Southern Baptists "Put the Nail in Their Own Coffin," Says Retired Virginia Pastor

Southern Baptists Just Put the Nail in Their Own Coffin 

Retired Virginia Pastor Dave Roberts says that by dismissing churches with females designated as "pastors" from its membership, the Southern Baptist Convention subtracted 57,000 members from its rolls, but in the bigger picture, with this move "put the nail in their own coffin."  I agree with him 100%.  

Roberts mentions that he was personally troubled by the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention was formed when it split off from its fellow Baptists in the north over the appointment of slave owners as missionaries.  Slavery is a sin, a grievous one, and the approval of it by Christians of any kind, and specifically Baptists who claim to believe in the authority and inerrancy of the Bible, was based on a very faulty interpretation of scripture.  The entire denomination was wrong, but it took more than a 150 years for that error to be acknowledged and admitted.  

The error was perpetuated as the "Lost Cause" myth was incorporated into church teaching and practice, and the denomination became a sort of "pseudo-Confederacy" in preserving antebellum culture and staunchly embracing racial segregation.  In fact, Roberts mentions that Southern Baptists failed to reunite with their fellow Baptists in the North, not because the northerners were more "liberal," but because they advocated for school desegregation.  So it is that today, Baptists in the United States are still divided, along ideological and racial lines, with the Southern Baptists being predominantly white, and mostly in the southern states, though they now have affiliated churches in all 50 states, the National Baptists being the second largest Baptist group, made up of predominantly African American churches, and the American Baptist Churches, USA, which is the original Triennial Convention, and is very diverse in its distribution of churches and the ethnicity of its membership.  

Roberts says that a third error made by the denomination, setting it on the road to its own destruction, was the "Conservative Resurgence" which was a takeoever of the seminaries and mission boards, started in 1979.  Whatever "Christlike spirit" might have been present in Southern Baptist life prior to that, and along with it, interest and motivation in missionary enterprises, gave way to attacks on professors in seminaries, name calling, labelling and pushing out of those who disagreed with turning the Baptist Faith and Message into a creed, and destroyed any hope of spiritual renewal within the denomination, says Roberts.  

Throwing out churches who have designated females as "pastors" is an extended result of the Conservative Resurgence, and of turning the Baptist Faith and Message into a creed.  Historically, Baptists are identified by their statements of faith which were intentionally not creeds, and by the statement, "no book but the Bible, no creed but Christ".  So turning the Baptist Faith and Message into a statement of "doctrinal accountability," which is the language used by the Conservative Resurgence leadership, has become as big an error in interpreting the Bible as was made when the denomination determined it would support slavery and appoint slave owners as missionaries.  

And I say Roberts' experience is similar to mine, as well as to thousands of others who have exited the Southern Baptist Convention over the past couple of decades, an exodus that has resulted in the loss of over 3 million members, and 1.7 million in the weekly church attendance of what was once trumpeted as "the largest Protestant denomination in the United States."  Formally, that designation might still be correct, but non-denominational Evangelicals, along with the churches of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, far outnumber Southern Baptists now, even though they, too, are not seeing numerical growth over the past decade.

I predict that the numerical decline will increase in size, as a number of churches who have women serving in positions called "pastor" have been put on a hit list for referral to the credentials committee at the next annual meeting.  Some of them say they are not affiliated with the SBC any more, and haven't been for a while, which is likely, since most churches don't make a formal announcement when they "leave" the SBC, they just stop contributing to its ministry causes.  It is likely that an additional 4 to 5 million members may be in churches that have already informally stopped contributing, given the discrepancy between the reported membership of 13 million, and the regular, weekly church attendance figure of just under 4 million (which includes a million who attend church via "online" services).  

So the nation's "largest Protestant denomination" is, in just a couple of decades since the Conservative Resurgence, about half the size it was in 1979 when the conservatives took over.  That tells you how successful they have been in poisoning the well.