When I was 5 years old, I believed I could be nothing but a Southern Baptist. My friends were Southern Baptists, my family was Southern Baptist, and my Appalachian community likewise was Southern Baptist. We worshiped in a small brick church that formed the hub of our lives, a place I assumed always would embody the gospel.
As I grew older, I came to believe the church I knew had ceased to be alive in the way Scripture promised, not because of waning attendance but because it seemed to have lost its first love. It became more devoted to power than to the gospel’s call to embody the words of Jesus Christ.
Daniel Coffey
I first sensed this at the age of 7, when I asked to be baptized. In our congregation, such a request from someone so young was unusual, bordering on suspect. I met with the deacons and pastor and offered a simple confession: “I want to follow Jesus.”
That confession grew out of evenings spent on my grandmother’s lap, listening as she read the Bible aloud. Her words shaped me as much as Scripture itself. She would make remarks that, while uncontroversial in our small church at the time, now ring as difficult or even dangerous in Southern Baptist life.
Two comments have remained with me: “Women preached it first.” And: “We must not bid another with that in our conscience which the Scriptures do not speak.” Looking back, this was the writing on the wall, with more to come thereafter.
A shift
By the time I was 10, I realized something fundamental was shifting. My grandmother decided I was ready to learn more about the faith into which I had been baptized. She handed me a copy of the 2000 edition of the Baptist Faith and Message, the Southern Baptist Convention’s doctrinal standard, and said: “Son, the denomination you were born into is not the same one you were baptized into, and I fear it will very quickly change into something unrecognizable.”
Her words proved prophetic. She died in 2011 before witnessing what has become of her beloved church — a denomination wounded by its pursuit of prominence and increasingly entangled in partisan politics.
“Her words shaped me as much as Scripture itself.”
Historically, Baptists have been heirs to the free church tradition. They have emphasized freedom of conscience, soul competency, local church autonomy and a firm separation between church and state. These convictions emerged from centuries of dissent. In Colonial Virginia, for example, Baptist preachers such as James Ireland endured harassment, abuse and imprisonment for preaching without state licensure under the established Anglican Church. Out of such struggles arose the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and enacted in 1786, which disestablished the Church of England in Virginia and guaranteed religious liberty for all faiths.
These commitments shaped Baptist identity for centuries, even as Baptists themselves developed confessional documents. The SBC first adopted the Baptist Faith and Message in 1925, largely in response to Modernist theology and the rise of naturalistic approaches to religion. It was revised in 1963, amended in 1998, and revised again in 2000, each time addressing not only theological questions but also cultural anxieties.
The 2000 revision reinforced hierarchical gender roles and strengthened language on biblical inerrancy, signaling the consolidation of the so-called “conservative resurgence” of the 1980s.
Tool of orthodoxy
What troubles me most is not that Baptists wrote a confession of faith, but how that confession has come to function within the SBC itself. The BFM, originally conceived as a guide, increasingly has been wielded as a tool of orthodoxy. Churches that deviate — even in relatively minor matters — now risk censure or expulsion from the convention. For a tradition that has long claimed the autonomy of the local congregation, this shift feels discordant and betrays its free church heritage.
The consequences are clear. In 2023, the SBC expelled Saddleback Church, its largest congregation, for ordaining women as pastors. This decision, although framed as “fidelity” to Scripture, illustrates how the convention’s doctrinal enforcement prioritizes institutional conformity over local discernment.
The narrowing of theological space also has paralleled a tightening of political alignment, particularly with conservative social causes. The “conservative resurgence,” while framed as a theological recovery, in practice has blurred into a political project.
This trajectory represents what I perceive as a profound loss. The Baptist heritage of conscience and liberty has given way to coercion and conformity. Where once Baptist preachers were jailed for refusing to submit to state-mandated orthodoxy, now Baptist churches risk expulsion for failing to submit to denominational orthodoxy. The irony is painful.
Leaving home
As I matured, I came to believe remaining within the SBC meant compromising my conscience. To preserve what was most authentically Baptist in me, I had to leave the Baptist convention I inherited. Eventually, I found a spiritual home in the International Council of Community Churches, another free church tradition. In many ways, it feels more Baptist than the SBC of my youth.
“To save the Baptist within me, I had to let die the conservative that sought to reign over my conscience.”
The ICCC allows member congregations genuine freedom: Some practice only credobaptism, others allow pedobaptism; some emphasize sacramental traditions, others lean more evangelical. This diversity does not fracture communion but enriches it.
To save the Baptist within me, I had to let die the conservative that sought to reign over my conscience. Faithfulness required me to rebel against the captivity of conscience to institutional power. In this sense, leaving the SBC was not a rejection of my Baptist heritage but a reclamation of it.
A lesson
What, then, is the lesson of my journey? Above all, that a church loses its soul when it substitutes political power for gospel devotion. The free church tradition always has insisted that conscience, guided by Scripture and the Spirit, cannot be coerced. When creeds function as chains rather than guardrails, they betray their original purpose.
The path forward for Baptists — and for all traditions tempted by power — may be found not in clinging to institutional prominence but in returning to their first love. To embody the gospel is to make room for dissent, to welcome the voices of all genders alike, to embrace orthodoxy, orthopraxy and conscience to recognize that sometimes the truest act of fidelity is holy rebellion.
My story is one of both loss and hope. I lost a home in the denomination of my childhood, but I found freedom in a wider fellowship. If my journey reveals anything, it is that love of the gospel sometimes requires leaving what we know in order to be faithful to the one we follow.
Daniel Coffey is a minister of word and sacrament affiliated with the International Council of Community Churches. Raised in Appalachia, his faith formation combined deeply rooted Baptist heritage and a passion for justice, spiritual authenticity and inclusive community. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in religion from American Public University; he earned a master of divinity degree and master of arts in Christian education degree from Union Presbyterian Seminary in 2025. He currently lives in North Carolina with his husband and three cats.