Baptist reunification?

Not in his lifetime.

Most likely, not in my lifetime.

And probably not until the Consummation of Time.

Good question 

My father-in-law had a solid reason for his question. He had read my editorial about this year's Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. It describes the generation gap within the SBC and tells how the youngish leadership walloped the old guard.

This is significant because the old guard comprises the remnants of the hard-line fundamentalist leadership that wrested control of the SBC from so-called moderates in a struggle that lasted from the late 1970s to the early ’90s. They pre-selected presidents, controlled committee appointments and named nominees to all the convention's institutional boards. 

By 1990, they controlled the SBC annual meeting so thoroughly the moderates quit attending. Immediately, they took over Baptist Press, the convention's news agency. Within the next four years, their trustees gained absolute control of all SBC institutions. Next, they reorganized the convention to their liking. Then they re-wrote the convention's doctrinal statement, the Baptist Faith & Message.  Along the way, they exerted themselves in most state conventions, and the three states with strong moderate and fundamentalist factions—Missouri, Texas and Virginia—split.

Now, a youngish faction has exerted itself over against the old guard. (I say "youngish" because that's a relative term in the ever-aging SBC. This revolution is led by two near-50 seminary presidents and a 50-something convention president, but they relate well to the rising generation of truly young pastors.) The flashpoint was a proposal to examine—and consider reorganizing—the SBC's structure.

The proposal—a motion to create a Great Commission Task Force, or long-range planning committee—quickly took on generational overtones. Most notably,  it drew the opposition of Morris Chapman, who, as president of the SBC Executive Committee, is the convention's highest staff official. Well into his 60s and far more than a decade into his job, Chapman represents the trailing edge of the old guard.

But old guard he is. Prior to the annual meeting, he editorialized against the reorganization proposal. At the annual meeting, he used his report to the convention to speak against it (a tactic youngish Southeastern Seminary President Danny Akin called "shameful"). Chapman put the full weight of his office—and, symbolically, the previously unquestioned imprimatur of the old guard—against the proposal.

And he got stomped. The proposal passed overwhelmingly.

So, my father-in-law wanted to know if this meant moderates would come back to the SBC in force and the divided state conventions would reunite.

Honest answer

No.  At least not in the foreseeable future.

Here are several reasons why:

1. Offspring. Denominational schism is a lot like a divorce. Sometimes after  divorce, people wonder if the unhappy couple will make up and remarry. Occasionally, it happens. But if one or the other marries someone else, the possibility is just about nil. And if the follow-up marriages produce children, forget about it.

That's what has happened among Southern Baptists and former Southern Baptists. At the national level, many so-called moderates have affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. At the state level, Baptists in Texas and Virginia who want a closer relationship with the SBC have formed their own conventions, and in Missouri, the old fundamentalist convention has cast the moderates out, and they have created their own group. Those denominational unions have produced offspring—staff, programs, institutions and even missionaries.

No pull toward "what used to be" will be strong enough for the various groups to dissolve their current relationships and abandon their dependents.

2. Worldviews. Even if the SBC's young generation  softens the fundamentalism of their fathers, they still hold a different mindset than the so-called moderates.

For one thing, they tend to come down at a different place on the socio-political spectrum. They're cultural warriors; moderates aren't. For another, they're in another place—or maybe places—theologically than moderates. Many of them still hold the theological fundamentalism of their predecessors, but they're just not angry about it. It sounds like their theology has changed, but it really hasn't.

Except where it has changed. That's among the increasing number of young Calvinist, or Reformed, Baptists. Their heritage dates back to the earliest decades of the Baptist movement. But even though old-guard fundamentalists rail against it, Reformed theology's rigorous, structured, conservative system finds more compatibility with rigid fundamentalism than it does with more open and flexible moderate theology. 

3. Time. Baptists don't own a time-travel machine, and they're not likely to go back to pre-1979.

For one thing, the people who lived through the "Baptist Battles" don't really want to go back. On both sides of the divide, their lives have moved on. They may feel nostalgia for  previous relationships, but they realize no amount of wishful thinking will undo 30 years of conflict.

For another, the young Baptists who either can't remember or weren't even born prior to the beginning of the convention conflict have no reason to visit a world that is foreign to them. Their issues are the emergent church movement, missions opportunities that are at once more approachable and less concrete than those their parents considered, the relevance of a timeless faith in a postmodern world, ever-changing technology, interaction with other world religions that reside next door, and other ideas that lie off the map of an old generation who simply sought landmarks in a battlefield between two types of  Christianity.

Looking forward

So, no, Baptists won't reunite. 

And that's probably for the best. The world needs all types of Baptists to reach people with the gospel and minister to them in God's grace. That's a challenge best served by looking forward, not looking back.