The 2 Rails Of The Southern Baptist Convention
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(OPINION) I want to remind us of what is good about being a Southern Baptist. That’s why I’ve chosen Hebrews chapter 10, verses 23 and 24, to be the theme verses for this year. And the theme statement will be “Hold fast.”
“Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering. For he who promised is faithful. Let us consider how to stir up one another up to love and good works.”
It might be good for us to be reminded that we need to hold fast to the many good things in the Southern Baptist Convention.
I’ll just talk about two things today, and I’ll be done.
Two things in particular – it is our confession, the Baptist Faith and Message, and our cooperation. In God’s good providence, today we look forward to 2025. That will be the 100-year celebration of the Baptist Faith and Message and the Cooperative Program.
Those two institutions. That’s our standard, and we are the standard bearer. If the SBC were a train, it would have two rails it would run on. One would be the Baptist Faith and Message. The other would be the Cooperative Program.
Our confession is biblical, and it’s clear, and it’s straightforward, and it’s Christ centered, and it’s joyful. It is good for us to celebrate being Biblicists. So many historic denominations have walked away or inched away from the authority of the Bible.
Isn’t it good to be a part of a fellowship of churches that have remained true to the faith once and for all delivered to the saints?
The doctrine of inerrancy — we have it so deeply that we’ve quit talking about it. Thankfully, we’re not fighting about it, but let’s not forget there’s something we stand on that we do actually believe — that the Bible is God’s Word, that it is truth without error. That it is the sole rule for our faith and our practice. That opinions and tendencies and proclivities are always subservient to the Word of God. That we know our heart beats faster when we see some man get up with a Bible and he starts to preach. We want that guy to use the Book.
We see the Bible as light to our paths, food for our souls, the very foundation we stand on. To this we hold fast.
We celebrate the clarity of the Baptist Faith and Message. It’s a good confession. We live in a world where the waters have gotten so muddy, the waters of morality or theology or even sexuality. They are not muddy for us. We see clearly. We have a confession of faith that gives us real clarity, that helps us think through.
It helps us transcend personalities and see the issues of our time. Our confession holds up the issues of life and abortion, the issue of marriage between a man and a woman, the issue of gender, the goodness of the creation of God in a woman, the goodness and creation of God in a man. The issues of religious liberty. We have a clear statement of faith, and we need to hold fast.
I’ve been a pastor all of my adult life. I have confidence that I could take the Baptist Faith in Message and on a Wednesday night or Sunday night, and with all of the accompanying Scripture underneath every one of our statements, use that and teach my people. And they would come out knowing really good theology.
What does the writer of Hebrews say? Hebrews 10:23: “Hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering.” That little phrase “without wavering” is used one time in the New Testament. To be unbending. We are not accommodationists, we are not incrementalists. We are inerrantists. We hold fast to the statement of faith that’s served us for 100 years.
The Baptist Faith and Message has in it the Gospel. We celebrate the Gospel in our good confession. Hebrews chapter 10, verse 23: “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope.” It is our hope. It’s why we can smile. We have hope — the Gospel of Christ. We are conversionists. We believe the worst sinner can be saved by the Gospel.
We believe that the grace of God presented to us in the perfect life, the atoning death, the resurrection of Jesus. We believe that that is the hope of the world and that our confession is not designed to be dead orthodoxy. It’s not designed so we can go and sit down and read it and ponder and think over.
It is not designed to be dead orthodoxy. It must lead to live orthopraxy. We want to do something. Our doctrine does something. It goes somewhere. I’m thankful for our entities, our enterprise, our fellowship. I’m thankful that we are all joyfully, in some way or other, governed by the Baptist Faith and Message.
When I came out of college, I didn’t know where to go to seminary. Some of them were still in bad shape. You had to pick and choose, where are you going to go? That’s not the case anymore. Young men and women come to our church, when they graduate college, they can pick one of six seminaries and be guaranteed that those seminaries are true to the Bible.
That’s one rail, the BF&M. One rail that our train runs on, the Baptist Faith and Message.
The other rail is the Cooperative Program.
This year marks 100 years of the genius of the Cooperative Program. What does the text say? Hebrews 10:24: “Let us consider how to stir up one another toward love (agape) and good works.”
We need to celebrate our cooperation — the genius of having almost 50,000 Southern Baptist churches get behind a cause and give to fund primarily education and missions. To equip and send, that’s what we do.
To “stir up one another.” “Stir up” is only used twice in the New Testament. To provoke. It’s not positive. It’s negative — to agitate.
We are good at agitating one another. But the text says we are to stir up, to agitate one another to love and good works — to agape and good works.
We don’t all have to be best friends. But we do all have to be brothers and sisters in Christ, and we do have to press one another, agitate to something – to love, to the Gospel and good works, to ministry. That’s what the Cooperative Program does.
There are a few things we like as Southern Baptists.
We like autonomy. We hold it dear, not just because it’s right, but because it feels good. We don’t like people telling us what to do. You can’t come to my church and tell me how to run it. My people can, but you can’t.
We like congregationalism. We like to be together. We like actual, genuine, meaningful membership. We believe that is the right thing to do.
And we love cooperation. And the Cooperative Program is this unbelievably superior way for us to preserve autonomy, to have the congregation of a church and to cooperate for the advancement of the Kingdom of God.
Ultimately that’s what our business is. We’re all doing this so we can keep moving forward on the train of Kingdom of God — to advance the Gospel, to send missionaries, to build the Kingdom.
The Cooperative Program is good for our mission. It strengthens the local church.
When I went to Clear Branch Baptist Church in Lincoln County, Mississippi, I didn’t know anything about the Cooperative Program, but built into that little church that was struggling to keep the doors open, they had a line item that said this number of dollars, it wasn’t very much, went to the Cooperative Program. That’s when I started to learn, this is what the Cooperative Program is. This is what these people believe in – the Kingdom of God.
It strengthens the local church. It puts your eyes outside of the four walls of your church. It makes you look to the field. It multiplies the mission force. I can’t in one church raise up enough missionaries. We together can send thousands of missionaries! It elevates evangelism. It keeps our eyes on what we’re here for. The Cooperative Program reminds us it’s all worth it.
This is all going to equip our people to get them ready for the mission. You know what our Cooperative Program does? It ensures fidelity.
I can believe that the missionaries, the church planters, the revitalizers, I can know they’ve come through a system that has been governed by a statement of faith. They will be true to the Bible.
There are some mission organizations, who knows what they believe? You know what I know? I know what my missionaries believe.
It ensures fidelity in our seminaries, in our missionaries and planters.
The Cooperative Program extends the Gospel beyond your church. It reminds individual churches that we are actually better together. Individual churches forget that. We get competitive because we’re Baptists. We like the numbers. And one church likes to compete against another, and the Cooperative Program helps us remember – this is about the Kingdom of God, and we actually are in it together.
It keeps our focus on a world that is lost and needs the Gospel.
If we’re not careful, we spend all of our time talking through and thinking through and agitating ourselves about our issues. What the Cooperative Program does is turn our faces around and look out.
I want us to hold fast to our confession, to hold fast to our cooperation. To keep pressing for doctrinal fidelity. We’ve got to have it. To keep pressing for Gospel centrality – we keep the Gospel center.
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.
God bless you. Thank you.
The following was taken from remarks made by SBC President Clint Pressley at the Sept. 17 meeting of the SBC Executive Committee in Nashville. The remarks have been edited for length and clarity. You can watch the full sermon here.
This piece was republished with permission from Baptist Press.
Clint Pressley is president of the Southern Baptist Convention.