Why can't we use a name by continent: American Christian Church, or European Christian Church, etc?

Unless you're talking about bbq.

But I concur – on all points of this entry.

Oh, and you might as well scrap "North American Baptist Convention". It's too close to the name of an existing denomination, the North American Baptist Conference.

(I like Lottie Moon Baptists!

First off, I don't think anyone really thinks a name change will alter the organization that much. That is not the point. The question is whether the name represents a barrier that can reasonably and purposefully be removed, and thus should. To me, the only argument regarding actual change in the organization would be along the lines of rousing people to rethink things they had taken for granted for far too long, and obviously people get used to things and stop thinking about them on a regular basis. It is like the spirit of spring cleaning, once you begin to look at the dust in the house, then you see how much you had gotten used to and make efforts to change it. The name won't change the organization, but the act of rethinking our identity might.

Secondly, I think the issue of image and perception is huge. Many people in America (I can't speak for many other places) are not really itching to go to church for the first time and so they don't need much discouragement to skip it. Now we can talk another time about whether bringing people to church is the best or right way to try and encourage people to meet Jesus. However, the point is that we often find reasons to support decisions we already wanted to make in the first place. Giving people easy reasons to discount the message we offer does not serve them well.

I think Paul of Tarsus discussed it this way: people suppress the truth in unrighteousness. I understand by this that our moral standing actually determines many of our intellectual stances. I think the role of apologetics is to break down intellectual and emotional walls which people have put up around their hearts to the gospel. The holy spirit deals with the heart, but we can be active in attacking the walls themselves so that people really have to face up to heart issues. This is what I mean when I talk about taking away barriers. If people want to discount the gospel or Christians, they are not above using things as meaningless as perception to discount it.

All that to say I believe the name "southern" represents a totally needless barrier to people around the nation and the world. We don't want non-believers to come to southern Baptist Churches to interact with our history or heritage as much as we want them to interact with the Living Christ. Moreover, I believe the heart of the Incarnation is that God made himself accessible, he entered our world, he stepped into our context that we might know him. For us to come into other areas as "southern" brands us as other when part of what I think God is doing through us is coming near.

Finally this conversation is not vanity because it is one aspect (and a very prominent aspect in our image-driven culture) of us trying to be the presence of Christ in our world and in our culture (more specifically, their culture).