NASHVILLE (BP) — Earlier this year, then-candidate Bart Barber received a question at a forum hosted by First Baptist Church in Keller, Texas, for those to be nominated as Southern Baptist Convention president.
What should the Credentials Committee be doing? Are its actions currently outside the scope of what it was designed to do? What should they do if a church is accused of operating outside of the Baptist Faith and Message? How do you determine if that church is still considered in fellowship with the SBC?
So yes, it wasn’t a single question but a series of them. That pattern of trying to clarify the group’s responsibilities has remained since the Credentials Committee was repurposed by messengers in 2019.
No longer would it function only during the annual meeting to ensure messengers were from churches in “friendly cooperation” according to Article III of the SBC Constitution. The group – now a standing committee – would be tasked with considering whether a church remained in friendly cooperation based on allegations related to sexual abuse, discriminatory behavior based on ethnicity and other matters related to faith and practice.
But such a process on a national scale can be cumbersome. Cooperation was simpler 120 years ago, Barber said, because local associations were closely involved, and this involvement is still crucial.
“If you want it to work better today,” Barber said, pointing to the crowd, “you can do more about it than the president of the SBC can.”
Local associations “leaned in” to credential messengers and churches, Barber said, providing a boots-on-the-ground verification of their commitment to Southern Baptist distinctives. If that role is diminished or abdicated, consequences follow.
“When local associations are weak and refuse to assure that the doctrinal parameters that make us Southern Baptists are enforced in the local association, that just creates these problems of scale where you have a Credentials Committee at the national convention level with 47,000 churches trying to figure out what to do all across the fruited plain,” he said. “It’s unmanageable.”
More than 1,100 associations operate across the national convention, according to the Southern Baptist Conference of Associational Leaders (SBCAL). Focused on local churches, they also often serve as a connection point with state conventions and national entities.
The ones leading those associations are pivotal in existing credentialing procedures, said Ray Gentry, SBCAL president/CEO and associational mission strategist for Southside Baptist Network in McDonough, Ga.
“They know pastors and churches personally,” he said. “Depending on the size of the association’s credentials committee, they may or may not know details of a pastor’s theology, but they would know something about it.”
An advantageous position
That relationship, Gentry added, positions associations to “check in with a pastor and church leaders in a winsome but more thorough way than a state or national credentials committee could.”
Barber agreed in a recent interview with Baptist Press.
