My Personal Journey with the Baptist Faith and Message

One of my writing projects this summer is a short commentary on the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M), which is under contract with Courier Publishing. This past school year, I taught through the BF&M for the EQUIP Institute at Taylors First Baptist Church. I called the series “What Baptists Believe.” I’ve been editing those lessons into short chapters. Lord willing, the book will be available this time next year, in time for the 2027 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. What follows is adapted from the preface to the book.

The Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M) has been part of my life for nearly three decades. I can remember exactly where I was when I first became fully aware of the confession. It was the summer of 1998. I was serving as the summer youth minister at Pineview Missionary Baptist Church in Waresboro, GA. I was nineteen years old, and this was my first church staff role. I was greener than a grasshopper, but I was on fire for the Lord. I had recently taken out a subscription to The Christian Index, the Baptist state paper in Georgia. The paper became my entry point into both Georgia Baptist life and the wider world of my Southern Baptist tradition.

In June of that summer, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to amend the Baptist Faith and Message by adding an article on the family. The amendment received a lot of coverage in both secular and religious media, including The Christian Index, because Southern Baptists took a public stand against progressive trends in the wider culture. I was aware of the debate, but the amendment hardly registered with me personally. After all, it reflected what I had been taught at my home church, Central Baptist Church in Waycross, GA. However, I soon learned not all Baptists thought the same way I did about gender roles in the family.

One woman in my church—a dedicated youth volunteer—made a point of telling me she wouldn’t be submitting to her husband any time soon. I was flabbergasted. When I spoke to a couple of pastor friends, they weren’t surprised, but they also assured me that what I had been taught represented what the vast majority of Southern Baptists believed the Bible to affirm about the topic. I decided then and there I needed to become more familiar with the Baptist Faith and Message if I wanted to know what my tradition believed represented biblical doctrine and ethics.

I’ve lived with the Baptist Faith and Message ever since. The summer of 2000, the confession was revised, right before my senior year of college. During that year, I served as interim pastor of Rock Springs Baptist Church in Dublin, GA. The church had a Wednesday night Pastor’s Bible Study, and we spent several months studying the recently revised Baptist Faith and Message article by article. The congregation really appreciated walking through the confession. Many church members, some of them senior saints, told me this was the first time they had ever thought seriously about what Baptists believe.

Since that time, I’ve taught the Baptist Faith and Message to hundreds of church members, college students, and seminarians. I strongly believe that the confession ought to be used as a teaching tool in local churches to reinforce core Baptist beliefs and priorities.[1] I’ve long hoped to eventually write an accessible commentary on the confession, in the spirit of O. C. Wallace’s classic commentary on the New Hampshire Confession and Herschel Hobbs’s influential commentary on the 1963 edition of the Baptist Faith and Message.[2] This book will represent the culmination of that desire.

There are other helpful resources about the Baptist Faith and Message that have been published since its revision in 2000. Three in particular stand out. In 2001, the faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary published a short booklet expounding briefly on each of the articles.[3] In 2007, LifeWay Christian Resources published a study guide that was co-authored by three members of the committee that drafted the latest edition of the confession.[4] This resource was intended primarily for study groups in local churches. Also in 2007, two Southern Baptist professors published a collection of essays that provided a more scholarly commentary on the BF&M.[5] This resource was intended primarily as a textbook for college or seminary courses.

I’ll engage periodically with each of these helpful books in my own commentary, as well as other relevant resources. However, it’s my desire to minimize citations so that it remains as accessible as possible. My intended audience won’t be primarily pastors or seminary students, but ordinary members of Southern Baptist churches. In an increasingly post-denominational age, I want every member of every Baptist church to know (and ideally profess) the core beliefs that unite Baptist followers of King Jesus.

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I hope to see some of you in Orlando next week. On Sunday afternoon around 3:30-5:00 and Monday afternoon around 1:30-3:30, I’ll be hanging around the North Greenville University booth in the exhibit hall. On Monday evening, I’m attending the Ethics and Religious Liberty Convention’s event “One Nation Under God: Reflections on 250 Years of Faith and Democracy.” I’ll be moderating the panel discussion. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I’ll be firmly planted on the “business stage” as I record the minutes of the annual meeting in my final turn as Recording Secretary. I’ll also be attending the annual Southeastern Seminary Friends and Alumni luncheon on Wednesday.

I look forward to casting a vote for my good friend and fellow pastor Josh Powell, who will be nominated to serve as the next President of the Southern Baptist Convention. Josh was recently interviewed by SBC This Week, where he shared his thoughts about the state of the SBC, why he felt led to be nominated for the presidency, etc. I appreciate Josh’s hopeful vision for Southern Baptists and our cooperative mission in obedience to the Great Commission.

Leah received another chemo infusion this week. She has struggled with significant side effects her previous couple of treatments, mostly related to headaches, nausea, digestive issues. It has also taken her longer to rebound between treatments. Frankly, she has been pretty discouraged. We discussed all this with the nurse practitioner this week, and Leah tried a different anti-nausea medication. While Monday afternoon and evening were still rough, by Tuesday she was feeling much better. We’re so thankful that the new medicine has made such a big difference.

Thanks to so many of you who continue to pray for her (and for our whole family) during Leah’s cancer battle. If you want to follow her updates, please check out her Substack. Her most recent update was published Wednesday.

[1] Nathan A. Finn, “The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 as a Teaching Tool,” Baptist Press (December 13, 2024).

[2] O. C. Wallace, What Baptists Believe: The Hampshire Confession: An Exposition (Nashville, TN: Sunday School Board, 1913); Herschel H. Hobbs, The Baptist Faith and Message (Nashville, TN: Sunday School Board, 1971). The former volume has been reprinted on numerous occasions, while the latter work was revised in 1996, just two years before the confession was amended and four years before the latest revision was adopted by the SBC.

[3] An Exposition from the Faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (Louisville, KY: The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2001).

[4] Charles S. Kelley Jr., Richard Land, and R. Albert Mohler Jr., The Baptist Faith & Message (Nashville, TN: LifeWay Press, 2007).

[5] Douglas K. Blount and Joseph D. Wooddell, eds., Baptist Faith and Message 2000: Critical Issues in America’s Largest Protestant Denomination (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).