Truett-McConnell College in northeast Georgia plans to become the first Baptist college to require its faculty to affirm the Baptist Faith and Message as revised by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000. Trustees of the four-year school voted recently to adopt the policy intended to signal solidarity with the Georgia Baptist Convention. “The Georgia Baptist Convention and our churches deserve nothing less than a faculty that will abide by nothing less than the essentials of the faith,” said the college’s President.

“Institutions that do not faithfully support the theology of Southern Baptists do not deserve the faithful support of Southern Baptists,” Caner said.

The policy runs counter to other historically Baptist colleges and universities that in recent decades have loosened or severed ties with sponsoring state conventions. Most have done so to prevent pressure to force their professors to move from moderate theology to the more conservative ideology imposed upon SBC seminaries in the 1980s and 1990s.

Winds of theological and political change prompted Georgia Baptists to part ways with their flagship Mercer University in 2007. They also opened the door for the 37-year-old Caner, founding dean of an undergraduate program at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, to become the youngest president in Truett-McConnell’s history in 2008.

“The 20th century saw the degradation of sound, biblical theology,” Caner said. “But thankfully on a national level our seminaries, mission agencies, the [SBC] Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and our other agencies are now faithful to the Word of God, but we can’t say the same about all our state Baptist colleges. I will stand on the Baptist Faith and Message.”

Southern Baptists originally adopted the Baptist Faith and Message confessional statement in 1925, largely to respond to the debate over evolution then dividing religious bodies. They updated the faith statement in 1963 to quell concerns about biblical authority. After a conservative faction solidified control of denominational entities in the 1990s, the convention updated the Baptist Faith and Message in 2000, adding restrictions on the roles of women and removing a key phrase citing Jesus Christ as the lens through which Scripture should be interpreted.

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