Common Conviction, Cooperative Commitment, and Common Sense — The Southern Baptist Convention and the Future by Albert Moehler
Southern Baptists will soon meet in Nashville for the 2021 meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The annual meeting is expected to draw thousands of messengers from our churches and an abundance of national attention. Serious issues will be addressed even as the Convention finds itself facing external headwinds and internal tensions. But, more than anything else, the annual meeting will be a great test of the basic commitments of the Convention and its churches.
Some people predict that the Convention will fail this test. What remains of the old “moderate” movement from the last century has awakened from its decline, just in time to predict the SBC’s collapse into fratricide and self-destruction. The challenges faced by the SBC are real, but the strengths of the SBC are formidable, and my prayer and hope is that the SBC in Nashville will lean into those fundamental strengths.
Common Conviction
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Southern Baptists are a people of deep beliefs and biblical conviction. This is our greatest strength, and we must lean into those convictions without compromise. The biblical worldview makes clear that truth is foremost and foundational. If the truth is subverted, compromised, or forgotten, all will be lost — and quickly. God’s people are a people of truth, and Southern Baptists are a people of passionate love for biblical truth.
In the modern age, the very idea of truth is contested. But Southern Baptists believe in what Francis Schaeffer called “true truth,” objective, absolute truth — revealed truth. The “Battle for the Bible” in the Conservative Resurgence was essential for the integrity and survival of the SBC as a gospel movement. The Convention affirmed loudly, clearly, and at great cost that the Bible is God’s verbally inspired, inerrant, infallible, sufficient, trustworthy, and living Word. If you want to see what inevitably happens when that conviction is compromised, just look at the ruins of mainline Protestantism. Closer to home, look at the ruins of the moderate movement that left the SBC behind. It is a morass of doctrinal porridge, outright heresy, and the embrace of the LGBTQ agenda.
The SBC made its convictional commitments clear with the Baptist Faith & Message revision of 2000. That confession of faith is foundational for us. It is central to our self-definition and it is the essential instrument of our doctrinal accountability. Without fidelity to that confession, the SBC will just slide more slowly into confusion and compromise. Fidelity means that Southern Baptists must actually believe those truths, teach those truths, cherish those truths, and defend those truths. The Baptist Faith & Message is not an aspirational statement. It does not merely state what we hope Southern Baptists might believe. It is a statement of doctrinal belief that expresses in words the truths that lead us to cooperate in world missions, evangelism, and theological education.
