MURFREESBORO — Tennessee Baptists kicked off their celebration of 150 years of cooperation with energy, excitement and passion during the first session of the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board’s annual Summit, Monday, Nov. 11 at the Murfreesboro Convention Center.
Celebrating objectives reached
Led by the worship team from First Baptist Church, Hendersonville, nearly 900 messengers and guests began the evening session with praise and worship focused on the faithfulness of God. In addition to the evening’s business, Roc Collins, TBMB’s strategic objectives director, led the congregation in celebrating the completion of TBMB’s 2024 five strategic objectives, covering the period from 2014 to 2023.
Accompanied by video of scenes of Tennessee Baptists involved in ministry across the state, Collins encouraged the crowd to “Press On!” with the work in Tennessee until Christ returns.
Celebrating Tennessee Baptist history
David Dockery, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, delivers a sermon on Monday night at this year’s Summit.
Building on the night’s celebratory theme and the cooperative spirit evident among messengers and guests, David Dockery, current president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and immediate past president of Union University in Jackson, delivered the session’s sermon from Philippians 1:3-6. Acknowledging the challenge of telling the story of Tennessee Baptists in 30 minutes or less, Dockery offered “a look back, a look within and a look forward” over 15 decades of Tennessee Baptist history.
Gratitude for those who came before
Baptists from Virginia and North Carolina began settling in East Tennessee in the second half of the 18th century, Dockery said, noting that two Baptist churches started in East Tennessee in the 1770s. The Holston Association — Tennessee’s first Baptist association — was officially founded in 1786. By 1802, the Holston Association had added nearly 30 additional congregations.
In the 1780s, Baptists also came to Middle Tennessee in the Cumberland region, Dockery said. By 1806 about 40 churches had affiliated with the Cumberland Association, and by 1810 the work had become so extensive that two additional associations — Red River and Concord — also formed. The first association in West Tennessee formed in 1820.
Unfortunately, the first attempt to form a statewide convention in the 1830s failed due to a myriad of challenges, Dockery said.
“The efforts to birth the first Tennessee Baptist Convention took place in 1833, 37 years after Tennessee had officially become a state,” Dockery said. “But, due to discord, dissension, and doctrinal confusion, compounded by an anti-missionary and anti-cooperative spirit present in all three regions of the state, the initial TBC was short-lived, coming to an end in 1842.”
Overcoming these challenges took more than three decades, Dockery explained, but by 1874 “Tennessee Baptists were positive about cooperation as well as hopeful regarding genuine revival and expansion” thanks to the vision and leadership of R.B.C. Howell, then pastor of First Baptist Church, Nashville.
This cooperative spirit brought Tennessee Baptists together in Murfreesboro on April 10, 1874, to form the Tennessee Baptist Convention.
“Tonight, we give thanks in every remembrance of these early Baptists in Tennessee,” Dockery said.
Grateful for partnerships of the past
Dockery also expressed gratitude for those early Baptists who caught the vision of partnership expressed by the Apostle Paul in Philippians 1:5.
“Tennessee Baptists were officially formed 50 years prior to the launch of what we now know as the Cooperative Program, an initiative led by Union University alum M. E. Dodd and adopted at the Southern Baptist Convention in Memphis in 1925,” Dockery said.
“Efforts at cooperation served as the primary motivator for the initial Tennessee convention in the 1830s. In 1874, it was Christian education that was at the center of the efforts to birth the convention,” Dockery continued. “By God’s grace, the commitments expressed on April 10, 1874, at the Murfreesboro convention, have continued to undergird the work of Tennessee Baptists for the past 150 years.”
In the years following, the convention continued to grow to serve the needs of Tennessee Baptists, including the founding of Union University in Jackson, affiliation with Carson-Newman in Jefferson City, recognition of the Woman’s Missionary Union as an auxiliary, prioritizing student ministry through the Baptist Young People’s Union, and an emphasis on Sunday School and state missions.
“Leaders of the convention through the years have all brought deep commitments and various gifts and emphases to bear upon the work of Tennessee Baptists, doing so through trying times that have included World Wars, depressions, pandemics, natural disasters and multifaceted changes in culture and society,” Dockery said.
“They have navigated denominational conflicts while prioritizing and promoting the importance of cooperation and collaboration for the sake of the gospel.”
Dockery urged Tennessee Baptists to give thanks for these and “the hundreds of others who have modeled faithful cooperation,” including “hundreds and hundreds of faithful pastors, associational leaders, state convention workers and people in the pews who served without fanfare,” but were “key instruments in God’s providential work among the people called Baptists in this state.”
Grateful that God will finish His work
Finally, referencing Philippians 1:6, Dockery reminded the congregation that God will finish what He started among Tennessee Baptists in 1874.
“In God’s good providence, the work of those who have gone before us have blessed many beyond their own time,” Dockery said, noting that God’s work among early Tennessee Baptists continued despite opposition and conflict and the failure of the first effort to form a convention in Tennessee.
The work will also continue beyond current challenges, Dockery said “because the work that the Lord has started will ultimately be completed not at the conclusion of our lives on this earth, but when Christ Himself returns.”
The responsibility of those who will be part of this work in coming decades requires a genuine commitment to shared participation, partnership and cooperation, while recognizing that both conviction and cooperation matter, Dockery said.
“We trust that God will grant us all a renewed sense of cooperation and deep conviction as we trust the Lord to bring renewal to all aspects of Tennessee Baptist life, including 3,200 churches, 66 associations, and nearly one million church members,” Dockery said.
Dockery closed by asking the Lord “to join our hearts and hands together to serve the next generation who will take the good news of the gospel to our neighbors and to the nations for the glory of our great and majestic God,” trusting that the work God began in Tennessee Baptists will continue until Christ returns. B&R — Lovell has been writing about Baptist work for more than 25 years. She and her husband, Joe, are members of the Church at Station Hill, a campus of Brentwood Baptist Church.
