Thomas Southerland, 68, was raised a Southern Baptist.
He was steeped in a 166-year-old tradition of conservative, strict biblical beliefs. He serves as the business administrator for First Baptist Church in downtown Columbus.
It came as a shock Monday morning when an acquaintance told him he may not be a Southern Baptist for much longer. The Southern Baptist Convention is considering a move to divest itself of the “Southern” part of the name in favor of something less regional and, in some eyes, more innocuous.
In 2005, proposals to change the name to North American Baptists or Scriptural Baptists failed. Now, as the SBC heads into its February executive committee meeting, the issue has been resurrected.
The movement is being fueled in part by results from an online poll of 2,000 Americans that indicated 40 percent of respondents had a negative view of Southern Baptists and 44 percent said the Southern Baptist designation would negatively affect their decision to visit or join a church. The poll was conducted by Lifeway Research and commissioned by SBC in an effort to understand the denomination’s declining membership.
For people such as Southerland, even as he admits a name change would bother him, he acknowledges that there may be a dual-pronged advantage — redefining a denomination that has expanded beyond the South and across the globe and shedding the negative connotations some people associate with the South.
Life is now so technologically connected that regionalism doesn’t play the same role it once did, Southerland said Monday afternoon. Southern Baptists number 16 million people around the world. A good portion of those Southern Baptists are not Southern at all.
Still, even as the current designation doesn’t accurately define the church, a name change would strip it of some of its identification, Southerland said.
Dan Robertson, missions director of Golden Triangle Baptist Association, is adopting a wait-and-see attitude. This has been tried before, and it has failed each time, he said. Members see the name as part of their heritage, but he wants to hear SBC President Bryant Wright’s position on the subject.
Even if the SBC decides to drop the Southern Baptist designation, don’t expect Fairview Baptist Associate Pastor Sammy Crawford to rush outside and change the church sign.
He said he thinks it’s a good idea to examine the regional aspect but with 2,000 members on his church’s roll and an average of 1,100 in the pews on Sundays, growth at Fairview is “probably stronger number-wise than we’ve ever been.”
After 33 years at Fairview, he doesn’t see any advantage in changing the name, though he acknowledged that other Southern Baptist churches, particularly those in the Midwest, West Coast and Northeast, may have a plausible argument.
“I would not want our particular church to drop that name,” Crawford said. “I just think there’s some distinction about that name that keeps us rooted and grounded in where we are.”
In the end, the best solution may be for the church to redefine itself by concentrating on how it reflects itself in the community and fulfills its mission of spreading the Gospel and meeting people’s needs, he said.
He said he believes Fairview has dodged the membership decline in part because it started with a strong foundation of prayer and in part because it sought to provide opportunities for multigenerational, multifaceted involvement from programs for preschoolers to a music ministry.
It’s not so much a matter of Southern Baptists needing to reinvent themselves, said Charles Mullins, pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church, but perhaps re-evaluating past actions. Because the Southern Baptist Convention has not been afraid to jump into the fray of national and local events and speak out on controversial issues, the name “gets dragged before the media,” he said.
But a name change won’t solve that problem, he contends.
“It might help us be identified a little more accurately as to who we are and what we’re about, but I think the real thing is to see a resurgence in our passion for Jesus Christ.”
As for Southerland, he’ll keep believing what he was raised to believe, holding to the conservative, Bible-based doctrine of his youth.
“Yes, I grew up Southern Baptist,” he said. “I believe what I’ve been taught, but I’m a Christian first and a Southern Baptist second.”
The Tennessee Baptist Convention voted down the name change at a meeting last month. If SBC does decide to move forward with the proposal, it will go before the denomination’s convention delegates for a final vote.
Travis Loller from The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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