Read part one in this multi-part history here.

Both a zealous commitment to congregational autonomy and a strong impulse toward cooperative ministry underlie the organizational history of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Throughout the history of the denomination, Southern Baptist leaders have carefully navigated the principle of congregational autonomy as they have sought to develop cooperative ministries.

In the SBC, congregations own their own property, call and ordain their own clergy, and conduct business independent of denominational control. Considered autonomous churches, these congregations freely associate with the SBC (a national body), other national Baptist bodies, state bodies (generally known as state conventions), and local bodies (generally known as associations). In general, churches choose to associate with the SBC (or any of the other Baptist bodies) because it allows them to cooperate with other autonomous congregations to accomplish shared goals: mission efforts, public witness, theological education, etc. The present form that this cooperation takes among Southern Baptists emerged semi-organically over the last one hundred and fifty years.

From its birth in 1845, the number of congregations affiliating with the SBC grew through the nineteenth century, and by 1900 the denomination had become fairly large. In addition, by that time, the SBC governed several entities including the Foreign Mission Board (FMB), the Home Mission Board (HMB), the Baptist Sunday School Board (BSSB) and Southern Seminary (SBTS). This growth led to two challenges. First, it became increasingly difficult to conduct all the convention’s business at the annual meeting. Second, the increasing number of ministry entities associated with the SBC created the turn-of-the century version of “donor fatigue” in the convention. Both issues needed to be addressed.

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Next week, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) will hold its annual meeting in Houston, TX.  Over the last several decades, the SBC’s public profile has increased significantly due to the actions of its leaders and as a result of the media scrutiny that has come from solidly positioning itself on the conservative wing of American evangelicalism.  Even so, very few non-Baptist journalists or readers understand the history of the SBC or grasp the organizational processes of this zealously congregational yet intensely cooperative denomination.  Today, my post will briefly survey the former.  Tomorrow, I will focus on the latter.

In 1845, the same year that Texas entered the union as a slave state, a group of Baptists in the South formed the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Pursuant to the cooperative spirit of the early nineteenth century, Baptists throughout America united for mission via the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America which met every three years beginning in 1814. Eventually, the burden of slavery would outweigh the shared theological convictions and commitment to cooperative missions that held this “Triennial Convention” together. As had already happened among the Presbyterians (1837) and Methodists (1844), the weight of slavery tipped the scales towards regional schism, foreshadowing the coming national crisis.

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“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” – Luke 24:5b NRSV

According to the accounts found in the Synoptic Gospels, the female disciples that travelled to Jesus’s tomb the first Easter morning expected nothing spectacular. They merely intended to finish preparing the corpse for its long-term entombment (Mark 16:1, Luke 24:1), a process that had been truncated due to the late hour of Jesus’s expiration and the impending approach of the Sabbath. These women had encountered death countless times in their lives and likely engaged in the task of preparing bodies for burial many times over. In the Roman Empire, where life expectancy hovered around thirty years-old and many children, especially in urban areas, died before age ten, preparing a body for burial was a mundane task.

Familiarity with death meant that resurrection possessed a considerable poignancy for the women, bringing a hope that countered the ubiquitous fear of death. As the good news spread, the first-century readers of the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (and most readers since) had an acute sense of what it meant that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Cor. 15:26, NRSV). Until Easter, death had been victorious, the destroyer of lives, families, and hope. But victory only tastes sweeter when defeat is the norm. For the first Christians, the news of Jesus’s victory over death as “the first fruits” (I Cor. 15:23) was sweet indeed.

Throughout the history of the world, most people—like the women at the tomb—encountered death on a near daily basis. Death’s brutality over the greater part of the last two millennia cast a long shadow over everyday life as disease, famine, and infant mortality claimed victim after victim. For Christians of yesteryear, this familiarity with the pungent reality of death brought the hope of resurrection into sharp relief, not just in old age, but at every stage of life.

By contrast, Americans have largely outsourced death and dying over the last 150 years, gradually banishing it from sight and thought. Coincidentally, over the same period, many American evangelical groups have adopted a near myopic emphasis on expiation in their discussions (and presentations) of the gospel message. In a culture that sanitizes death and dying while simultaneously and self-reflectively obsessing about guilt, the need for forgiveness trumps the need for resurrection.

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Once an intimate family affair, death and dying are now outsourced in America. Set in different centuries, stories from two of America’s greatest storytellers highlight the manner in which American encounters with death and dying have changed over the last two hundred years.

Culled from Stephen King’s novella The Body (1982), the plot in the 1980s coming-of-age film Stand by Me (1986) revolves around a quest by four adolescents to find a dead body. Set in 1959, the narrator reflects back on the events from the present, highlighting the novelty of the encounter in the film’s opening line: “I was twelve going on thirteen the first time I saw a dead human being.” By the mid-twentieth century, close encounters with death had become exceptional for American adolescents.

By contrast, in his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain incorporates a dead body into the plot as a banal element of the antebellum tale. Although the reader does not expect Huck to hide a bag of money in the coffin containing “the remainders of Peter,” Twain portrays the presence of a coffined body in the downstairs parlor of the Wilks home while the family sleeps upstairs as mundane occurrence. By the twentieth century, such a scene could only fit comfortably as a prelude to some horrific preternatural episode in one of King’s other works.

These disparate works of fiction punctuate the manner in which American attitudes towards death and dying have been transformed from an uncomfortable familiarity to a comfortable unfamiliarity over the last two centuries. (more…)

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. (James 1:27)

The global vision of American evangelicalism began in an improbable place, 1950s South Korea, as Americans encountered people like Pun Hui Pak. The youngest of four children, Pun Hui Pak was born in a small town outside Taegu, South Korea, in 1949. In an agricultural economy, the Paks were better off than many: her family owned farmland and her father served as mayor of the small town. (more…)