What’s in a name? As Shakespeare has it, a rose by any other name smells the same. But in the case of America’s largest Protestant denomination, changing the name could change everything.
A week ago, Southern Baptist Convention President Bryant Wright told his organization’s executive committee in Nashville that he had appointed a task force to study a possible name change. Abandoning the 166-year-old identifier, he argued, would help the group thrive both in America and internationally.
Could this cause a schism? Some might continue to identify themselves as Southern Baptists, while others might become the BC/NA (Baptist Church in North America), still others might form any number of Continuing Southern Baptist Conventions. This could be interesting.
Since they’ve got so much going on outside the US, not just the South, the name doesn’t mean what it once did.