What does it mean to be a Southern Baptist Church?
What does it mean to be a Southern Baptist church? This is a very interesting question. A short, albeit loaded, answer is that Southern Baptists are a network of autonomous baptistic churches which voluntarily partner for the purpose of advancing the Great Commission. Wow! That's a mouthful. Let's see if we can break this down? Autonomous- means that each Southern Baptist church is truly independent and self-governed. Local Baptist churches do not receive directives from a centralized denominational government. Instead, the members of each church determine the course for their own church through a democratic process of voting. We do things this way because we believe that Christ is the head of each church and that the church members have the ability to know His will through prayer and the study of His Word. We believe that His specific will for each specific church is discoverable through the voting of its members (see Acts 15:22). Baptistic- This term describes the manner