Autonomy and Cooperation: How the Southern Baptist Convention Governs Itself

No Southern Baptist congregation answers to a bishop, a presbytery or the Convention itself. Each local church is fully self-governing, calling and dismissing its own pastor, owning its own property and setting its own membership standards, a principle Baptists have called soul liberty since the movement's seventeenth century English beginnings. What binds tens of thousands of such congregations into a single recognizable denomination is not authority but cooperation: churches voluntarily contribute to the Cooperative Program, the Convention's shared funding mechanism for missions, seminaries and disaster relief, and send messengers to the annual Convention meeting, which can set denominational policy for its own agencies but cannot compel any individual church to follow it.

Shared doctrine is expressed the same voluntary way, through The Baptist Faith and Message, first adopted in 1925 and most recently revised in 2000. Unlike the creeds of older traditions, it is offered as a consensus statement rather than a binding test of orthodoxy for member churches, though Convention seminaries and mission agencies require their own employees to affirm it. The 2000 revision states that the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture, a position the Convention has increasingly enforced in recent years through its Credentials Committee, which reviews whether individual churches remain in friendly cooperation with the Convention's own confession, including this restriction.