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I do not believe in transferable church membership and I do not believe in transferable ordination. Each church must take responsibility for its own vetting & qualifying of members and leaders.
But networks of churches can assist one another in vetting & qualifying by appropriately sharing publicly available information. And there is strong momentum for the SBC to get a lot more intentional on this effort. I’m glad.
Baptist theology historically means that every believer is part of the priesthood and every church is free. So it is not wrong to say that every Baptist church is non-denominational.
In my view the SBC is a network in which churches freely partner together around a fairly broad theological confession and cooperate on projects that we all believe in.
Of course that cooperation is a two-way street - each free church chooses whether or not to convene every year with the other churches in the network. And the convened network can choose to reject or remove churches from the network.
Each church freely chooses whether or how much to be involved, either by contributing $ or by sending volunteers to serve when invited. The network collectively decides whether or not to accept participation from individual churches.
And together each church is responsible to vet the network and the network is responsible to vet the churches. Before God everybody needs to take this responsibility seriously.
