This book presents the history of two religious sects successfully established in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, where it was illegal to participate in any faith other than the legally established congregationalism of the Puritan founders of the colony. Taking a comparative approach, the author examines the Quaker meeting in Salem and the Baptist church in Boston over more than a century. The work opens with the dramatic events surrounding dissenters' efforts to gain a foothold in the colony, and goes on to locate sectarians within their families and communities, and to examine their beliefs and the changing nature of the organizations they founded and their interactions with the larger community and its leaders. The work deals with the religiosity of lay colonists, finding that men and women responded to these sects differently. It also analyzes sociological theories of sectarian evolution, the politics of dissent, and changes in beliefs and practices.

Everyday Christians need practical and accessible theology. In this handbook first published in 1890, Charles Octavius Boothe simply and beautifully lays out the basics of theology for common people. "Before the charge 'know thyself,'" Boothe wrote, "ought to come the far greater charge, 'know thy God.'" He brought the heights of academic theology down to everyday language, and he helps us do the same today. Plain Theology for Plain People shows that evangelicalism needs the wisdom and experience of African-American Christians. Walter R. Strickland II reintroduces this forgotten masterpiece for today. Lexham Classics are beautifully typeset new editions of classic works. Each book has been carefully transcribed from the original texts, ensuring an accurate representation of the writing as the author intended it to be read.

Written by a leading authority on Baptist life and thought, this inclusive survey traces the development of the Baptist tradition in North America over the past 400 years.
Shows how from a handful of churches on the Atlantic Coast, the Baptist movement spread to become the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
Considers the contribution of all Baptists, including those in the United States and Canada, men and women, Caucasians and non-Caucasians.
Includes statistical data, a timeline, lists of Baptist groups and related institutions, and a glossary of terms.

In the English-speaking Western world alone, thousands of men and women begin formal training for Christian ministry each year or informally seek to equip themselves for pastoral ministry. Over the past fifty years, the ancient world of virtue ethics has been re-imagined as a means of forming people of character and morality today. In Shaped for Service, this experience is used as the framework to understand what we are doing as we form Christian ministers now, and how we might strengthen that development by more consciously linking the practices of ministry with the person, spirituality, and wisdom of the practitioner. Writing from the context of a lifetime of pastoral ministry and the oversight of ministers in the Baptist Union of Great Britain, Goodliff explores what pastors do and who they are called to be using a mixture of theological and pastoral enquiry, reflections upon art and personal story. This book will be of interest to those who are charged with forming the next generation of ministers, but anyone beginning that journey of formation for ministry themselves will also find this vision of ministry challenging and inspiring.

The Dr G.R. Beasley-Murray Memorial Lectures were delivered annually between 2002 and 2012 with the aim of extending the legacy of this significant New Testament scholar and church leader into the twenty-first century. Themes addressed include baptism, ministry, preaching, mission, and theological faithfulness. Having first been delivered at the annual Assembly of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the lectures in this volume are now made available to a wider audience and will be of interest to church leaders across the denominations and across the world, and not least to those who stand in Beasley-Murray's own Baptist tradition. George Beasley-Murray died in 2000. The lectures cover a wide range of topics, from baptism to missions, from Evangelical identity to preaching. The lecturers are: Paul Beasley-Murray, former Principal of Spurgeon's College; David Coffey, former President of the Baptist Union and of the Baptist World Alliance; John E. Colwell, Pastor of Budleigh Salterton Baptist Church; Anthony R. Cross, Emeritus Director of the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, Oxford; Ruth M.B. Gouldbourne, former Tutor in Church History at Bristol Baptist College; Stephen R. Holmes, Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews; Mark Hopkins, Associate Professor of Church History, Theological College of Northern Nigeria; Bruce Milne, formerly Minister of First Baptist Church, Toronto; Michael Quicke, former Principal of Spurgeon's College, London; Brian Stanley, Professor of World Christianity, University of Edinburgh.

The antebellum southern Baptist churches were led, in general, by populists who addressed their appeals to the common person and allowed women and slaves to vote on membership matters. Paradoxically, at the same time, no denomination could wield the religious authority as ruthlessly as the Baptists - between 1785 and 1860 they ritually excommunicated forty to fifty thousand church members in Georgia alone. Wills traces this split to two rival strains in the Baptist church - moderates who emphasized personal religious freedom and tolerance, and fundamentalists who preached discipline and the inerrancy of scripture. He demonstrates how a denomination of freedom-loving individuals came to embrace exclusionist spirituality, and how the results of that conflict continue to affect the church.

Best-selling author John Piper puts the life of Andrew Fuller on display as inspriration for all Christians to devote themselves to knowing, guarding, and spreading the true gospel-to the ends of the earth.

Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church tells the story of one of the largest African churches in South Africa, Ibandla lamaNazaretha, or Church of the Nazaretha. Founded in 1910 by charismatic faith-healer Isaiah Shembe, the Nazaretha church, with over four million members, has become an influential social and political player in the region. Deeply influenced by a transnational evangelical literary culture, Nazaretha believers have patterned their lives upon the Christian Bible. They cast themselves as actors who enact scriptural drama upon African soil. But Nazaretha believers also believe the existing Christian Bible to be in need of updating and revision. For this reason, they have written further scriptures - a new 'Bible' - which testify to the miraculous work of their founding prophet, Shembe. Joel Cabrita's book charts the key role that these sacred texts play in making, breaking and contesting social power and authority, both within the church and more broadly in South African public life.

"The recent reprint of The Baptist Catechism has given families and study classes a helpful tool for memorizing the great doctrines of the Christian faith. Now, a hidden jewel, Benjamin Beddome's 'A Scriptural Exposition of the Baptist Catechism, ' takes its place alongside the Catechism to give much needed assistance to the same families and classes. Beddome shows how the doctrines contained in the Catechism are founded upon Scripture, and explains them for all to understand. This is indeed a wonderful instrument to make skilled craftsmen from apprentices " - Dr. James M. Renihan

Nearly 25 centuries ago, the angel Gabriel foretold the time Christ would transfer His ministry from the holy place to the most holy place of the heavenly sanctuary in preparation for the time when divine intercession for man's salvation would be finished. Christ has revealed His plans about the reward of the righteous and the final disposition of evildoers inside the pages of the Bible. The Most High has assured us in His word that the root and branches of sin will be consumed into smoke and ashes - evil shall not rise the second time. The Sanctuary is mentioned in both the beginning and end of the Bible. Between these entries are some of the most fascinating and inspiriting themes that can occupy the human mind is revealed. The study of the sanctuary may properly engage the interest of the one who desires to understand the purposes of the Creator in the salvation of the rigorous and the final disposition of evil.

Embracing in one common trajectory the major Baptist confessions of faith, the major Baptist theologians, and the principal Baptist theological movements and controversies, this book spans four centuries of Baptist doctrinal history. Acknowledging first the pre-1609 roots (patristic, medieval, Reformational) of Baptist theology, it examines the Arminian versus Calvinist issues that the General and the Particular Baptists first expressed. These issues dominated English and American Baptist theology during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Helwys and Smyth and from Bunyan and Kiffin to Gill, Fuller, Backus, and Boyce and were quickened by the awakenings and the missionary movement. Concurrently, the Baptist defended distinctives vis-a-vis the pedobaptist world and the unfolding of a strong Baptist confessional tradition. Then during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the liberal versus evangelical issues became dominant with Hovey, Strong, Rauschenbusch, and Henry in the North and Mullins, Conner, Hobbs, and Criswell in the South even as a distinctive Baptist Landmarkism developed, the discipline of biblical theology was practiced and a structured ecumenism was pursued. Missiology both impacted Baptist theology and took it to all the continents, where it became increasingly indigenous. Conscious that Baptists belong to the free churches and to the believers' churches, a new generation of Baptist theologians at the advent of the twenty-first century was somewhat more Calvinist than Arminian and decidedly more evangelical than liberal.

Provides an illuminating look at the diverse world of Black religious life in North America, focusing particularly outside of mainstream Christian churches From the Moorish Science Temple to the Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine to the Commandment Keepers sect of Black Judaism, myriad Black new religious movements developed during the time of the Great Migration. Many of these stood outside of Christianity, but some remained at least partially within the Christian fold. The Black Coptic Church is one of these. Black Coptics combined elements of Black Protestant and Black Hebrew traditions with Ethiopianism as a way of constructing a divine racial identity that embraced the idea of a royal Egyptian heritage for its African American followers, a heroic identity that was in stark contrast to the racial identity imposed on African Americans by the white dominant culture. This embrace of a royal Blackness—what McKinnis calls an act of “fugitive spirituality”—illuminates how the Black Coptic tradition in Chicago and beyond uniquely employs a religio-performative imagination. McKinnis asks, ‘What does it mean to imagine Blackness?’ Drawing on ten years of archival research and interviews with current members of the church, The Black Coptic Church offers a look at a group that insisted on its own understanding of its divine Blackness. In the process, it provides a more complex look at the diverse world of Black religious life in North America, particularly within non-mainstream Christian churches.