When you step into the Southern Baptist world, you meet a wall of names and acronyms: SBC, NAMB, Send Network, IMB, the Cooperative Program, the BF&M. It can feel like a maze. It isn't. It's a family of cooperating organizations, each with one job — and most of them exist to help you. Here is each one in plain language, with the key facts double-checked. One important note up front: figures like leaders, budgets, and church counts change over time, so treat the numbers here as a recent snapshot and confirm current details on each organization's website before you rely on them.
Through this link you can download PDF file with description of all Southern Baptist Convention entities
The Southern Baptist Convention
A closer look at the family of churches you'd be cooperating with — its story, beliefs, structure, and honest realities.
Founded
1845, in Augusta, Georgia
What it is
The largest Protestant denomination in the United States; a cooperative fellowship of self-governing churches
Size
More than 46,000 churches; about 12.7 million members (2024)
Polity
Congregational — local-church autonomy under the Lordship of Christ
"Headquarters"
The local church (the SBC is intentionally not top-down)
President
Clint Pressley (elected 2024, re-elected 2025; a new president may be elected June 2026)
Statement of faith
The Baptist Faith & Message 2000
Website
Convention or denomination?
The phrase "Southern Baptist Convention" means two things at once: a denomination (a family of churches) and the annual meeting where those churches do business together. The SBC describes a Southern Baptist church as about as independent as a congregation can be while still belonging to a denomination. It does not ordain ministers, assign pastors to churches, dictate a church's literature or calendar, or levy required dues. Those are all local-church decisions.
Why belong to a denomination at all? Because cooperation multiplies impact. By pooling resources, churches accomplish together — global missions, seminaries, disaster relief — what none could do alone. Southern Baptists see this not as compromise but as the New Testament pattern of churches partnering for the gospel. As the saying goes, "we can do more together than we can do apart." There are limits to what a church can believe or do and remain in the fellowship, but within those limits there is wide room for difference.
Origins and history — told honestly
The SBC's beginning is not a clean story, and Southern Baptists today tell it plainly. Baptists in the North and South had cooperated in missions through the Triennial Convention (founded 1814), but the question of slavery divided them. When Northern Baptists refused to appoint slaveholders as missionaries, Southern churches broke away and formed the Southern Baptist Convention in Augusta, Georgia, in 1845; roughly 300 churches joined the new body.
That history has been openly repented of. In 1995, on its 150th anniversary, the Convention adopted a resolution repudiating its past defense of slavery and its opposition to the civil-rights movement, and apologizing for racism. In 2012 it elected its first African-American president, Fred Luter Jr., and in 2017 it formally condemned white supremacy.
The other defining chapter is the Conservative Resurgence, a movement begun in 1979 to reorient the denomination around biblical inerrancy by electing conservative leaders who in turn shaped the seminaries and agencies. Supporters call it a recovery of orthodoxy; critics called it a takeover. Either way, it set the theological direction the SBC holds today.
What Southern Baptists believe
The SBC summarizes its shared convictions in the Baptist Faith & Message 2000. Crucially, Southern Baptists are a confessional, not a creedal, people: the BF&M expresses consensus belief, but it never overrides Scripture or the autonomy of the local church. Core convictions include:
The Bible as God's inspired, trustworthy Word, the supreme authority for faith and practice.
The gospel — salvation by grace through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Believer's baptism by immersion, and the Lord's Supper, as the two ordinances — symbols that testify to the gospel rather than confer grace.
The priesthood of all believers and congregational polity — every member has direct access to God, and the local congregation governs itself.
Religious liberty — a historic Baptist conviction that faith must be free, never coerced.
The Great Commission — the mission to take the gospel to every person and make disciples of all nations, which is the SBC's stated reason for existing.
"The headquarters is the local church"
This is the single most important thing to grasp, and the SBC says it of itself: the structure is not top-down. Authority does not flow down from a national office; cooperation flows outward and upward from autonomous local churches that freely choose to work together. Picture four cooperating levels, with the local church at the center:
The local church — fully self-governing; it retains all its authority.
The local association — nearby churches cooperating closely (roughly 1,200 of them).
The state or regional convention — 41 in all, some spanning more than one state.
The national SBC — 11 ministry entities plus an Executive Committee, with the Woman's Missionary Union (WMU) as its sole auxiliary.
Why this matters for you
Affiliating with the SBC does not mean surrendering your church's independence. No one can tell your church whom to ordain, what to preach, or how to spend its money. You join a cooperative family while remaining fully self-governing — a balance of freedom and partnership that fits an immigrant congregation wanting both support and self-determination.
The entities, at a glance
The Convention does its shared work through eleven entities and the Executive Committee:
Two mission boards — the International Mission Board (overseas) and the North American Mission Board (here at home, including church planting through Send Network).
Six seminaries — Gateway, Midwestern, New Orleans, Southeastern, Southern, and Southwestern, where students from SBC churches pay roughly half tuition.
The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) — the public-policy and ethics voice.
Lifeway Christian Resources — publishing and discipleship resources (self-funded; receives no Cooperative Program money).
GuideStone Financial Resources — retirement and insurance for ministers (also self-funded), with a housing-allowance benefit that can carry into retirement.
The Executive Committee — conducts the Convention's business between annual meetings.
Of the national SBC's Cooperative Program allocation, the great majority goes to missions: the 2024 budget directed 50.4% to the IMB and 22.8% to NAMB, with most of the remainder funding the seminaries — so well over 70% of those gifts fuel missions, church planting, and ministerial training.
How it's governed — and how you get a voice
Remarkably, the SBC legally exists only two days each year, during the annual meeting every June. Churches send representatives called messengers — not "delegates," because each church is autonomous — with each church able to send up to a set number (commonly up to twelve). Those messengers, and only they, vote: they elect officers, elect the trustees who govern every entity, adopt the budget, pass resolutions, and make motions.
Two "presidents" are easily confused, so the distinction matters:
The SBC President is a volunteer, elected by messengers for a one-year term, who appoints key committees and presides over the annual meeting. Often a pastor, but not required to be.
The Executive Committee President is a full-time, salaried administrator who serves as the Convention's treasurer and oversees the Cooperative Program day to day. (Jeff Iorg currently serves in this role.)
Neither can command any church, association, convention, or entity — they can only advise and lead by persuasion. Final authority rests with the messengers' vote. Between annual meetings, entity trustees (elected by messengers) govern the agencies, and any member of a cooperating church can have a voice by serving on a board or committee, nominating others, or raising concerns.
What "friendly cooperation" requires
A church relates to the SBC through what's called friendly cooperation. In practice that means two things above all: participating financially (through the Cooperative Program and gifts to one's association and state convention — the SBC is candid that there is no real voice without financial participation) and sharing the Convention's beliefs as expressed in the BF&M 2000.
There are also boundaries. A repurposed Credentials Committee (since 2019) reviews whether a church remains in friendly cooperation, and the Executive Committee can declare a church no longer cooperating. In recent years churches have been removed for affirming homosexual behavior, for indifference to sexual abuse, and over the question of women in the pastoral office — most prominently in 2023, when messengers upheld the removal of Saddleback Church (then the SBC's largest congregation) and a smaller church, Fern Creek, for having women pastors.
On that last point, here is the precise, current state of things, because it is easy to get wrong. The BF&M 2000 already states that the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. A proposed constitutional amendment (the "Law Amendment") sought to write that into the SBC's constitution as well; it passed a first vote in 2023 but failed to reach the required two-thirds majority in 2024 (about 61% in favor) and again in 2025. So the doctrinal position stands in the statement of faith, and the Convention has shown it can act on it through the existing process, even though the constitutional amendment did not pass.
Affiliation itself is voluntary and unhurried. The SBC explicitly says it does not recruit churches away from other denominations, and that deciding the SBC is not the right fit is "not a bad thing." A church typically prays and studies, reaches consensus through its own bylaws, votes, and sends a letter requesting affiliation with the local association — and each year completes an Annual Church Profile, the simple report that lets the cooperating family measure its shared work.
A growing, multi-ethnic family
This is the part of the SBC story most relevant to a Slavic planter — and it is genuinely encouraging. The Convention is becoming dramatically more diverse. Nearly one in four congregations is now non-Anglo: about 22%, up from just 8.4% in 1990. More than 60% of new church plants in recent years have been non-Anglo or multiethnic, and on any given Sunday the gospel is preached in more than 100 languages across SBC churches.
And this is not abstract. The SBC's own orientation manual, when listing the ethnic groups worshiping within the Convention, names Russian congregations explicitly, alongside Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Korean, Chinese, Native American, and many others. Your community is not an exception the SBC is trying to accommodate — it is already a named part of the family. As the Executive Committee's president has put it, ethnic-minority Southern Baptists are not the objects of mission but a missionary force.
An honest balance: while congregations are increasingly diverse, the overall membership remains majority Anglo (about 85%, per Pew), so the diversity is concentrated in newer and ethnic churches — exactly the wave a new Slavic church would join and strengthen.
Honest challenges
A clear-eyed profile names the hard parts too:
What to know going in
Decline. 2024 marked an 18th consecutive year of membership decline and a 50-year low in total membership — though attendance and baptisms ticked up in the same year. Financial strain. Cooperative Program giving has softened, even as the Convention carries significant legal and abuse-reform costs. Abuse reform. Since a 2022 independent investigation, the SBC has worked — amid real difficulty — toward reforms including a database of credibly accused abusers. Internal debate. Questions of governance and the role of women remain genuinely contested. None of this is hidden; Southern Baptists discuss it openly.
What this means for you
Joining the SBC means becoming part of a large, cooperative, intentionally non-hierarchical family — one that lets your church stay fully self-governing while giving you access to assessment, training, funding, seminaries, retirement provision, and a global missions network you could never build alone. It is a family that already worships in your language, that names Russian churches among its own, and that increasingly grows through ethnic and immigrant congregations like the one you may plant.
It is often said that the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention is the local church. That is the truest one-sentence summary of how it works — and your church would be one of them.