PAINTSVILLE, Ky. — A Kentucky Baptist pastor has penned a question-and-answer book about the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (BF&M) to encourage other pastors and teach church members more about the contents of Southern Baptists’ statement of faith.
Seth Carter, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Paintsville, said he was first prompted to consider writing about the BF&M 2000 from a resolution that passed in the Kentucky Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in 2023 that encouraged pastors and other church leaders to preach more frequently on it.
“So many church members were unfamiliar with it,” he said. “I began to act on that in church, and after having more intentional conversations finding that to be true in our church. A lot of people knew we had it but didn’t know what was in it.”
That’s how it started for Carter, who began an intentional effort to teach on the BF&M more consistently.
“I wanted to write a catechism to make a long statement of faith more digestible,” he said. “I thought a question-and-answer to be less intimidating. I looked to see if anyone else had done that and couldn’t find one anywhere. That’s when I started working on it.”
His finished product, “Firm Foundations: A Question-and-Answer Guide Through the Baptist Faith and Message,” is a 49-page paperback that asks 150 questions and gives the answers in short form.
The BF&M 2000 is a statement of beliefs adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in 2000. Before that SBC churches used the BF&M 1963. The first version was adopted in 1925. It outlines key tenets of Baptist theology, including the authority of the Bible, the nature of God, salvation and the purpose of the church.
“It’s an offensive weapon in teaching us what we believe,” Carter said. “It’s also defensive in guarding against false teaching. There are 18 articles altogether. With our non-reading culture, most people are not going to sit down with it and read through it. That’s one of the things that prompted the project. We’d give a whole copy to everyone who took our new members class and asked them to read through this document. Hardly anyone would read through the whole thing. That prompted me to turn it into a smaller question-and-answer book.”
Carter has taught about the BF&M 2000 on Wednesday nights and in Sunday School classes, and discipleship groups have used the book as a study guide.
Carter came up with the questions and then used the BF&M 2000 to answer them. For example, on page 41 is the question “What is man?” The answer from the document reads: “Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation.”
In the book’s introduction, Carter suggests ways the book can be used. He mentions personal devotion time, Sunday school, discipleship, youth and children or just as a guide for pastors to teach the entire Baptist Faith and Message to congregations.
Carter has received encouragement from others, including French Harmon, the executive director of the Kentucky Baptist Foundation, who plans on purchasing some copies of the book for pastors. Carter also gave copies of the book to Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, who Carter said seemed to appreciate it.
“I pray the Lord would use it,” Carter said.
The book is available on Amazon for $7.
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Mark Maynard is managing editor of Kentucky Today, the news website of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. This article originally appeared in Kentucky Today.)
