The poet, Maya Angelou, said, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.” This quote makes me think of the members of my family who have poured countless hours of time and energy into tracing our family history.
While there is much to be proud of in looking through our family history, there are also some moments that we would all rather skip over. But instead of trying to forget these events, we can learn from the decisions and actions of those who have come before us, and determine to make a different choice or act in a different manner in the future.
This idea of looking back to move forward can apply to another family--our church family!
Council Road Baptist Church is a part of the family of churches known as the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). SBC churches choose to cooperate with other like-minded churches to impact the whole world with the Good News of Jesus Christ.
The history of the SBC is not always a pleasant tale to tell. But to do better, we must first know better, so let’s get to know a little bit of our family history.
Baptists emerged in seventeenth century England as part of the Puritan-Separatist movement in the Church of England. People were able to obtain the Bible in their own language and read it for themselves. They believed what it said and sought to live their lives according to what they had read and learned from God’s Word. Membership into the groups formed by these people required a confession of faith and believers baptism by total immersion. This practice led to the groups being nicknamed the “Baptists”.
English law under King James I prohibited dissenting churches and penalized those unwilling to join the Church of England. This led to the exile of many of these Baptist groups. Some went to other parts of Europe. Others made their way to the British colonies. The first Baptist church in American was formed in Providence, Rhode Island in 1639. The colonial Baptist churches still struggled to have religious liberty and worship in the ways they wanted until the first amendment of the US Constitution was in place and guaranteed this right.
Baptist churches in America continued to grow and expand as the nation grew. As more and more churches began, some desired to form groups, or associations, for fellowship and counsel concerning common problems among churches. Some, however, feared that these associations would rob their church of their freedom.
This nervousness about associations led to the formation of missionary societies—independent organizations that allowed people from various churches to work and give toward missionary efforts in certain areas.
On May 18, 1814, Baptists from across America met in Philadelphia and formed a national foreign missions society. In 1824, a second society for the publication and distribution of tracts and religious materials was created. A home mission society was added in 1832.
Seemingly, Baptists were united through these societies for Christian work, but all was not well under the surface.
As Baptists grew and expanded, so did their differences. Businessmen from the north, planters from the south, and farmers of the west all had different social, cultural, economic, and political ideas and values.
Tensions were high as the societies were formed, and the meetings following their inception served only to highlight the differences in thinking between those from the North and those from the South. Southern leaders wanted stronger ties among churches than the societies provided. They also felt that the Southern need for missions was not being met by the Northern-based home mission society.
These issues alone could have possibly led to a divide, but another major issue became the political and moral linchpin--slavery. The society meetings of the 1840s brought heated debates between Northerners and Southerners on how issues related to slavery should be addressed.
In 1844, the Home Mission Society declined to appoint a slave holder to be a missionary in Georgia. This was the final straw that led almost 300 Baptist leaders from the South to meet in May of 1845 to establish a separate body for missionary work in the South. Instead of creating a new mission society, these Baptists wanted to create a general convention for the association of churches and the oversight of home missions and foreign missions. And thus the Southern Baptist Convention was born.
The initial years of the SBC were punctuated by Civil War, reconstruction, withdrawal of blacks from white churches, internal conflicts over doctrine, and organizational questions, yet the convention grew. The work of the home and foreign mission boards flourished and expanded.
The Sunday School board of the SBC was formed in 1890 to provide Southern Baptists with quarterly literature, supplies, and helps for Sunday school teachers. These teachers no longer had to rely on the Tract Society based in the North, and the final tie between Baptists in the North and in the South was broken.
The SBC has grown to be more than just a regional organization with forty-one state conventions covering the entire nation. Yet, issues of race relations have continued to haunt the convention. The socially and theologically conservative stance maintained on most issues through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries led leaders of the SBC to oppose the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
But change is possible and the 1995 annual SBC meeting brought the adoption of a resolution formally denouncing racism. Another large step towards racial reconciliation came in 2012 when Fred Luter, Jr. became the first African American president of the SBC.
Like most or all families, we don’t agree on everything and have issues to work through. We have much work to be done to best represent our Father’s heart. But, the SBC is working hard to move forward in healthy ways. The more than 50,000 SBC churches and congregations continue to cooperate in sharing the Gospel with people of all races and nationalities through evangelism, missions, and church planting efforts. Thousands of men and women are provided theological training through six SBC seminaries. Quality, Bible-based resources are made available for churches and their leaders through Lifeway Christian Resources. Almost four thousand missionaries are sharing God’s love and plan for salvation around the world through the work of the International Mission Board.
Despite past failures, God is working powerfully through the people and the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. May we each strive to look and behave like the Father who makes us family.
MEET THE AUTHOR!
Sarah serves as the Children’s Minister at CRBC. After graduating from the University of Central Oklahoma with a B.S. in Special Education, she worked with kids and families in churches in Tahoe City, CA, New Orleans, LA, and Lawton, OK before coming back home to OKC. Sarah also has a Masters of Arts in Christian Education from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. She desires to see kids grow in faith that leads them to know Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior and to equip parents to help their kids along that journey. Sarah is married to Joe, and they live in Mustang with their puppy, Momo.