What's In A Name?

The Southern Baptist Convention is considering a change to its venerable name yet again…

The president of the Southern Baptist Convention formed a task force to study the possibility of changing the name of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

“The convention’s name is so regional,” SBC President Bryant Wright told Fox News Radio. “We are going to think through potential names that would better describe us without such a regional geographic limitation.”

Here is my suggestion. Drop Southern. Drop Baptist. Maybe even drop Convention.

Denominational identifiers, like local church identifiers on a grander scale, serve to divide and distinguish. We are this and therefore not that. We believe in this secondary doctrine but do not practice that secondary doctrine. We are us and you are not us. You are probably a Christian but not our kind of Christian. You can’t teach in our local church, you perhaps cannot even break bread with us, if you identify as that and not this.

The name Southern Baptist Convention carries a ton of baggage. It is “Southern”, i.e. the Southern United States, and it is “Baptist”, i.e. a specific set of secondary doctrines and practices as well as certain cultural and political expectations. I have been a member and even a pastor of several Southern Baptist churches and you can find them all over the country and all over the world. Even if you acknowledge the historically Southern heritage of the SBC and the importance of Baptist faith and practice the questions remains: Is the name Southern Baptist Convention helpful or harmful in carrying out the global mission of the church and in fostering unity and cooperation among various Christians? I think it is great for fostering uniformity and erecting boundaries, not so much for aiding in unifying the church.

Here is another example. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church or OPC for short. Founded in the 1930’s as a reaction to liberalism in “mainstream” Protestantism, the name draws a clear line in the sand. We are not just Presbyterians, we are Orthodox Presbyterians. So what does that mean for other Presbyterian denominations? They are not Orthodox? I think you can make that argument when speaking of the PC-USA but what about the PCA? They seem like pretty decent folk apart from that “baptizing” babies thing. I think they are pretty Orthodox. What about the rest of the various and sundry Presbyterian and Reformed denominations? Are they not orthodox or perhaps less orthodox than the OPC? Why not name the denomination the “We’re right and you’re wrong Presbyterian Church” or “WRYRPC”? Check out the accompanying chart and see if you can figure out the maze of Presbyterian denominationalism. If we spend more time fighting over which subset of a subset of a faith tradition is right than we do in preaching Christ to the lost and performing acts of mercy and grace, I would question just how orthodox we really are no matter what the name of a given denomination might say or which Reformed confessions we subscribe too.

I am firmly convicted that naming local churches and denominations in ways that draw lines in the sand that act to corral and divide are harmful to the church. So my recommendation to the SBC is to drop the “S” and the “B” and the “C”. “Christian” is the only title or identifier any of us should ever need or want.