Southern Baptist Convention

The Southern Baptist Convention is a U.S. Protestant denomination founded in 1845. Its autonomous churches cooperate through a convention for missions, education, and other ministries.

Baptist: A Protestant Christian tradition emphasizing believer’s baptism and the authority of Scripture. The convention is the largest U.S. body within this broader tradition.
American Baptist Home Mission Society: A Baptist organization founded in 1832 to support missionary work in the United States. Its refusal to appoint slaveholders as missionaries helped precipitate the split.
Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting: The yearly gathering where messengers from cooperating churches conduct convention business. Messengers elect leaders, consider motions, and shape the convention’s priorities.
Southern Baptist Convention and slavery: The history of the convention’s formation in a defense of slaveholders’ eligibility for missionary service and its later reckoning with slavery. Its founding dispute tied the denomination directly to slavery.
American Baptist Churches USA: A U.S. Baptist denomination formed from northern Baptist traditions and organized around cooperating congregations. It represents a separate national Baptist tradition that did not join the 1845 Southern split.
Believer's baptism: Baptism administered to people who personally profess Christian faith. It is a defining Baptist practice shared by convention churches.
Triennial Convention: A national Baptist organization formed in 1814 to coordinate missions and other cooperative work. Southern Baptists separated from this national body when the convention formed.
Southern Baptist messengers: Representatives sent by cooperating churches to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting. They vote on convention business, while their churches retain local autonomy.
Southern Baptist Convention and the Civil Rights Movement: The convention’s varied institutional and individual responses to the mid-twentieth-century struggle for racial equality. Its record reveals tensions between local churches, leaders, and changing public demands.
National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.: A historically Black Baptist denomination founded in 1895 through the consolidation of Black Baptist organizations. Its history and constituency differ from those of the predominantly white Southern convention.

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