Southern Baptist Beliefs Explained

1. What the Southern Baptist Convention Is

The Southern Baptist Convention is a voluntary association of self-governing Baptist churches in the United States that cooperate to fund missionaries, seminaries, publishing and relief work. Southern Baptists teach that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and the final authority for faith and practice, that a person is saved by grace through personal faith in Jesus Christ, that baptism is for professing believers by full immersion, and that every local congregation answers to Christ alone with no bishop, presbytery or convention over it. The convention is the largest Protestant body in the United States by membership, and it holds that place while possessing almost no power over the churches that belong to it.

Membership rank here rests on the figures Southern Baptist churches report through the convention's own Annual Church Profile, compiled with Lifeway Christian Resources, set beside the membership other American denominations publish for themselves. Reporting is voluntary in most bodies, so treat any ranking as approximate.

That combination confuses outside readers constantly. The convention exists only when it is in session. It meets once a year, usually in June, as an assembly of messengers sent by cooperating churches. Between meetings its work is carried by an Executive Committee based in Nashville, Tennessee, and by a set of entities the convention owns. The convention adopts resolutions, and resolutions express the opinion of the messengers present in that hall in that year. They bind no congregation, no pastor and no future meeting.

Convention, Denomination, Church

Three words get used interchangeably in news reports and they mean different things here. A Southern Baptist church is a local congregation that owns its building, calls and dismisses its own pastor, sets its own budget and admits its own members. The Southern Baptist Convention is the annual meeting plus the entities it funds. The word denomination is used loosely for the whole network, and Southern Baptists themselves often avoid it, because it suggests a governing structure that does not exist. The strongest action the convention can take against a congregation is to declare it no longer in friendly cooperation, which ends the relationship and leaves the church standing, incorporated and open on Sunday.

The wider Baptist family and its shared distinctives, including believer's baptism, congregational autonomy and soul liberty, are covered in our guide to what Baptists believe across the whole Baptist family. This page stays with the largest single convention: its confession, its structure, and the specific places where Southern Baptist and Catholic teaching land on the same side.

2. How the Convention Began, and What It Has Said Since

Southern Baptists organised in Augusta, Georgia in May 1845, after the national Baptist mission board declined to appoint a slaveholder as a missionary. Baptist churches in the South withdrew from cooperation with their northern counterparts and formed a convention that would send and fund missionaries on their own terms. The founding is a matter of record in the convention's own published history, and Southern Baptists today do not dispute it.

The 1995 Resolution on Racial Reconciliation

Meeting in Atlanta in June 1995, on the convention's one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, messengers adopted a resolution on racial reconciliation that named slavery as a primary reason for the convention's formation, apologised for that complicity and for the convention's later support of segregation and its failure to support the civil rights movement, and asked forgiveness from African American Christians. The resolution committed the convention to eradicating racism from Southern Baptist life. Later resolutions and agency actions have returned to the subject repeatedly, including votes on the display of the Confederate battle flag and on the ethics of racial reconciliation in the convention's institutions.

Historians and Southern Baptists themselves continue to argue about how far institutional practice has followed the words. The convention has elected an African American president, and its churches and pastors span a range of ethnic backgrounds far wider than the 1845 founders would have recognised. Anyone writing about the convention should give both the 1845 origin and the 1995 repudiation, since giving one without the other misstates the record.

Great Commission Baptists

In 2012 the convention approved the use of Great Commission Baptists as an alternative descriptor for churches that prefer it, keeping the legal name unchanged. The proposal came in part from congregations outside the South and from ethnic minority congregations for whom the regional name carried freight. Both names remain in use.

3. The Baptist Faith and Message

The Baptist Faith and Message is the confessional statement of the Southern Baptist Convention, adopted in 1925, revised in 1963 and again in 2000, with an article on the family added in 1998. It runs to eighteen articles and covers the Scriptures, God, man, salvation, God's purpose of grace, the church, baptism and the Lord's Supper, the Lord's Day, the kingdom, last things, evangelism and missions, education, stewardship, cooperation, the Christian and the social order, peace and war, religious liberty, and the family.

Confession, Not Creed

Southern Baptists insist on the distinction. A creed, in their usage, is imposed by an authority above the local church and made a test of communion. A confession is a voluntary statement of what a body of Christians believes together, revisable by the same messengers who adopted it, carrying no power over any congregation's conscience. The preamble to the Baptist Faith and Message says as much explicitly, disclaiming any authority over conscience and affirming the right of each congregation to interpret Scripture for itself. In practice the confession does real work: the convention requires its missionaries, seminary faculty and agency employees to teach in accordance with and not contrary to it, so employment turns on it even though church membership does not.

What Changed in 2000

The 2000 revision is the version currently in force, and three changes drew the most comment. On Scripture, the 1963 statement that the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ was replaced with the affirmation that all Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is himself the focus of divine revelation. Supporters argued the older wording had been used to set parts of Scripture against other parts. On the church, the 2000 text states that while both men and women are gifted for service, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. On the family, the 1998 article affirms that a husband has the God-given responsibility to provide for, protect and lead his family and that a wife is to submit graciously to her husband's servant leadership, with both made in God's image and equal in worth.

A number of moderate Baptists declined to affirm the 2000 revision, and some left for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship or other bodies. Because the churches are autonomous, a congregation may keep the 1963 text, adopt its own confession, or adopt none at all, and still cooperate with the convention.

The content of the Baptist Faith and Message summarised here is taken from the text published by the Southern Baptist Convention, including the 1925, 1963 and 2000 editions and the 1998 article on the family. Read the convention's own text before quoting it in argument.

4. Scripture, Inerrancy and Authority

Southern Baptists hold that the Bible has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter, and that it is the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds and religious opinions are to be judged. That formula comes from Article I of the Baptist Faith and Message and it is the load-bearing sentence of the whole confession. Inerrancy, as Southern Baptists use the word, means that Scripture is entirely truthful in all that it affirms, including matters of history and doctrine.

Two consequences follow, and both surface in any conversation with a Catholic. First, Southern Baptists hold sola scriptura, the Reformation principle that Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith. Church history, confessions and the writings of the Fathers are useful and non-binding. Second, the individual believer under the guidance of the Holy Spirit is competent to read and understand Scripture, a conviction Baptists call soul competency. No priest, bishop or council stands between the reader and the text.

The Catholic Position Stated Plainly

The Catholic Church affirms the inspiration and truth of Scripture with equal firmness. Dei Verbum 11 teaches that the books of Scripture teach firmly, faithfully and without error the truth that God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation. Where the two part company is on the rule of faith. Catholics hold that Scripture, apostolic Tradition and the teaching office of the bishops in communion with the Bishop of Rome are bound together, so that none of them stands without the others. Paul calls the Church the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15), and the same apostle tells the Thessalonians to hold to the traditions taught by word of mouth or by letter (2 Thessalonians 2:15). The canon of Scripture itself came to the churches through that living body. Our guide to Sacred Tradition and Scripture makes the case at length.

A Southern Baptist will answer that the traditions Paul names are the apostolic gospel itself, now written down, and that later developments cannot claim the same standing. The argument is real and it is not settled by trading one verse for another. It is settled, if at all, by asking how the Church recognised which books were Scripture in the first place, and on what authority.

5. What Southern Baptists Teach About Salvation

Southern Baptists teach that salvation is the free gift of God offered to every person, received by repentance and personal faith in Jesus Christ, and that it includes regeneration, justification, sanctification and glorification. Article IV of the Baptist Faith and Message sets out those four terms. Regeneration is the new birth worked by the Holy Spirit. Justification is God's acquittal of the sinner on the principle of righteousness. Sanctification is the lifelong process of growth toward moral and spiritual maturity. Glorification is the final blessed state of the redeemed.

Personal Conversion

The centre of Southern Baptist piety is a conscious, datable turning to Christ. A person hears the gospel preached, is convicted of sin, repents, trusts Christ and confesses him publicly. The invitation at the end of a service, the walk to the front, the counselling room and the subsequent baptism form a pattern most Southern Baptists know from the inside. Southern Baptists treat the walk to the front as the visible expression of a decision already made in the heart, and they locate the saving act in repentance and faith rather than in the aisle.

The Security of the Believer

Article V, on God's purpose of grace, affirms that all true believers endure to the end and that those whom God has accepted in Christ and sanctified by his Spirit will never fall away from the state of grace. Southern Baptists preach this as the security of the believer, and it is a source of real assurance in their spiritual life. The same article warns that believers may fall into sin, grieve the Spirit and bring reproach on the cause of Christ, and that a person who abandons the faith entirely gives evidence of never having been born again in the first place.

The Catholic Response

Catholic teaching agrees that salvation is by grace, that no one earns the initial grace of justification, and that faith is necessary. The Council of Trent taught justification by grace through faith while denying that faith alone suffices, and the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between Catholics and Lutherans records a considerable measure of agreement on the substance. Catholics part from Southern Baptists on final perseverance. The Church teaches that a baptised Christian can fall from sanctifying grace by grave sin freely committed and can be restored through sacramental confession, which is why Paul warns the Corinthians that the one who thinks he stands should take care lest he fall (1 Corinthians 10:12) and disciplines his own body lest after preaching to others he himself be disqualified (1 Corinthians 9:27). Our guides to faith and works and sacramental confession take that argument further.

6. Baptism and the Lord's Supper

Southern Baptists keep two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper, and call them ordinances rather than sacraments to signal that they are commands of Christ obeyed by the believer rather than channels of grace. Baptism is administered only to those old enough to profess faith, by full immersion in water, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Lord's Supper is a memorial of Christ's death, observed with bread and the fruit of the vine, in which the congregation remembers the Lord and anticipates his return.

Why Immersion, and Why Only Believers

Southern Baptists read the New Testament as recording believers being baptised after they believed, in Acts 2:41, Acts 8:12 and Acts 18:8, and they read immersion out of Paul's image of burial and resurrection in Romans 6:3-4. That argument is the common property of the whole Baptist family rather than anything peculiar to this convention, and we set it out at length, with the Catholic reply, in our guide to believer's baptism and the Baptist case for immersion. What is specific to the Southern Baptist Convention is how tightly the practice is tied to membership: the Baptist Faith and Message makes baptism prerequisite to church membership and to the Lord's Supper, so the ordinance functions as the door into the congregation.

The Catholic Answer

The Catholic Church holds that baptism actually accomplishes what it signifies. Peter tells the crowd at Pentecost to repent and be baptised for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). Paul writes of the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5). Peter says plainly that baptism now saves you (1 Peter 3:21). Because the effect is God's work rather than the recipient's achievement, infants may be baptised, and the New Testament records whole households baptised together in Acts 16:15, Acts 16:33 and 1 Corinthians 1:16. Paul's link between baptism and circumcision in Colossians 2:11-12 carries weight for Catholics, since circumcision was given to infants of the covenant. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1213 calls baptism the gateway to life in the Spirit.

The disagreement about the Lord's Supper runs deeper. Southern Baptists hold a memorial view. The Catholic Church holds that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, taking John 6:53-56 and Paul's warning about discerning the body in 1 Corinthians 11:27-29 as the plain sense. Our guide to the Eucharist and the Real Presence lays out that case. Our guide to baptism, including infant baptism handles the baptismal question in full.

One Point of Real Recognition

The Catholic Church recognises a Southern Baptist baptism as a true baptism, provided it was administered with water and with the Trinitarian formula and the intention to do what the Church does. A Southern Baptist received into full communion with the Catholic Church is not rebaptised. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1271 states that those who believe in Christ and have been properly baptised are put in some, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church, have a right to be called Christians, and are with good reason accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church. That recognition is not reciprocated: most Southern Baptist churches require immersion following a profession of faith for membership and will baptise a former Catholic on reception.

7. How the Convention Works: Messengers, Entities, Money

The Southern Baptist Convention operates through an annual meeting of messengers, a set of owned entities, and a shared funding channel called the Cooperative Program. Understanding those three things explains most of what confuses outsiders about Southern Baptist news coverage.

Messengers, Not Delegates

Cooperating churches send messengers to the annual meeting. The word is deliberate. A delegate carries the authority of the body that sent him and votes on its behalf. A messenger carries no such authority and votes his own conscience, because the sending church has no authority to delegate in the first place. Messengers elect the convention president and officers, receive reports from the entities, adopt the budget allocation, and debate and vote on resolutions and on constitutional amendments. A constitutional amendment requires approval by two-thirds of messengers voting at two consecutive annual meetings.

The Entities

The convention owns and funds a set of national entities. The International Mission Board sends and supports missionaries overseas. The North American Mission Board handles church planting, evangelism and disaster relief in the United States and Canada. Lifeway Christian Resources publishes curricula, Bible study material and research. The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is the convention's public policy and moral concerns arm. GuideStone Financial Resources handles retirement and insurance for ministers and church staff. The Executive Committee conducts business between annual meetings. The convention also owns six seminaries: Southern in Louisville, Southwestern in Fort Worth, New Orleans, Southeastern in Wake Forest, Midwestern in Kansas City, and Gateway, formerly Golden Gate, now in Ontario, California.

The Cooperative Program

Adopted in 1925, the Cooperative Program is the mechanism that makes a fellowship of independent churches capable of funding a global mission force. A cooperating church forwards a percentage of its undesignated offerings to its state Baptist convention. The state convention keeps a share for state work and forwards the rest to the national convention, which allocates it among the entities according to a formula the messengers approve. Two annual missions offerings, the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for international missions and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American missions, run alongside it and go entirely to missions.

The percentage a church gives is set by the church. There is no assessment, no tax and no penalty for giving nothing. The system runs on persuasion, and Southern Baptist leaders spend a good deal of their public communication making the case for it, which is why Cooperative Program giving percentages are a recurring subject of debate at the annual meeting.

8. The Conservative Resurgence

The Conservative Resurgence is the name supporters give to a movement that began in 1979 and changed the leadership of every Southern Baptist agency and seminary within about a decade. Its opponents call the same events the fundamentalist takeover, and the choice of name signals which side of it a writer stands on. The dispute was about biblical inerrancy and about who would teach in the convention's institutions.

How It Worked

The architects of the movement observed that the convention president appoints the Committee on Committees, which shapes the Committee on Nominations, which nominates the trustees who govern the entities and hire their faculty and executives. Elect a president committed to inerrancy every year for long enough, and the trustee boards turn over. Beginning with the election of Adrian Rogers in Houston in 1979, conservatives held the presidency continuously through the 1980s, and by the early 1990s the trustee boards and the seminary presidencies had changed hands.

What Followed

Faculty at several seminaries resigned or were dismissed. Moderate Baptists formed alternative institutions, and in 1991 the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship organised as a separate funding channel for churches that wanted to support missions without supporting the convention's agencies. The 2000 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message consolidated the doctrinal result. The convention withdrew from the Baptist World Alliance in 2004, citing theological concerns about the global body and its treatment of the convention.

Southern Baptists on both sides of that history are still in the churches, and a Catholic asking a Southern Baptist about the Resurgence should expect a strong answer in one direction or the other. The story matters for a practical reason: it explains why the convention's public voice since the 1990s has been consistently conservative on Scripture, sexual ethics and the sanctity of life, which is also the reason the areas of Catholic and Southern Baptist convergence described below exist at all.

9. The Calvinism Question Inside the Convention

Southern Baptists are divided over Calvinism, and the Baptist Faith and Message is worded to accommodate both sides. Article V affirms election as the gracious purpose of God according to which he regenerates, justifies, sanctifies and glorifies sinners, and in the same breath affirms that election is consistent with the free agency of man and comprehends all the means in connection with the end. A convinced Calvinist and a convinced non-Calvinist can each sign that sentence.

The Two Camps

A renewed Calvinism has spread among younger Southern Baptist pastors since the 1990s, carried by seminary teaching, church-planting networks and a wave of popular publishing. Its adherents typically hold to the doctrines summarised as total depravity, unconditional election, definitive atonement, effectual calling and perseverance, and they see themselves as recovering the theology of the convention's founders, several of whom were confessional Calvinists. On the other side, many Southern Baptists hold that Christ died for all without exception, that grace can be resisted, and that the Calvinist account undercuts the convention's evangelistic instinct. In 2012 a group of Southern Baptist leaders published a statement of what they called the traditional Southern Baptist understanding of salvation, which prompted a convention-appointed advisory committee to issue a report the following year calling for cooperation across the divide.

The convention has repeatedly declined to settle the matter by amending its confession, which is consistent with its polity. Our guides to Calvinism and to the five points of Calvinism set out the system and the Catholic response, and our guide to Reformed Baptists covers the churches that hold Calvinist soteriology with Baptist ecclesiology as a settled confessional position.

10. Women, the Pastorate and the Law Amendment

The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 limits the office of pastor to men as qualified by Scripture, and the application of that sentence has been one of the convention's sharpest internal debates. Southern Baptists who defend the restriction cite 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Timothy 3:1-7, and they affirm at the same time that women are gifted for service and hold a very wide range of ministry roles in Southern Baptist churches, including teaching, missions, counselling and administration.

What Actually Happened

In February 2023 the Executive Committee found several churches, including Saddleback Church in California and Fern Creek Baptist Church in Kentucky, not in friendly cooperation over women serving as pastors. Messengers at the June 2023 annual meeting in New Orleans upheld those decisions on appeal. A proposed constitutional amendment, known after its author as the Law Amendment, would have written into the convention's constitution that a cooperating church may not affirm, appoint or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind. Messengers approved it at the 2023 meeting, and at the 2024 meeting in Indianapolis it received a majority of votes cast and fell short of the two-thirds required for a second passage, so it did not take effect.

The result left the convention where it was: the confession restricts the office of pastor to men, the constitution does not name the question explicitly, and the friendly cooperation process remains available case by case. Both sides of that vote remain inside the convention.

The Catholic Position, Which Is Not the Same Position

Catholics reading this should be careful not to hear an echo of their own doctrine. The Catholic Church teaches that it has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood, a judgment John Paul II set out in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994, and the reasoning runs through sacramental theology and the constitution of the Church rather than through a rule about church offices. Southern Baptists have no sacramental priesthood to argue about. Their question is who may hold the office of pastor in a congregation, and the answer is reached by a vote of messengers who could reach a different one. Similar language, different structures underneath. Our guide to the Catholic priesthood sets out the sacramental argument.

11. Abuse Reform and the Limits of Autonomy

Congregational autonomy makes sexual abuse very hard to track across Southern Baptist churches, and the convention has spent years working on that problem in public. Because no body above the congregation can license, discipline or defrock a minister, a credibly accused pastor dismissed by one autonomous church can be called by another that never learns why he left.

In 2021 messengers voted to commission an independent investigation of how the Executive Committee had handled abuse allegations, and the resulting report by the firm Guidepost Solutions was released in May 2022. Messengers at the 2022 annual meeting in Anaheim voted to establish an implementation task force and to create a database of ministers credibly accused of abuse. The work has continued, contested and slow, through subsequent annual meetings, with disputes over funding, legal exposure and who may be listed. Southern Baptist survivors and advocates have been the most persistent public voices pressing it forward.

Catholics have no standing to be smug here. The Catholic Church's own record on abuse is grave, documented and the subject of continuing reckoning, and our guide to the abuse crisis and the Church's response treats it without minimising. The structural point is worth naming honestly in both directions: hierarchy made concealment possible in Catholic dioceses, and autonomy makes tracking nearly impossible in Baptist churches. Neither polity protects children by itself. Policy, transparency, reporting to civil authorities and the willingness to lose institutional face are what protect children.

12. What the Convention's Own Numbers Show

The Southern Baptist Convention publishes its own membership statistics each year through the Annual Church Profile, a voluntary survey of cooperating churches compiled and released with Lifeway Christian Resources. Those reports show membership peaking above sixteen million in 2006 and declining in most years since, alongside declines in baptisms and in average weekly worship attendance, with some annual reports noting increases in the number of cooperating churches and in attendance following the pandemic years.

Membership, baptism and attendance figures cited here are those published by the Southern Baptist Convention in its Annual Church Profile, compiled with Lifeway Christian Resources. The profile is a voluntary self-report by cooperating churches and the convention itself notes that reporting rates vary year to year. Check the current year's release before quoting a number.

How to Read a Membership Number

Baptist membership rolls are known within the convention to overstate active participation, because a person baptised at fifteen may remain on a church roll for decades without attending. Southern Baptist researchers have said so publicly and have urged churches to clean their rolls. Weekly worship attendance is the more meaningful figure for comparison, and it is substantially lower than membership. Catholics should note that the same caution applies in the other direction to Catholic sacramental registers, which count the baptised rather than the practising.

The larger picture is the decline of religious affiliation across American Christianity generally, which affects Southern Baptists and Catholics alike. Our guides to whether Christianity is dying and why people leave the Church set out the survey evidence with the publishers named.

13. Where Catholics and Southern Baptists Agree

Catholics and Southern Baptists already agree on a substantial body of doctrine and on almost the whole of the moral law as it touches life, marriage and religious freedom. Naming that agreement first is honest, and it changes the temperature of every subsequent disagreement.

The Creedal Common Ground

Southern Baptists confess one God eternally existing as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus Christ, his virgin birth, his atoning death, his bodily resurrection, his ascension, his personal return in glory, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and everlasting punishment for the lost and everlasting joy for the redeemed. A Catholic reading Articles II, III, IV and X of the Baptist Faith and Message will find that account of God, the person of Christ and the last things recognisable as his own. Southern Baptists do not recite the Nicene Creed in worship, and they teach its substance.

The Sanctity of Human Life

Article XV of the Baptist Faith and Message calls Christians to speak on behalf of the unborn and to contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death. That is a formula a Catholic can sign without amendment. The convention's early resolutions on abortion in the 1970s were considerably more permissive, and from 1980 onward the convention has taken a consistently pro-life position, adopting resolutions calling for the end of elective abortion, including a 2021 resolution on abolishing abortion. The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has been an active public voice on the question. The Catholic position is set out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2270, that human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. Our guides to abortion and Catholic teaching and euthanasia and assisted suicide set out the Catholic case.

The convention has also addressed reproductive technology, adopting a resolution in 2024 on the ethical questions raised by in vitro fertilisation and the dignity of the human embryo, which moved Southern Baptist teaching closer to the Catholic account of embryonic life than it had been. Southern Baptists and Catholics differ on contraception, where the Catholic Church holds a position most Southern Baptists do not share, treated in our guide to contraception and Catholic teaching.

Marriage and the Family

Both bodies teach that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, established by God, and both teach that sexual intimacy belongs within it. Both teach that children are a gift and that parents bear the primary responsibility for their formation. Both hold that human beings are made male and female in the image of God. Our guide to marriage as a sacrament gives the Catholic account, which adds the sacramental dimension Southern Baptists do not hold.

Religious Liberty

Article XVII of the Baptist Faith and Message states that church and state should be separate, that the state owes every church protection and full freedom in the pursuit of its spiritual ends, and that the state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind. Baptists were arguing for that before it was popular, and Catholics arrived at a compatible statement at the Second Vatican Council in Dignitatis Humanae, which teaches that the human person has a right to religious freedom and that no one is to be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters. Southern Baptists and Catholics have cooperated repeatedly in American public life on conscience protection and on the freedom of religious institutions, including the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, drafted and signed by Catholic and evangelical leaders in their own names on life, marriage and religious liberty.

Missionary Seriousness

Both bodies take the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19-20 as binding on every Christian. Southern Baptists have built a large international missionary force around it through the International Mission Board and give sacrificially to fund it. Catholics with a taste for institutional self-criticism should sit with that. A modest Southern Baptist congregation will often know the names of the missionaries it supports, pray for them by name on Sunday, and give a Christmas offering that goes entirely overseas. That is a habit worth learning.

14. Where Catholics and Southern Baptists Differ

The differences between Catholics and Southern Baptists cluster around four questions: what has final authority, what the sacraments do, what the Church is, and what happens after death. Everything else follows from those.

The Question Under the Questions

Every row of that table is downstream of one dispute: whether Christ established a visible Church with teaching authority that persists, or whether he left a written revelation to be read by believers gathered in congregations. A Southern Baptist who becomes convinced of the first will find the sacramental and Marian doctrines follow. A Catholic who becomes convinced of the second will find the whole structure loosen. Arguing about the rosary before the authority question has been touched is arguing about the branches.

Related material sits on other pages rather than here. Our guides to purgatory, the saints and their intercession, the deuterocanonical books and the papacy take those rows one at a time, and our broad comparison of Catholic and Protestant teaching gives the map.

15. How to Have the Conversation Well

A Catholic who wants a real conversation with a Southern Baptist should start by learning what this particular Southern Baptist believes, since the convention's polity guarantees variation. The Calvinist church plant in a strip mall and the century-old First Baptist on the courthouse square are both Southern Baptist and will not answer the same way about grace, worship or politics.

Five Things Worth Doing

• Concede what is true. The New Testament does record adult converts believing and then being baptised. Southern Baptists are reading a real pattern in Acts, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's time.
• Know the Baptist Faith and Message before quoting it. Read Articles I, IV, V, VI and VII in the convention's own text. Quoting a summary back at someone who has the original is how arguments get lost.
• Do not attribute hierarchy to a body that has none. Saying the Southern Baptist Convention ordered, required or excommunicated anything misdescribes what happened. The convention votes, and churches do as they judge right.
• Ask about assurance. Southern Baptist confidence in salvation is real and it is pastorally serious. Ask how they read 1 Corinthians 10:12 and Hebrews 6:4-6, and expect a considered answer.
• Start at authority. The sacramental disagreements resolve or harden depending on how the authority question goes, so go there early and stay there patiently.

Four Caricatures of the Convention to Retire

• "Southern Baptists are anti-intellectual." The convention runs six accredited seminaries and a substantial publishing and research operation, and Southern Baptist scholars publish across biblical studies, ethics and history.
• "The convention speaks with one voice." Southern Baptists argue in public, at length, about Calvinism, about who may be called a pastor, about abuse reform and about political alignment, and the annual meeting is where those arguments are held rather than settled.
• "Southern Baptists hate Catholics." Southern Baptists and Catholics have cooperated in American public life for decades on life, marriage and religious liberty. Individual Southern Baptists hold a wide range of views about the Catholic Church, and many have never met a Catholic who could explain it to them.
• "The convention controls its churches." The convention cannot appoint a pastor, seize a building, impose a curriculum or discipline a member. Its one available action toward a congregation is ending the cooperative relationship.

What a Catholic Should Take Home

Learn the missionary habit. Learn the scriptural literacy, because Southern Baptist formation puts a high premium on knowing the text of the Bible and expects ordinary members to find a passage and discuss it. Then hold the Catholic claims without apology: that Christ founded a visible Church, that the sacraments do what they signify, that the Eucharist is his body and blood, and that these have been believed from the beginning. Say it calmly, cite the texts, and stay in the friendship past the end of the argument. Our guide to the Catholic approach to Christian unity sets out how the Church understands this work.

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