Followers of religion in the American South watched their status updates and twitter feeds closely Monday night, as a special Executive meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (the SBC is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, headquartered in Nashville, with over 16 million members and 44,000 churches) met to hear the recommendation of a task force reporting on whether to change the name of the organization. Specifically, the issue was whether to take “Southern” out of the title and create a new name for a denomination founded in Alabama in 1845, by and for slaveholders.
The result was reported in breaking news Monday night: legally, the Southern Baptist Convention will keep the name it has had since its inception, but informally, churches will be allowed, and even encouraged, to use a non-legal name—Great Commission Baptists—that avoids the negative connotations of the legal name.
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