Reggie Weems Blog

For several years Heritage has offered our Sunday guests a copy of John Piper’s “The Passion of Jesus Christ” but we have recently run out of copies of that particular book.  Starting this Sunday we will offer “The Baptist Faith and Message 2000” along with the Welcome Packet given to each guest in our Sunday services.  The BF&M, is the doctrinal statement for the Southern Baptist Convention and its affiliated churches.  At Heritage, we are glad to be the heirs of such an historically vibrant and doctrinally rich lineage.  The BF&M is the Southern Baptist articles of faith, creed (Latin for, “I believe“) or confession of faith.  The ‘2000′ update was created in an effort to address mondern idealogies that crept into Baptist thinking in the 20th century. 

Baptists are distinctively and instinctively a confessional people.  Ever since the 2nd London Baptist Confession was overtly published in 1689, the very same year as the Act of Toleration gave Baptists liberty in England, Baptists have constructed various confessions to pubicly acknowledge their own beliefs.  In the 400 pages of William Lumpkin’s “Baptist Confessions of Faith,” Lumpkin cites no less than 42 distinct confessions, the earliest dating to 1525. 

Tennessee’s oldest Association, the Holston Baptist Association of which Heritage is a part, appropriately chartered itself on Reformation Eve, October 30^th, 1786.  The charter’s fifth point reads, “The present Baptist confession of faith, We adopt as our Confession, the same which was adopted at Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) in the year of our Lord – 1742.”   The Holston Baptist Association did not exist a single day without a confession of faith.  It adopted the Philadelphia Baptist Confession the very same Monday that seven churches chartered as an Association.  Adopting the Philadelphia Confession was in sincere and complete alignment with Baptists throughout history for Baptists in Tennessee and worldwide have, since their inception, always been a confessional people.             

Defending Baptist confessions, Southern Seminary President E.Y. Mullins (1860-1928)wrote, “Baptists have always insisted upon their right to declare their beliefs in a definite, formal way…”  B.H. Carroll (1843-1914), the first President of Southwestern Seminary wrote, “The modern cry, ‘less creed and more liberty’ is a degeneration from the vertebrae to to the jelly fish and means less unity and less morality, and it means more heresy…”

In complete compliance with the history of our Baptist faith and the Southern Baptist Convention’s history, the BF&M 2000 asserts the need for Baptists to declare their beliefs.  Its Preamble states, “Baptists are a people of deep beliefs and cherished doctrines. Throughout our history we have been a confessional people, adopting statements of faith as a witness to our beliefs and a pledge of our faithfulness to the doctrines revealed in Holy Scripture.  Our confessions of faith are rooted in historical precedent, as the church in every age has been called upon to define and defend its beliefs.”  

As such, the BF&M 2000 defines and defends what Southern Baptists believe.  Heritage is privileged to be aligned with such an historically rich belief system that extends far beyond 1845 when the Convention began and will extend long into the future as Baptists continue to reach “people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). 

Heritage members can access the BF&M 2000 at: http://www.sbc.net/bfm/