The Black Baptist Conventions

1. Who the National Baptists Are

National Baptists are Black Baptist Christians in the United States organized into four national conventions, all of which descend from the National Baptist Convention founded at Atlanta in September 1895. The four are the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., the National Baptist Convention of America International, Inc., the National Missionary Baptist Convention of America and the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Taken together they make up the Baptist portion of the historically Black church in the United States, and the congregations inside them are independent bodies that have chosen to cooperate.

The word convention is doing precise work here. A National Baptist convention is a voluntary association of self-governing churches that pool money and effort for foreign mission, publishing, education and benevolence. It ordains nobody, appoints no pastor to any pulpit, holds no title to any church building and issues no binding creed. A congregation can send messengers to two conventions in the same year, or to none, and stay a Baptist church in good standing either way. Every division described on this page happened at the convention level. Almost none of them changed what was preached on Sunday morning.

Why one page covers all four

These bodies are constantly confused for one another, and the confusion is understandable. Three of them carry the words National Baptist Convention in their legal names, two of them were founded in disputes over the same Nashville publishing house, and reference works have been sloppy about the difference for a century. Setting the four side by side is the only way to make the distinctions hold. For Baptist doctrine in general, including its English and American origins, see the wider guide to Baptist beliefs and history; this page stays on the National Baptist conventions themselves.

Founding dates and occasions above follow the conventions' own published histories and the standard reference accounts of Black Baptist organization. Membership totals are omitted throughout this page because every figure in circulation is self-reported by the conventions and none is independently audited.

2. Before 1895: Slavery, Freedom, Separation

Black Baptist churches existed in America for more than a century before any national convention gathered them. Congregations at Silver Bluff in South Carolina and at Savannah in Georgia were gathered in the 1770s and 1780s by enslaved and free Black preachers, among them David George and Andrew Bryan. In much of the antebellum South, enslaved Christians worshipped under white supervision, sat in galleries and were counted on white church rolls, and preached to one another in secret when supervision was withdrawn. Baptist polity mattered enormously in that setting, because a Baptist church is constituted by its own members and needs no outside authority to exist.

The Baptist family in the United States had already broken along the color line and the slavery line before the Civil War. In 1845 white Baptists in the South withdrew from the national mission societies and formed the Southern Baptist Convention, the immediate occasion being the refusal of those societies to appoint slaveholders as missionaries. The Southern Baptist Convention formally repudiated that founding in a resolution adopted at its 1995 sesquicentennial meeting, which apologized for the defense of slavery and for the racism that followed it.

Emancipation and the exodus from white churches

After 1865 freedpeople left white-controlled congregations in enormous numbers and constituted their own churches, usually within months of emancipation. They did so because they wanted their own preachers, their own discipline, their own singing and their own money. Black Baptist state conventions followed quickly, in North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and elsewhere, and regional bodies grew out of those. By the 1880s the question had become national. Black Baptists were sending missionaries abroad, printing Sunday school lessons and founding schools, and they were doing it through white-run agencies whose boards they did not control.

That verse became the text of Black Baptist missionary preaching in the late nineteenth century, quoted in sermons and printed on convention literature. It carried a claim: that Africa would be evangelized, and that African Americans had a particular commission to do it. The desire to run their own foreign mission board, funded by their own churches and staffed by their own people, was the driving force behind the founding of a national convention. The story of that mission effort continues in the guide to Christianity in Africa.

3. The Atlanta Merger of 1895

The National Baptist Convention was created in September 1895 at Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta by merging three national bodies that had grown up separately in the previous fifteen years. Each of the three had a single purpose, and the merger was an argument for consolidating them under one roof so that Black Baptists would speak with one voice and fund one set of boards.

The three bodies that merged

The Baptist Foreign Mission Convention was organized in 1880 at Montgomery, Alabama, largely at the urging of William W. Colley, who had served in Nigeria as a missionary appointed by the Southern Baptist Convention and returned convinced that Black Baptists needed a board of their own. The American National Baptist Convention was organized in 1886 at St. Louis under William J. Simmons of Louisville, and aimed at fellowship, home mission and the general dignity of the denomination. The Baptist National Educational Convention was organized in 1893 and concentrated on ministerial training and schools. Foreign mission, domestic organization and education were the three legs, and in 1895 they were bolted together.

Elias Camp Morris, pastor at Helena, Arkansas, was elected the first president and held the office until his death in 1922, an unusually long and stabilizing tenure. Under Morris the convention set up a Foreign Mission Board, a Home Mission Board, an Education Board and, in 1896, a publishing enterprise in Nashville. The convention grew fast, and the growth created the very asset that would tear it in half twenty years later.

4. The Lott Carey Convention of 1897

The Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention was organized at Washington, D.C., in December 1897, two years after the Atlanta merger, by ministers who were dissatisfied with how the new convention was running its foreign mission work. The complaints were about where the mission board sat, how it was staffed, and whether the eastern churches that raised much of the money had any real say in spending it. Some of the founders also objected to what they saw as an anti-white current in convention rhetoric and preferred continued cooperation with northern white Baptist societies.

The convention takes its name from Lott Carey, a Virginia Baptist born into slavery near Richmond who purchased his freedom, was ordained, and sailed for West Africa in 1821 as one of the first African American missionaries to Liberia, where he died in 1828. Naming the new body after him made its priority explicit.

Lott Carey never became a competing denomination, and that distinction matters. It functions as a cooperating mission convention, and the churches and pastors who support it usually belong to one of the National Baptist conventions at the same time. Working relationships between Lott Carey and the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. were repaired within a few years of the split and have continued in various forms since. A Baptist church may support as many mission agencies as it can afford, and many do.

5. The 1915 Publishing House Split

The division of 1915 was a fight over a printing plant. In 1896 the young convention authorized a publishing effort and placed it in the hands of Richard Henry Boyd, a Texas pastor born into slavery in Mississippi in 1843, who moved to Nashville and built the National Baptist Publishing Board into a substantial Black-owned printing and publishing business. Boyd printed Sunday school quarterlies, hymnals, church supplies and periodicals, and the board became the convention's best-known enterprise and a major source of its revenue.

Two claims to one asset

Boyd had chartered the publishing board as a corporation under Tennessee law, and the plant, the presses, the copyrights and the bank accounts stood in the name of that corporation rather than in the name of the convention. Boyd's position was that he had raised the capital, taken the risk and built the business, and that the board he incorporated owned what it had bought. The convention's position, argued at the annual sessions from about 1905 onward and pressed hard by 1914, was that the publishing board existed because the convention created it, printed literature the convention had commissioned, and was therefore convention property answerable to convention audit.

At the annual session in September 1915 the dispute broke open. Delegates moved to incorporate the convention itself so that it would have legal standing to hold property, Boyd and his supporters objected and withdrew, and two separate meetings were held. The group that incorporated became the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. The group that walked out with Boyd continued as the National Baptist Convention of America, unincorporated for the next seventy-two years, and was known for a long time as the Boyd convention. Litigation in the Tennessee courts followed, and Boyd's corporation retained the publishing property.

The incorporated convention responded by founding its own press, the Sunday School Publishing Board, at Nashville in 1916, which has printed its literature ever since. Two Black Baptist publishing operations therefore stand in the same city, and the reason is a corporate charter drawn up more than a century ago.

6. National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.

The National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. is the body that incorporated in 1915 and kept the original convention's boards and mission agencies. Its offices are in Nashville, its literature comes from the Sunday School Publishing Board, and it maintains foreign mission work with partner churches in Africa and the Caribbean. It is a member of the Baptist World Alliance.

The Jackson years

Joseph Harrison Jackson, pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, was elected president in 1953 and held the office until 1982, twenty-nine years in the chair. Jackson was a formidable preacher and administrator who believed that the advance of Black Americans would come through legal action, education, land ownership and enterprise, a program he summarized in the phrase from protest to production. He supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and litigation strategy, and he opposed civil disobedience, boycotts and street demonstrations as methods that invited disorder and put the convention's institutions at risk.

That position put him at odds with a large body of younger pastors during the years of the sit-ins and the freedom rides. A campaign to replace him with Gardner C. Taylor of Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn came to a head at the 1961 annual session in Kansas City, where the contest over the chair produced a physical struggle on the platform during which a delegate fell and later died. Jackson remained president. The pastors who had backed Taylor left, and the Progressive convention was organized within weeks.

After Jackson

Theodore Judson Jemison, who had organized the Baton Rouge bus boycott of 1953, was elected president in 1982 and oversaw the construction of the convention's Baptist World Center in Nashville. His successor, Henry J. Lyons, resigned the presidency in 1999 after being convicted in Florida state court on charges of racketeering and grand theft involving convention-related funds, a matter reported at length in the press at the time and followed by significant reforms in the convention's financial governance. Presidents since have served fixed terms under the convention's constitution.

The convention runs a Congress of Christian Education that meets annually for training in Sunday school teaching, church music, ministry to youth and pastoral work, and the Congress is for many member churches the most useful thing the convention does. It also maintains an auxiliary structure of women's, laymen's, ushers' and youth departments that carries much of the actual programming.

7. National Baptist Convention of America

The National Baptist Convention of America International, Inc. is the body that formed around Richard Henry Boyd and the National Baptist Publishing Board when the convention divided in 1915. For most of the twentieth century it was distinguished from its parent by one visible fact: it was unincorporated, and its literature came from a publishing house that the Boyd family owned and directed rather than from a convention board.

That arrangement gave the convention a stable press and gave the press a permanent constituency. It also left the same ambiguity in place that had caused the 1915 rupture, because the convention still did not own the publishing operation it depended on. The question was deferred for seven decades rather than settled.

The 1987 incorporation

In 1987 the convention voted to incorporate, which meant creating a legal person capable of holding property and, by implication, of owning a publishing board. The Boyd family's publishing corporation stood outside that new structure, and the old argument reopened on the same terms as before. In 1988 the churches most closely tied to the Boyd press withdrew and organized the National Missionary Baptist Convention of America. The incorporated body continued as the National Baptist Convention of America, Inc., and has since taken the style National Baptist Convention of America International, Inc. to reflect its work outside the United States.

Its structure resembles that of its sibling conventions: a president and officers elected under a constitution, boards for foreign mission, home mission, education and publication, a Congress of Christian Education, and women's, laymen's and youth auxiliaries. It teaches the same Baptist doctrine, and the ordinary member of one of its churches would find nothing unfamiliar in a service at a church of any other National Baptist convention.

8. National Missionary Baptist Convention of America

The National Missionary Baptist Convention of America was organized in 1988 by churches and pastors who left the National Baptist Convention of America after its incorporation, and who kept their working relationship with the Nashville publishing house founded by Richard Henry Boyd, now the R.H. Boyd Publishing Corporation. It is the youngest of the four bodies, and its name states its emphasis.

Its founding is the clearest illustration of a pattern running through this whole history. Two of the four conventions were founded in arguments about one printing operation, and a third incorporated itself to settle the question of who owned one. Sunday school literature decides what a congregation's children are taught week by week, hymnals decide what a congregation sings, and the revenue from both pays for missionaries and administrators. Control of the press is control of the denomination's formation and much of its money, and Baptists who will not concede authority to a bishop have fought hard over who holds it.

The convention maintains mission work, an annual session, a Congress of Christian Education and the standard auxiliaries. Like its siblings it holds no authority over the internal life of its member churches.

9. Progressive National Baptist Convention

The Progressive National Baptist Convention was organized in November 1961 at Zion Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, at a call issued by its pastor, L. Venchael Booth. The pastors who came had lost the contest for the presidency of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. in Kansas City weeks earlier, and they were leaving over two connected questions. The first was tenure: whether a president should be limited to a fixed number of terms, or whether an incumbent could hold the chair indefinitely. The second was method: whether the convention should place its name, its money and its buildings behind the marches, boycotts, sit-ins and jailings then underway across the South.

Thomas M. Chambers was elected the new convention's first president. Progressive wrote term limits into its constitution from the beginning, and the rotation of leadership has remained one of its defining features. Booth himself later described the founding as an effort to secure freedom of expression and orderly succession inside Baptist life.

The civil rights movement's Baptist home

Martin Luther King Jr. affiliated with the Progressive convention, as did Ralph David Abernathy, Gardner C. Taylor and Benjamin E. Mays. The convention supported the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in its work and gave the movement a denominational base at a time when the convention its founders had left would not provide one. Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King and his father both served, is associated with the convention. Later Progressive sessions took positions on voting rights, employment, housing and criminal justice, and the convention has kept an explicitly public posture ever since.

Progressive is a member of the Baptist World Alliance and has worked with the National Council of Churches and with other historically Black denominations on shared projects. Its annual session, like those of its sibling conventions, combines preaching, business and a Congress of Christian Education.

10. What National Baptists Believe

National Baptist belief is Baptist belief. The conventions do not impose a confession, and a member church may adopt whatever articles of faith it chooses, but in practice the churches of all four bodies teach a common set of convictions that can be stated plainly.

Scripture

The Bible is held to be the inspired word of God and the final authority for faith and practice. Preaching is expected to be biblical exposition, and the sermon is the center of the service. National Baptist churches historically use the King James Version in the pulpit, and many still do, though other translations are common in study settings. Church tradition, councils and confessions may be useful and carry no independent authority.

Salvation

Salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, received personally by repentance and belief, and the moment of conversion is expected to be a conscious one that a believer can speak about. The invitation at the close of the sermon, when hearers are called forward to profess faith or to unite with the church, is a fixed part of National Baptist worship. Most National Baptist churches teach the perseverance of the believer, and the Calvinist and Arminian systems are both present across the family without either being enforced. The wider Catholic and Protestant argument about the place of works appears in the guide to faith and works.

Baptism

Baptism is by full immersion in water, administered only to those old enough to profess faith for themselves, and given in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Infants are not baptized; they are presented or dedicated in a service of blessing that is understood to convey no sacramental grace. Baptism is held to be an ordinance commanded by Christ and a public sign of a salvation already received.

That verse, together with the baptism of the Ethiopian official in Acts 8:36-38 and the burial imagery of Romans 6:4, carries the Baptist case: hearing, believing and then baptism, in that order, by immersion. The full Catholic account of the same rite is set out in the guide to baptism.

The Lord's Supper

The Lord's Supper is celebrated as the second ordinance, usually monthly, with bread and with the cup, and it is understood as a memorial of Christ's death and a proclamation of it until he comes, following 1 Corinthians 11:26. National Baptist churches do not teach that the elements become the body and blood of Christ. Practice on admission to the table varies by congregation, and open communion for any professing believer is common.

The church

A church is a local congregation of baptized believers, voluntarily associated, governing itself under the headship of Christ. The congregation calls its pastor, receives and dismisses members, disciplines, ordains through a council of neighboring churches and holds its own property. Deacons serve alongside the pastor, and in many National Baptist churches the deacon board carries real weight in the congregation's decisions. Every believer has direct access to God and no priestly mediation is required, a conviction usually grounded in 1 Peter 2:9 and 1 Timothy 2:5.

Liberty of conscience

Baptists have insisted since the seventeenth century that faith cannot be coerced and that the civil magistrate has no authority over conscience or worship. Religious liberty and the separation of church and state are treated as Baptist principles rather than as merely American ones. For Black Baptists that principle has a particular edge, since the churches were among the few institutions in the segregated South that white authority did not directly control.

11. What a Convention Can and Cannot Do

A National Baptist convention has no jurisdiction. Understanding that single fact prevents most of the errors outsiders make about these bodies, including the assumption that a convention president functions as a bishop or that a convention resolution binds anyone.

What it can do

The convention receives money from cooperating churches and spends it on foreign missionaries, home mission projects, schools, disaster relief and publishing. It runs an annual session with preaching and business. It operates a Congress of Christian Education that trains Sunday school teachers, musicians, ushers, youth workers and preachers. It issues statements in the name of the convention. It may set standards for the ministers and churches it will seat as messengers, and it may decline to seat them.

What it cannot do

The convention cannot ordain, appoint, transfer or remove a pastor. It cannot dictate a congregation's doctrine, liturgy, budget, membership or discipline. It cannot own or encumber a member church's property. It cannot excommunicate. Its resolutions carry the weight of the argument in them and nothing more. When a National Baptist convention takes a public position, it speaks for the assembly that adopted it, and a member church is free to disagree from the pulpit the following Sunday.

Congregational government of this kind is one of the deepest structural differences between Baptists and Catholics, and it runs through every other disagreement. The comparison is drawn out in the guide to Catholic and Protestant differences.

12. Worship, Preaching and Music

National Baptist worship is built around the sermon, and the sermon is built around a biblical text opened, applied and driven home. The service typically runs devotion led by deacons, congregational singing, choir selections, prayer, scripture, offering, sermon and an invitation to discipleship. There is no prescribed liturgy and no lectionary, and the order is set by the local church.

The preaching tradition

Black Baptist preaching has a recognizable form. It usually begins in a measured, conversational register, builds through exposition and illustration, and rises at the close into a chanted or intoned delivery, often called whooping, in which pitch, rhythm and congregational response carry the conclusion. The congregation talks back, and the call and response between pulpit and pew is understood as part of the sermon rather than an interruption of it. Gardner C. Taylor, whose sermons have been collected and published in several volumes, worked in this tradition while preaching in a plainer style.

Music

Gospel music as a genre was largely formed in Black Baptist and Holiness congregations in the early twentieth century. Thomas A. Dorsey, working from Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago in the 1930s, brought blues phrasing into sacred song and wrote Take My Hand, Precious Lord, and the National Baptist Convention's annual sessions became one of the main channels through which the new music spread from church to church. Mahalia Jackson sang in that world. Alongside gospel the churches kept the Dr. Watts hymn, the long-meter lined hymn sung slowly and without instruments, which remains part of devotion in many congregations. The New National Baptist Hymnal, first published in 1977, is widely used across the conventions.

Instruments, choirs, praise teams and worship styles vary enormously from one congregation to another, and no convention regulates them. Some National Baptist churches are indistinguishable in sound from a contemporary evangelical service, and others have changed very little in eighty years.

13. Women, Schools and Foreign Mission

Women organized the practical work of the National Baptist Convention almost from its beginning, and the institution that carried it was the Woman's Convention, formed in 1900 as an auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention. Nannie Helen Burroughs, its corresponding secretary, gave the address at the 1900 session titled How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping, which argued that the denomination was wasting the ability of its women.

Nannie Helen Burroughs and the National Training School

Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls at Washington, D.C., which opened in 1909 and taught domestic science, office skills, missions and Bible alongside a deliberate program of racial self-respect. The school was funded substantially by contributions from Black Baptist women themselves, which Burroughs treated as a point of principle. She led the Woman's Convention for decades and built the fundraising network, the training program and the staff that carried much of the denomination's work among women. After her death in 1961 the school was renamed in her honor.

Ordination and the pulpit

Because every congregation governs itself, there is no convention-wide rule on the ordination of women. Some National Baptist churches ordain women to the ministry and call women as senior pastors, and others do not and hold to a male pastorate on the basis of the pastoral epistles. Both practices exist inside each of the four conventions, and the conventions have not attempted to settle the question for their churches. Women have always run the missionary societies, the Sunday schools, the youth departments and much of the finance regardless of the ordination question.

Schools

American Baptist College in Nashville began in 1924 as the American Baptist Theological Seminary, founded jointly by the National Baptist Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention as a school for training Black ministers. Its students in the late 1950s and early 1960s included John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette and C.T. Vivian, who took the Nashville sit-in movement out of its classrooms. Many other historically Black colleges were founded by white northern Baptist societies working with Black congregations after the Civil War, and Black Baptist state conventions founded and sustained dozens of academies and junior colleges of their own.

Foreign mission

Foreign mission was the reason the convention existed in the first place, and it remains a standing board in each body. National Baptist mission effort has concentrated on West and Southern Africa, on Liberia in particular given the Lott Carey inheritance, and on the Caribbean, and it now works largely in partnership with indigenous churches rather than by sending resident missionaries. The Baptist World Alliance provides a wider network, and the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. and the Progressive National Baptist Convention are both members of it.

14. Social Witness as History

The social record of the National Baptist conventions is a matter of documented history, and it is uneven, which is what makes it worth stating accurately. The conventions did not move as one body, and their most consequential internal argument was precisely about how far a church should go into public conflict.

Two positions, both held by serious Christians

Joseph H. Jackson's argument was that Black institutions were fragile, that the churches and their property could be destroyed by confrontation, and that durable gains would come from courts, ballots, education and ownership. That position was held by many pastors who had watched churches burned. The opposing argument, carried by the pastors who founded the Progressive convention, was that segregation was a moral evil that had to be confronted publicly, that the church was the only institution able to lead that confrontation, and that the risk was the cost of obedience. Both sides quoted Scripture, and the disagreement was about prudence and method.

What is beyond dispute is that Black Baptist churches supplied the movement with its buildings, its money, its music, its organizers and much of its language. Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma and Nashville ran through church basements. Ministers preached the campaign on Sunday and organized it on Monday.

Where this page stops

This section reports what these conventions did and argued about. The Catholic Church makes its own doctrinal case about justice, the dignity of the human person, the common good, solidarity and the preferential option for the poor, and that case is set out in full in the guide to Catholic social teaching. The two subjects are related and separate. One is denominational history, the other is a body of doctrine.

15. Where Catholic Teaching Agrees and Differs

The Catholic Church regards baptized National Baptists as Christians, brothers and sisters in Christ, joined to the Church by a real if incomplete communion. The Second Vatican Council's decree on ecumenism teaches that those who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in a certain communion with the Catholic Church, even though that communion is imperfect, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church 838 restates it. What follows sets out the agreements first because they are larger than the disagreements.

What is held in common

Catholics and National Baptists confess the Trinity, the incarnation, the true divinity and true humanity of Jesus Christ, his death for sinners, his bodily resurrection, his return in glory, the inspiration of Scripture, the necessity of grace and the call to repentance and holiness. Both bodies baptize with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Both preach that no one saves himself.

Baptism

Baptism performed in a National Baptist church with water and the Trinitarian formula is valid in Catholic teaching, and a National Baptist received into full communion is never rebaptized. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1256 states that anyone may baptize who uses the Trinitarian formula and intends to do what the Church does. The disagreements are two. Catholic teaching holds that baptism itself works the forgiveness of sins and the new birth rather than signifying a conversion already complete, and it baptizes infants, a practice the Catechism defends at 1250 and 1252 by pointing to the household baptisms in Acts and to the witness of the Church from the second century onward. National Baptists confine baptism to those who can profess faith, on the pattern they read in Acts. Neither side disputes what the other actually teaches on this point, and the difference is genuine.

The Lord's Supper

The sharpest difference is the Eucharist. National Baptists observe the Lord's Supper as a memorial ordinance in which the bread and the cup remain bread and wine or juice, and they hold that Christ commanded the remembrance rather than a change in the elements. Catholic teaching holds that the whole substance of the bread becomes the body of Christ and the whole substance of the wine becomes his blood, a change the Church calls transubstantiation, taught at Trent and restated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1376. This difference follows from a difference about ordained ministry, since Catholic teaching holds that the Eucharist requires a priest ordained in apostolic succession. The Catholic account is given in the guide to the Eucharist.

Church and ministry

Catholic teaching holds that Christ established a visible Church governed by the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, and that ordination through the laying on of hands in apostolic succession confers a sacrament. National Baptists hold that the church on earth exists in local congregations, that ministers are set apart by the congregation and a council of sister churches, and that no office stands above the congregation. The Council's decree on ecumenism describes Christian communities that lack the sacrament of orders as having a communion with the Catholic Church that is on this account incomplete, a description Baptists would reject in its own terms while agreeing on the descriptive fact that they have no bishops.

Where the two have talked

The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Baptist World Alliance have held two rounds of international dialogue, the first from 1984 to 1988 and the second from 2006 to 2010, producing agreed reports on witness to Christ and on the word of God in the life of the Church. Since the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. and the Progressive National Baptist Convention are Baptist World Alliance members, these conversations belong to them. The reports record real convergence on Scripture and on mission and record the same open questions on baptism, Eucharist and ministry. The broader Catholic approach is described in the guide to ecumenism.

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