From 1979 to 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was mired in conflict, with the biblicist and autonomist parties fighting openly for control. This highly polarizing struggle ended in a schism that created major changes within the SBC and also resulted in the formation of several new Baptist groups. Discussions of the schism, academic and otherwise, generally ignore the church's clergywomen for the roles they played and the contributions they made to the fracturing of the largest Protestant group in the United States. Ordained women are typically treated as a contentious issue between the parties. Only recently are scholars beginning to take seriously these women's contributions and interpretations as active participants in the struggle. Anatomy of a Schism is the first book on the Southern Baptist split to place ordained women's narratives at the center of interpretation. Author Eileen Campbell-Reed brings her unique perspective as a pastoral theologian in conducting qualitative interviews with five Baptist clergywomen and allowing their narratives to focus attention on both psychological and theological issues of the split. The stories she uncovers offer a compelling new structure for understanding the path of Southern Baptists at the close of the twentieth century. The narratives of Anna, Martha, Joanna, Rebecca, and Chloe reframe the story of Southern Baptists and reinterpret the rupture and realignment in broad and significant ways. Together they offer an understanding of the schism from three interdisciplinary perspectives-gendered, psychological, and theological-not previously available together. In conversation with other historical events and documents, the women's narratives collaborate to provide specific perspectives with universal implications for understanding changes in Baptist life over the last four decades. The schism's outcomes held profound consequences for Baptist individuals and communities. Anatomy of Schism is an illuminating ethnographic and qualitative study sure to be indispensable to scholars of theology, history, and women's studies alike.

The Perversion and Subversion of John 3:16 reveals a rancid putrid cancer in the Christian realm today. The Bible is being rewritten and reinterpreted in the new versions. Ancient heresies cloaked in a new garb have found a new venue. A battle for true Biblical Christianity rages out of sight and mind of the average Christian. This book documents, without a doubt, the most important Christian issue in our time. It is time for Bible believing Christians to return to our true Biblical heritage and take a firm stand with our traditional conservative Biblical faith.

Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing factions of evangelicals fought over their faith's future, and a contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand. Joshua Guthman here tells the story of how a band of antimissionary and antirevivalistic Baptists defended Calvinism, America's oldest Protestant creed, from what they feared were the unbridled forces of evangelical greed and power. In their harrowing confessions of faith and in the quavering uncertainty of their singing, Guthman finds the emotional catalyst of the Primitives' early nineteenth-century movement: a searing experience of doubt that motivated believers rather than paralyzed them. But Primitives' old orthodoxies proved startlingly flexible. After the Civil War, African American Primitives elevated a renewed Calvinism coursing with freedom's energies. Tracing the faith into the twentieth century, Guthman demonstrates how a Primitive Baptist spirit, unmoored from its original theological underpinnings, seeped into the music of renowned southern artists such as Roscoe Holcomb and Ralph Stanley, whose ""high lonesome sound"" appealed to popular audiences searching for meaning in the drift of postwar American life. In an account that weaves together religious, emotional, and musical histories, Strangers Below demonstrates the unlikely but enduring influence of Primitive Baptists on American religious and cultural life.

EVER since I wrote By the Still Waters, while a country pastor, I have longed to write more in the same vein. Friends who say they were blessed by those rustic sketches have encouraged me to write a companion volume, but a city pastorate of five years and many preaching journeys over the land have not provided a suitable setting for rural reflections. One cannot write of these things in a hotel room. It has become possible through circumstances, evidently the Lord's leading, to spend a few autumn weeks in the old home in the hills. No sooner had this opportunity opened before me than I felt impressed to return to my first love and resume the trail of reflections I left in the Carolina lowlands. Then it was the low country, and now it is the hills, but both are Carolina and both are "countrified" and I trust the theme in both cases is common to hearts everywhere. A few of these sketches were published with some changes in the Charlotte (N. C.) Observer, and grateful acknowledgement is hereby made for permission to reprint them. But all of them are FOREWORD A skin, and in these simple matters that abide time makes little difference. They are sent forth to the glory of our Lord Who spoke the colorful language of the outdoors and Who bade His disciples of old, "Come ye yourselves apart and rest awhile." V. H. Greensboro, N. C.

God's Word says, "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (II Timothy 2:15). Rightly dividing or being able to understand God's Word will require study. This book is designed to assist you in studying God's Word. Fifty-two major doctrines of the Bible are outlined in four separate books. Each chapter examines a different Bible doctrine. The chapters are written in such a way to help you thoroughly understand the doctrines--without needing a seminary degree. If you want to be an approved workman unto God, this book will help you accomplish that goal The thirteen chapters of Book Three covers: Hell, Trinity, God the Father, God the Son (2), God the Holy Spirit (2), The Gift of Tongues, Bible Memorization, Sanctification, Angels (2), and The Second Coming of Christ.