Voices: A confession wide enough for all Texas Baptists

Lee la version en español de este artículo aquí. 

We have a chance to say together, in our own words, what we believe.

On any given Sunday, Texas Baptists worship in about 80 languages. We meet in Panhandle wheat country, in Houston neighborhoods, in Rio Grande Valley colonias, and in cowboy church arenas, and we call one convention home. Whatever confession we share must be one each of those churches can read and recognize as its own.

What do Texas Baptists believe? Most of us have been asked out of curiosity or suspicion. The question found me in McAllen, where a Spanish-language ministry took root at Calvary Baptist Church, and it found me again at the Hispanic Baptist Convention of Texas, which I was privileged to lead.

I often wished I had one document, written by Texas Baptists in our own words for this generation, to put in the hands of anyone who asked.

That question followed me to Dallas, where I serve at Park Cities Baptist Church. Our Spanish-language ministry holds satellite services in two neighborhoods.

Vickery Meadow, often called the “Little UN,” packs about 38,000 neighbors into less than three square miles. More than 30 languages are spoken there. To our west, in Bachman Lake, we partner with the Buckner Family Hope Center.

A state convention this varied needs one confession all its peoples can call their own, so our mission has a common voice. It is an honor to serve as a theological reviewer for the Texas Baptist Confession of Faith Project.

Our own confession

Our heritage leaves room for such a confession. Texas Baptists did not organize around doctrinal conformity. We organized around cooperation for the gospel.

Messengers adopted the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, some churches use the 2000 version or the New Hampshire Confession, and the convention requires none for inclusion.

Churches that hold the 1963 confession and churches that hold the 2000 confession are Texas Baptist churches, and both groups belong in this conversation.

Baptists have long held that any group of Baptists, large or small, may tell the world what it believes. It is time to exercise that right.

A confession does not rule over Scripture or bind the conscience. It stands beneath Scripture as a family’s testimony, a way of telling our neighbors and our children where we stand. It unites co-laborers in the gospel without dividing them, articulating what is essential and leaving honest room for faithful Baptists to differ.

Some days, I wonder whether a small committee can speak for 5,300 churches. That doubt is why every church will get a turn to respond.

Of those 5,300 churches, about 1,200 are Hispanic, 1,100 African American, 350 intercultural, and 250 western heritage or cowboy, and the rest are predominantly Anglo. A confession drafted without their voices would be a document about them. One drafted with them, and translated into Spanish at every stage, tells every pastor a place was kept for them.

A discipleship tool

I picture a pastor in a small town, reading a draft at his kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, looking for his church in it. That pastor needs more than definitions.

This confession is meant to make disciples. Each article will come with a white paper and a discipleship tool, so a seminary classroom and a living room small group can study the same text.

The confession will take up questions our parents never faced, from artificial intelligence to medical ethics, while keeping us anchored in Christ and Scripture.

John saw a great multitude no one could count, “from every nation, tribe, people, and language,” standing before the throne (Revelation 7:9). Our churches glimpse that scene every Sunday. When they can say what they believe with one voice, and trust they have been heard, they carry the gospel farther.

Texas Baptists will gather in Waco, Nov. 15–17. Read the plan for this work at texasbaptistconfession.com, and pray for it as we prepare to make a motion Nov. 16 to approve its creation.

Should the motion be approved and the process begin, when your church’s turn comes to read and speak into our confession, tell us what you see. Let us write this confession together, in our own words, so every voice in our churches can say, “Amen.”