Confessional fidelity and denominational faithfulness

This summer, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is celebrating the centennial of the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M), the denomination’s confessional statement. When the SBC was formed in 1845, the Convention didn’t adopt a confession of faith. This was not because most Southern Baptists rejected confessions. In fact, all 293 of the delegates, as they were then called, were members of churches or associations that had adopted a version of the Second London Confession, an English Baptist confession that dated to 1677. The SBC didn’t adopt a confession at its inception because the Convention’s scope was limited to foreign and domestic mission work, and all the cooperating churches were of substantially similar faith and practice. Furthermore, most congregations were part of local associations that were decidedly confessional.

By 1925, the situation had changed. The Convention had grown to include three seminaries (all of which had confessions of faith), a Sunday School Board, and a recently formed Executive Committee. Southern Baptist churches were now found all over the South and Southwest and much of the Midwest, and they were beginning to expand into other regions even further from the Convention’s traditional territory. Southern Baptist churches were cooperating together for far more reasons than had been the case 80 years earlier, and they were just entering into a four-decade span of unprecedented growth both numerically and institutionally. A more localized confessionalism seemed ill-suited to ensure doctrinal fidelity across Southern Baptist life.

1925 was also a crucial year in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. The Scopes Trial brought debates about Darwinism and biblical teachings about origins into the national conversation. The Northern Baptist Convention, which shared a common theological heritage with Southern Baptists, but which had in recent years become far more tolerant of modernist theology, voted by a 2-1 margin to not adopt the New Hampshire Confession of Faith (1833) as its doctrinal standard. While the SBC was far more conservative theologically than their Northern Baptist counterparts, there were instances of liberal drift in some of their schools and a handful of churches.

So, Southern Baptists took a crucial step toward maintaining denominational faithfulness by adopting the Baptist Faith and Message (1925), their first Convention-wide confessional statement. When Neo-Orthodox views of Scripture became more common in Baptist schools a generation later, the BF&M was revised in 1963 to address those challenges. The BF&M was amended in 1998 to clearly address a biblical view of gender and family. Two years later, following a two-decade controversy between theological conservatives and progressives, the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) was adopted. It remains the Convention’s confessional statement a quarter-century later.

The BF&M (2000) also plays a larger role in Southern Baptist life than it ever has before. The arc of SBC history over the past century has been one of increased commitment to confessional fidelity. Whenever theological drift has occurred, Southern Baptists have reasserted their commitment to biblical orthodoxy through both confessional updates and increased confessional accountability. The Convention as a whole is more committed to a confessional identity than it has ever been in its history. This heightened confessionalism is in direct response to the desire of Southern Baptist churches to contend more faithfully for biblical truth in an increasingly decadent society.

History has played out differently in many other Protestant denominations. Theological conservatives have gradually disengaged from denominations such as the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the American Baptist Churches USA, the United Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ. In the middle of the 20th century, these denominations were collectively considered mainline Protestantism, while theologically conservative Protestants were mostly on the margins of American society.

The situation is very different today. Mainline Protestantism is dwindling in direct proportion to its embrace of liberal theology and progressive social ethics. United Methodists suffered an acrimonious split in 2022, resulting in the launch of the Global Methodist Church as a more conservative denominational alternative. The PCUSA shuttered its foreign mission efforts this past spring, following years of losing conservative churches to newer, more conservative Reformed denominations.

Today, the total aggregate membership of the mainline Protestant denominations is only a little bigger than the current membership of the Southern Baptist Convention. While the SBC has also declined some in recent years, as Ryan Burge has demonstrated, other conservative denominations like the Presbyterian Church in America and the Assemblies of God are actually growing faster than the rate of American population growth.

In a fallen world, there is no guarantee that theological and ethical faithfulness always leads to numeric growth. But it always glorifies God, which is what is most important. Furthermore, doctrinal drift always leads to spiritual declension. Confessions of faith don’t solve every theological debate, of course. But in an age of growing confusion and compromise, confessional fidelity is one of the most important ways that denominations can maintain faithfulness.