baptists are part of a large Baptist family that numbers about 35 million members worldwide. In the United States, Baptists are divided into more than 50 different groups, ranging from the SBC with almost 15 million members, to the tiny Duck River Baptists with fewer than 100 members.

Perhaps no religious group in America represents more diversity under the same generic name as do Baptists. Yet to many Americans, a Baptist is a Baptist. They may not be aware, for example, that Baptist Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. On the other hand, Pat Robertson, the erstwhile presidential candidate, was active in Southern Baptist life in his youth and has retained his membership, though not his ordination, in a Southern Baptist church.

The Baptist Tradition

As a distinct denomination, Baptists emerged out of the English Reformation in the early seventeenth century. English Christians in the Reformation era passionately sought to recover biblical patterns in church and ministry. Frustrated in their efforts at reform, many of these “Puritans” separated from the state church and thus were nicknamed “Separatists.”

Some of these Separatists, seeking to recover exact biblical patterns in doctrine and practice, came to the conviction that baptism should be applied only to professed believers, and not to infants. They concluded that baptism is a symbol of personal faith and, since infants cannot yet affirm personal faith, they do not qualify for baptism.

By 1609 John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, English exiles in Amsterdam, formed a church on this basis. Many regard this as the earliest identifiable Baptist church of modern history. By 1611, Helwys led a remnant back to London where they formed a General Baptist church, so named for their teaching of a “general atonement” (Christ died for all).

The Particular Baptists, who taught that Christ died only for the elect, emerged from Separatist churches in London in the 1630s. Their seven congregations issued a joint confession of faith in 1644, a document that helped shape Baptist beliefs and identity for generations.

By 1640, some of these baptizers came to the further conviction that baptism of believers should be applied by total immersion. Their practice of this ancient rite in public streams and rivers attracted public attention, most of it unfavorable, and earned them the nickname of “Baptist.”

Historians debate which was the earliest Baptist church in America, but all agree that it was in Rhode Island. The First Baptist Church of Providence and the Clarke Memorial Baptist Church of Newport both claim to be first. Both claim 1638 as their founding date. However, the best evidence seems to point to 1639 for Providence and 1644 (or possibly 1641) for Newport.

Baptist churches soon emerged elsewhere; about 24 were meeting in America by 1700. However, it was not until the Great Awakening, a nationwide revival in the 1730s, that Baptists had their first major period of growth.

A House Divided

The split of Baptists between North and South in 1845 was in some ways a prototype of the split of the nation in 1861, and resulted from some of the same issues. Richard Furman, pastor of First Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and for whom Furman University is named, wrote in 1822 what is still regarded as the most able American defense of slavery. Though most Baptists in the South were too poor to own slaves, they vigorously defended the practice.

Baptists in the North, whose region profited more from the importation of slaves than from their labor, developed a sensitive conscience on the subject, especially after importing slaves was outlawed. The denomination split in 1845 when the mission boards declined to appoint slave owners as missionaries.

Other issues contributed to this division. Baptists in the South preferred a strong central denomination, while Baptists in the North preferred a loose-knit system that conducted benevolent ministries through independent “societies” not connected with the churches. Baptists in the South also complained, with some justification, that the American Baptist Home Mission Society, headquartered in New York City, failed to send a fair share of home missionaries to labor in the South.

Just As They Are

Jan Hall

Pastor’s wife.

Simi Valley, California

Generations of Southern Baptists: At least two

Have you ever denied or wanted to deny being a Southern Baptist?

I’ve never wanted to deny it, but I have run into problems when people here in California don’t understand or have misconceptions of what “southern” means. So I sort of object to the “southern” in the title.

Favorite potluck dish:

Chilis rellenos.

Least favorite:

Jello.

On growing up Southern Baptist:

I feel very fortunate to have been raised in a Southern Baptist church. Each church is autonomous, and the authority in each church is the Bible and the Holy Spirit. If you have a question, you don’t go to Nashville or the state office or wherever, you go to the Bible.

It’s important for young Christians to get that foundation, as I did. Baptists will fight tooth and nail for that.

Though Southern Baptists entered the twentieth century as a minor-league denomination, the spiritual climate of the South seemed to fit hand-in-glove with the Southern Baptist ethos, and their numbers grew rapidly. Southern Baptists’ emphasis upon religious individualism matched the cultural individualism of their environment. Their fervent evangelism represented a spinoff from the older camp meetings that formed such a vital part of Southern social as well as religious history. And perhaps no religious group in America so clearly addressed the hungers and aspirations of its host culture, leading to what Martin Marty dubbed the “baptistification” of American religion. Soon their appeal—and their numbers—spread to other parts of the country.

Out Of Dixie

As late as World War I, the term “Southern” in the convention title reflected accurate geography. However, by 1950 more Southern Baptists lived outside the Magnolia Belt than in it.

Southern Baptist churches now meet in all 50 states. And on any given Sunday, they conduct worship in more than 80 different languages in this country alone. Growth is especially pronounced among Asian and Hispanic communities.

Places such as Macon, Mobile, and Savannah were once centers of Baptist strength; now Dallas, Houston, and Oklahoma City are emerging as key cities, joined by Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Portland. In the future, expansion may carry the Southern Baptist name into such un-Southern venues as Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton.

This expansion out of Dixie has brought Southern Baptists into conflict with other Baptists. Leaders of the Northern Baptist Convention (which changed its name to the American Baptist Convention in 1950 and to the American Baptist Churches USA in 1972) described the encroaching Southern Baptist presence as an “invasion.”

Before World War I, Baptists North and South had agreed that each group would stick to its own territory. These “comity agreements,” however, never worked well, and after 1942 did not work at all.

In 1950 and 1951 the SBC met in Chicago and San Francisco, hardly typical Southern sites. The 1951 convention adopted a tart resolution that Southern Baptists would henceforth hold themselves free to plant churches and minister to “any community or any people anywhere in the United States.”

Inevitably, the issue of a name change was raised. Advocates pointed out that in the North, the regional adjective brought the same reaction as a red flag to a bull. They wanted a name change to reflect the new geographic realities and to avoid barriers to their work.

Others defended the name on the basis that it represented more than geography; it had acquired a theological image that would be damaging to lose and difficult to rebuild under another name. The issue was further complicated by the fact that no acceptable alternative was found.

In 1973 the convention voted to keep the present name, though many churches outside the South have learned how to maintain their SBC identity without calling undue attention to it.

See You In Sunday School

A major factor in the twentieth-century growth of Southern Baptists has been their Sunday schools. For most denominations, and for most Baptists, Sunday school is a training center for children. But to most Southern Baptists, “Sundayschoolandchurch” has become one word and one experience. And more important, the Sunday school has been adapted to all ages, including adults.

Just when “adult education” became important to a generation of Americans, Southern Baptist churches had in place a structure that afforded adult study and discussion groups. In 1987, they enrolled almost eight million persons, with almost 50 percent of them attending Bible study classes on any given Sunday.

How The Convention Works

A Southern Baptist church is independent. The church owns its own property, sets its own budget, employs and dismisses its own pastors and staff, is responsible for its own debts, and in general runs its own affairs. This autonomy is balanced by voluntary cooperation with other churches in associations and conventions.

The association covers a small area, perhaps a county, where churches group together for communication and fellowship, and to extend their ministries at a local level.

The state convention, as the name implies, includes churches within a state. These churches work together on such projects as planting new churches, sponsoring Baptist colleges and universities, and strengthening the educational and evangelistic ministries of the churches.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the national structure through which more than 37,000 churches pool their resources for missions, evangelism, theological education, and other ministry causes.

These levels of Baptist structure are independent areas, rather than a hierarchy of organization. Each is autonomous in its sphere; no level extends its authority to any other level. Each local church decides whether to affiliate at all, or in which levels of denominational work it will participate. Each local congregation sends representatives directly to each body.

These representatives are called “messengers” rather than “delegates,” to emphasize that they vote their own convictions. They carry no delegated authority from the churches to association, state, or national bodies; and they carry no authority from these bodies back to the churches.

Ministries beyond the local church are funded through the Cooperative Program, a kind of ecclesiastical United Fund. Each church decides independently how much money it will contribute to the Cooperative Program. It sends its contributions to the state convention, which retains a percentage for work in that state, and forwards the balance to SBC offices in Nashville. The Executive Committee recommends a proposed budget, by which the funds are parceled out to the mission boards, seminaries, and other causes. The convention must ratify that budget.

The president of the SBC appoints the committees that, in turn, appoint the groups that exercise direct control over the mission boards, seminaries, and other convention agencies. This appointive power makes the SBC president one of the most powerful ecclesiastical figures in America.

By H. Leon McBeth.

The results of the Sunday school movement have been far reaching. Many Southern Baptists can tell more about the geography and history of Palestine than of their own country. And the Sunday school has probably helped condition a segment of American citizens to support the nation Israel on the assumption that modern Israelis are the same “children of Israel” they met in Bible study.

The Sunday school also provides an evangelistic avenue: People who attend Sunday school are far more likely to join the church. And it serves as the major financial collection agency for Southern Baptists. Most members make their offerings not in the collection plates in church, but through the Sunday school classes.

Movin’ On Up

Are Southern Baptist ministers moving up the social ladder?

I recently addressed that question in a study identifying several indicators of upward mobility (personal income, professional education—both discussed here—public acceptance, and performance in ministry) and applying them to SBC ministers. The results pointed to an upward mobility little known to the denomination before the 1950s.

Sizable salaries

For starters, there is the matter of money.

Wages among Baptist ministers were low in earlier times, typified by an incident related by J. M. Carroll, a noted Texas Baptist leader. He had been pastor of a rural church in Texas where he preached on one Saturday and the following Sunday of each month. His salary was set at $75 per year. The amount bothered some of the church members, and a motion was made to reduce his salary to $25 per year. According to Carroll, the argument in support of the motion went something like this:

“The pastor gives to us but two days in each month, and one of these days is Sunday. It is not right to charge for or pay for Sunday work, so the pastor gives us only twelve work days in the year. Even $25 a year is large pay—a little more than $2 a day. We can get good hands on the farms for 50 cents a day.”

Compare that with the revelation that the highest local church pastor’s salary in the nation ($149,150) is claimed by a Southern Baptist pastor in Dallas, Texas (not W. A. Criswell, pastor of the Dallas First Baptist Church). But that figure must be balanced with the fact that 61.5 percent of the churches cooperating with the Southern Baptist Convention have a membership of 299 or less; and only 7.136 percent of Southern Baptist churches have more than one thousand members. In Texas, 65 percent of the churches are single-staff churches in which the pastor is the only paid staff member. And 20 percent of the churches and missions have a bivocational pastor who also works at secular employment.

Those figures must also be balanced with the understanding that the average total compensation for pastors in the smaller churches is just above the bottom 20 percent of median family income. Commenting on the salary findings of a survey sponsored by the Minister’s Financial Services Association, Michael J. Springer, the executive director of the association, said that when compared with the $50,525 median income for people across the nation with graduate education—equivalent to seminary—many ministers “could possibly be significantly underpaid.”

Trained “professionals”

Along with buying power comes education as a sign of upward mobility. Prior to the American Revolution, Baptist ministers were secured from four sources: immigrants from the British Isles, some of whom had received theological training in their homeland or on the Continent; preachers from other faiths who accepted Baptist views and continued their ministry; graduates from schools such as Hopewell Academy (formed in 1756) and Brown University (1764), later aided by Colgate University (1819), Columbian College (1821), and Newton Theological Institute (1825); and preachers who were privately tutored in the homes of older, experienced Baptist ministers. Added to this were the men in local Baptist churches who were set aside as ministers, usually without the benefit of theological education.

The lack of an educational requirement for ordination meant that a large percentage of Baptist ministers had no formal theological training. More were self-educated than seminary educated; most of their reading was the Bible.

Today, however, the Southern Baptist Convention operates six seminaries in addition to a Seminary Extension Department. In 1985–86 (as reported in the 1987 Annual), the total cumulative enrollment was 14,947. In that same reporting period, 3,922 students graduated from Southern Baptist seminaries.

When churches expect their pastors to have both college and seminary experience, the level of ministerial education is raised. And more churches are expecting a more highly educated ministry.

The combination of higher wages and academic training is unquestionably transforming the image of the Southern Baptist pastor. That that transformation remains for the good is a critical challenge facing the denomination in the days ahead: power and money have a way of undermining even the most respectable ministries.

By James E. Carter, director of Church-Minister Relations Division, Louisiana Baptist Convention, Alexandria, Louisiana.

The Baptist Way

Novelist William Faulkner once quipped that being Southern Baptist is a state of mind that has nothing to do with God, man, the universe, or anything else. At the core of Southern Baptist beliefs, however, are the ame basic doctrines as other evangelical Christians (see “What They Believe,” page 22).

Worship varies in Southern Baptist churches, from liturgical styles that include a robed minister presiding in a divided chancel, to informal revivalistic services with gospel songs and fervent preaching. Most sermons conclude with a “gospel invitation” in which the preacher urges people to come forward to signify they wish to receive Christ as personal Savior.

Like most in the free-church tradition, Southern Baptist congregations run their own financial and ecclesiastical affairs. Each church, not the denomination, decides whom to ordain as deacons and preachers. Because of this freedom, ordination standards are not uniform. Some SBC churches ordain women as well as men; others do not.

This congregational autonomy is balanced by cooperation with other churches in associations and conventions. However, these denominational structures are advisory only and have no control over the local congregations (see “How the Convention Works,” page 19).

At their formation in 1845, Southern Baptists refused to adopt any confession, preferring the direct authority of the Bible alone. But in 1925 and again in 1963, the SBC adopted a confession of faith. In 1987 the convention voted an official interpretation of the confession, which, some say, moves Southern Baptists further from the Bible itself and another step toward creedalism.

The old image of Southern Baptists as people who don’t dance, drink, or play cards—fortunately or unfortunately—no longer holds true. While Southern Baptists seek to teach and practice a lifestyle of rigorous morality, social dancing is increasingly common and social drinking is not unknown, though still frowned upon by most.

On weightier moral issues, most Southern Baptists oppose abortion on demand, the use of narcotic drugs, and alcohol abuse. They tend to favor a strong military, a capitalist economy, a limited government, and rigorous law enforcement. Most still favor complete religious liberty for all, safeguarded by separation of church and state (though in recent years some appear to be softening on this issue).

Just As They Are

Brad Creed

Pastor, First Baptist Church.

Natchitoches, Louisiana

Generations of Southern Baptists: Four

On being “born again”:

I can’t remember when I was not aware of the love of God. At age 11, I made this important faith commitment to Christ. A counselor at camp led me in a prayer of salvation—nothing intensely emotional, but earnest, real, and life changing.

What I did as a teen that the church said I shouldn’t do:

Laughed and cut up during worship service, especially when Mrs. H. sang a solo.

Favorite potluck dish:

Bertha Williams’s cornbread casserole.

Least favorite:

Anything with mushroom soup and Velveeta cheese.

Personal doctrinal struggle:

In college, I struggled to reconcile science (biological evolution) and the Scriptures. Today, I struggle with reconciling Baptist individualism with the New Testament church.

Unlike most prominent denominations, Southern Baptists have little to do with ecumenical ventures. The convention has no official relation to the World Council or National Council of Churches. However, many individual Southern Baptists attend these meetings, and local churches usually cultivate cordial relations with neighboring churches of other denominations.

Moderates And Conservatives

Baptists are no strangers to controversy, but as recent headlines show, Southern Baptists seem especially contentious. The present conflict between “moderate” Southern Baptist leaders and their “conservative” or fundamentalist counterparts has convulsed the convention for more than a decade.

At stake is nothing less than control of the whole denomination, including its mission boards, seminaries, and considerable resources.

In 1979, the conservative faction, led by Dallas minister Paige Patterson and Houston judge Paul Pressler, launched a bold campaign whose goal was announced in advance: to capture control of the SBC. The conservatives saw clearly that the key to control was the convention presidency, and they have succeeded for the past ten years in electing their candidate. As a result, most of the mission boards and seminaries are now controlled by conservative/fundamentalist trustees. It remains to be seen whether their actions will be as radical as their rhetoric has sometimes been (see “Where They Are Going,” page 26).

Perhaps the conservative movement in the SBC is best understood as part of the overall American resurgence of conservatism during the Reagan era. Many Southern Baptists seek a return to traditional values in society as well as in religion. They helped put President Reagan in office, and have generally supported his conservative political and social agenda.

Whatever the outcome of this battle for control of the convention, it is clear the controversy has adversely affected financial contributions and growth, and has devastated the public image of Southern Baptists.

The Southern Baptists have provided one of America’s ecclesiastical success stories. In a system sometimes described as “a rope of sand,” they have balanced autonomy with cooperation to survive and prosper as a body of believers. Their future, to a large extent, will depend upon the outcome of their present internal crisis. So far, the rope has held.

H. Leon McBeth is professor of church history at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth and author of The Baptist Heritage (Broadman).

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