Baptists dropping ‘Southern’ from descriptions for racial and regional inclusion
The president of the Southern Baptist Convention says some church leaders favor using a name for the nation’s largest denomination that is less racially charged and more in tune with the times, according to a story Tuesday in the Washington Post.
Convention President J.D. Greear, who pastors Durham-based The Summit Church, told the newspaper in an interview that the denomination is leaning toward calling itself “Great Commission Baptists,” both to eliminate the inaccurate regional reference and to move away from the denomination’s pro-slavery roots.
“Our Lord Jesus was not a White Southerner but a brown-skinned Middle Eastern refugee.
“Every week we gather to worship a savior who died for the whole world, not one part of it,” Greear told the Post. “What we call ourselves should make that clear.”
The denomination approved the descriptor “Great Commission Baptist” at its annual convention in 2012, and the phrase has appeared on some church websites and in literature published by the denomination in the years since. Paige Patterson, who was president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, at the time, wrote in an opinion piece for the Baptist Press that year that he liked the term.
“First, it still says, with gratitude to God for Baptist martyrs and witnesses who have gone before, that we are Baptists. We believe what Baptists believe. We practice what Baptists practice,” Patterson wrote.
“Second, while Great Commission Baptist focuses on the Great Commission of our Lord, it also is misleading in no way whatever. The church is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention and makes no denial of that. It simply has chosen to use the descriptor Great Commission Baptist to state clearly what we intend to do. Southern Baptist is who we are. Great Commission Baptist is what we do,” Patterson wrote.
“Third, by emphasizing what we do before we emphasize who we are, we give an opportunity to people who assume the racism of Southern Baptists or some other negative aspect of Southern Baptists first to consider the claims of Christ on their own lives,” Patterson wrote.
The Southern Baptist Convention
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 by Baptist congregations in the South that rejected anti-slavery views of northern congregations. But the denomination had 14.8 million members in more than 47,000 churches across the United States in 2018, according to the Pew Research Center, which cited Convention sources.
Although more racially and ethnically diverse than mainline Methodist or Lutheran churches, the Southern Baptist denomination is more than 85% white, Pew reported.
In surveys, members of the denomination lean toward conservative positions on social issues such as abortion and homosexuality.
Baptists in North Carolina
The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, based in Cary, says the denomination has about 4,300 churches in the state. Southern Baptist churches cooperate but are autonomous, with each church deciding to join in ministry and mission efforts, the state convention says.
Most churches in the denomination in North Carolina don’t use “Southern” in their names.
They include some of the largest congregations in North Carolina. In 2014, the denomination had 31 churches in North Carolina with an average attendance of at least 1,000 people in Sunday worship, according to The Biblical Recorder, a news service of the N.C. Baptist Convention.
This story was originally published September 15, 2020 at 10:53 AM with the headline "Baptists dropping ‘Southern’ from descriptions for racial and regional inclusion."
