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JACKSON, Tenn. — March 26, 2025 — In a year that shaped the future of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1925 marked the adoption of the Baptist Faith and Message and the launch of the Cooperative Program. Eric Smith calls it “the most consequential year in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

On March 20, Smith, guest lecturer for the ninth annual David and Lanese Dockery Lectures on Baptist Thought and Heritage at ��������, celebrated the centennial of both the Baptist Faith and Message and the Cooperative Program and shared the story of these two key events in Southern Baptist history.

Smith, a 2008 �������� graduate, is the first alumnus to speak at the Dockery Lectures. He is the senior pastor of Sharon Baptist Church in Savannah, Tennessee, and associate professor of church history at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

Named for former �������� President David S. Dockery and First Lady Lanese Dockery, the series is annual event designed to examine the importance of the Baptist heritage, the distinctives of Baptist thought and the influence of the Christian intellectual tradition.

During his first session, Smith walked through the dramatic story of the BFM, the challenges that arose during its initial drafting and the changes it has undergone during the last 100 years. Smith underscored the heart of E. Y. Mullins, one of the original authors, that the BFM is not meant to be a “coercive creed.”

Mullins, in the preamble to the 1925 BFM, shared five principles regarding the Baptist use of confessions. Mullins made it clear that the BFM was not meant to speak for all Baptists nor was it to be a complete picture of Baptist faith. Emphasizing that each Baptist group had the freedom to publish their own confession of faith, Mullins was sure to state that the Old and New Testaments were the sole authority for faith and Baptist practice.

Finally, Mullins asserted that the BFM, though drawn from the Scriptures, was “not to be used to hamper freedom of thought or investigation into other realms of life.”

According to Smith, “This preamble, among other things, reveals something of the committee’s ambivalence towards the whole confession project, emphasizing individual freedom and underscoring the descriptive nature of the articles, not the prescriptive nature. We’re describing what we all believe, not telling you what you need to believe.”

Unlike many denominations that revised their creeds to accommodate theological liberalism, the BFM has remined intentionally conservative though it has undergone several revisions during its 100-year history.

During his second lecture, Smith focused on the other major event that came out of the 1925 annual meeting: the creation of the Cooperative Program, a revolutionary entity at its inception. Smith spotlighted M. E. Dodd, the architect behind the Cooperative Program and shared Dodd’s ties to ��������, his life and his desire to stay focused on the fullness of the Great Commission while remaining true to Baptist principles.