Southern Baptist Convention leaders dropping 'Southern' from name over slavery connection

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention are steadily removing the “Southern” part of their name in an effort that Convention President J.D. Greear said is essential following a summer of Black Lives Matter protests and increased calls for racial justice reform.

In an interview with The Washington Post published Tuesday, Greear said there has been more support to adopt the new name “Great Commission Baptists,” both because of the changing climate in the U.S. and because many have long believed the “Southern Baptist” title no longer adequately encompasses the approximately 50,000 churches that now exist around the globe.

“Our Lord Jesus was not a White Southerner but a brown-skinned Middle Eastern refugee,” Greear told The Post. “Every week we gather to worship a savior who died for the whole world, not one part of it. What we call ourselves should make that clear.”

These statements come after the leader also announced in June that he would be retiring a historic gavel named for a slaveholder that Southern Baptists had continued to use to open their meetings.

“While we do not want to, nor could we, erase our history, it is time for this gavel to go back into the display case at the Executive Committee offices,” Greear said in a statement at the time.

The convention formed in 1845, splitting from Northern Baptists over Southern support for slavery. While the group had a historic drop in membership last year, it remains the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with 14.5 million members.

I still attend a Southern Baptist Church and we sing the old hymns, have Wednesday and Sunday evening services as well as Sunday morning services and Sunday school. Our governor ordered churches to close services or do online/parking lot services. We continued with CDC guidelines 10 in church and the rest of the congregation online or in the parking lot and the lot was always full. When the pastor was preaching instead of amens, you would hear car horns going in the parking lot. Our offerings actually went up in this time frame. We have reopened now with services and Sunday school and before the virus averaged around 100-120 in the morning service, 50-70 evening services and 40-50 on Wednesday evenings. Now morning 70-90, evening 40-50 and Wednesday same 40-50.

The pastor and the assistant pastors are mainly preaching the Word about getting people saved and don’t get all balled up in doctrine. They will call a sin a sin popular or not. I had a friend who attended and she was all excited about the Supreme Court gay marriage ruling and the pastor said little that Sunday but the next service he let it be known that God hasn’t changed his mind on the sin even if man, the law and some churches have. She left the church and went back to the Methodist church and asked me about it and I said seriously, you think the pastor and deacons were all going to throw away the Bible and accept liberal theology and sin because it was popular? You really don’t know them.

During the parking lot services the pastor would be preaching and Facebook was filled with comments and you could hear the 10 people left in the building spread out shouting AMEN! Well the local health department got a complaint and they tried to shut us down on Easter Sunday, threatened to send the State Police to which the pastor said send 3 troopers and I’ll preach to all of them. We contacted the state Attorney General and filed a complaint and the AG came down on our side and said meet your following CDC guidelines, contact us if the local health department tries anything, they didn’t. It boiled down to someone getting their toes stepped on by the pastor on Facebook...

I look for them to part ways with the SBC not because of the name but because they are going liberal. The liberal churches in our town are still closed and bleeding membership. They are spiritually deader than four o’clock on a Friday.

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