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Books > Christianity > Protestantism & Protestant Churches > Baptist Churches
This first scholarly treatment of a fascinating and understudied
figure offers a unique and powerful view of nearly one hundred
years of the struggle for freedom in North America. After her
conversion at a Baptist revival at sixteen, Jennie Johnson followed
the call to preach. Raised in an African Canadian abolitionist
community in Ontario, she immigrated to the United States to attend
the African Methodist Episcopal Seminary at Wilberforce University.
On an October evening in 1909 she stood before a group of Free Will
Baptist preachers in the small town of Goblesville, Michigan, and
was received into ordained ministry. She was thefirst ordained
woman to serve in Canada and spent her life building churches and
working for racial justice on both sides of the national border. In
this first extended study of Jennie Johnson's fascinating life,
Nina Reid-Maroney reconstructs Johnson's nearly one-hundred-year
story -- from her upbringing in a black abolitionist settlement in
nineteenth-century Canada to her work as an activist and Christian
minister in the modern civil rights movement. This critical
biography of a figure who outstripped the racial and religious
barriers of her time offers a unique and powerful view of the
struggle for freedom in North America. Nina Reid-Maroney is
Associate Professor in the Department of History at Huron
University College at Western (London, Ontario) and a coeditor of
The Promised Land: History and Historiography of Black Experience
in Chatham-Kent's Settlements
In 1993, sociologist Nancy Ammerman published an edited collection,
Southern Baptists Observed, that assayed the Southern Baptist
Convention (SBC) as the conservative takeover of the denomination
was triumphant and expanding. This volume examines the state of the
SBC now that it has been under conservative control for a
generation. Rather than asking where that change in leadership came
from, the question here is what has happened since. The sweeping
success of the conservative takeover-based on enforcing doctrinal
fidelity, especially on issues like biblical inerrancy and
so-called complementarianism, a rejection of modern, secular
values, and advanced international missionary work-veiled a
weakness at its very heart. By the turn of the twenty-first
century, the conservative resurgence failed to attract new members
and, even worse, the younger generation who had grown up in the SBC
were fleeing the denomination-nearly half of them are leaving the
church as adults and never coming back. The contributors to this
volume all offer insights into the question of why. While
conservatives dominate the SBC's governance, they have failed to
resolve issues that preoccupy its members and the larger society,
including those related to gender, homosexuality, race, and abuse.
The essays are grouped under four broad categories: Truth and
Freedom: Baptist Institutions and Contentious Issues; Defining and
Defending Biblical Truth: Staking the Boundaries; Apologies,
Reconciliation, and Continuing Reality; and the View from Outside.
With an introduction by editor Keith Harper contextualizing the
history of the movement and the issues it faces today, this
collection is sure to add new insight into this influential
denomination.
An examination of worldviews, religious belief and ritual as seen
through the musical performances of one Afro-American Baptist
church in a small black community in rural Mississippi. "Let the
Church Sing!": Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community
is based on years of fieldwork by an Irish ethnomusicologist, who
examines, in more detail than ever before, how various facets of
the Clear Creek citizens' worldview find expression through
religious ritual and music. Therese Smith, though originally very
much an outsider, gradually found herself welcomed into Clear Creek
by members and officials of the Clear Creek Missionary Baptist
Church. She was permitted to record many hours' worth of sermons
and singing and engaged in community events as a
participant-observer. In addition, she conducted plentiful
interviews, not just at Clear Creek but, for comparison, at Main
St. Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky. All of this enables her
to analyze in detail how music is interwoven in the worship
service, how people feel about the music that they make and hear,
and, more generally, how the religious views so vividly expressed
help the Church's members think about the relationship between
themselves, their community, and the larger world. Music and prayer
enable the members and leaders of the Church to bring the realm of
the spiritual into intersection with the material world in a
particularly active way. The book is enriched by extensive musical
transcriptions and an accompanying CD of recordings from actual
church services,and these are examined in detail in the book
itself. Therese Smith is in the Music Department, University
College, Dublin.
Volume IX of the Baptists in Early North America Series provides a
unique window into the inner life of the Sandy Creek Baptist
Tradition. The records of Sandy Creek Baptist Church in North
Carolina were destroyed by a fire, leaving a gap in the historical
record. Baptists in Early North America--Abbott's Creek, North
Carolina, Baptist Church, Volume IX, containing the records of the
first church founded by Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall after
their Separate Baptist movement took off at Sandy Creek, helps to
fill this gap. Abbott's Creek, like many churches in the Sandy
Creek tradition, experienced significant growth during the Second
Great Awakening. This growth was followed by an increase in church
discipline, then controversy, and eventually schism over the newly
formed convention system among North Carolina Baptists. The church
split in 1832 with Abbott's Creek Primitive Baptist Church
continuing with the majority of members and Abbott's Creek
Missionary Baptist Church forming a new congregation a few hundred
yards away. The records contained in this volume begin in 1783 when
the church was reconstituted following the Revolutionary War and
continue through 1836. The records cover the ministries of George
Pope and Ashley Swaim and the church's controversy over mission
methods focusing on the work of Samuel Wait. The annotations
included along with the transcribed minutes include information
about the work of the Sandy Creek Baptist Association, of which
Abbott's Creek was a founding member. An extensive bibliography and
indexes are included.
In The Power of Mammon, Curtis D. Johnson describes how the market
economy and market-related forces, such as the media, politics,
individualism, and consumerism, radically changed the nature of
Baptist congregational life in New York State during three
centuries. Collectively, these forces emphasized the importance of
material wealth over everything else, and these values penetrated
the thinking of Baptist ministers and laypeople alike. Beginning in
the 1820s, the pastorate turned into a profession, the laity's
influence diminished, closeknit religious fellowships evolved into
voluntary associations, and evangelism became far less effective.
Men, being the most engaged in the market, secularized the more
quickly and became less involved in church affairs. By the 1870s,
male disengagement opened the door to increased female
participation in church governance. While scientific advances and
religious pluralism also played a role, the market and its related
distractions were the primary forces behind the secularization of
Baptist life. The Power of Mammon is history from the ground up.
Unlike many denominational histories, this book emphasizes
congregational life and the importance of the laity. This focus
allows the reader to hear the voices of ordinary Baptists who
argued over a host of issues. Johnson deftly connects large social
trends with exhaustive attention to archival material, including
numerous well-chosen records preserved by forty-two New York
churches. These records include details related to membership,
discipline, finance, and institutional history. Utilizing
statistical analysis to achieve even greater clarity, Johnson
effectively bridges the gap between the particularity of church
records and the broader history of New York's Baptist churches.
Johnson's narrative of Baptist history in New York will serve as a
model for other regional studies and adds to our understanding of
secularization and its impact on American religion.
The record is clear that Baptists, historically, have prioritized
conversion, Jesus, and God. Equally clear is that Baptists have
never known what to do with the Holy Spirit. In Baptists and the
Holy Spirit , Baptist historian C. Douglas Weaver traces the way
Baptists have engagedaand, at times, embracedathe Holiness,
Pentecostal, and charismatic movements. Chronicling the
interactions between Baptists and these Spirit-filled movements
reveals the historical context for the development of Baptists'
theology of the Spirit. Baptists and the Holy Spirit provides the
first in-depth interpretation of Baptist involvement with the
Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements that have found a
prominent place in America's religious landscape. Weaver reads
these traditions through the nuanced lens of Baptist identity, as
well as the frames of gender, race, and class. He shows that, while
most Baptists reacted against all three Spirit-focused groups, each
movement flourished among a Baptist minority who were attracted by
the post-conversion experience of the "baptism of the Holy Spirit."
Weaver also explores the overlap between Baptist and Pentecostal
efforts to restore and embody the practices and experiences of the
New Testament church. The diversity of BaptistsaSouthern Baptist,
American Baptist, African American Baptistaleads to an equally
diverse understanding of the Spirit. Even those who strongly
opposed charismatic expressions of the Spirit still acknowledged a
connection between the Holy Spirit and a holy life. If,
historically, Baptists were suspicious of Roman Catholics'
ecclesial hierarchy, then Baptists were equally wary of free church
pneumatology. However, as Weaver shows, Baptist interactions with
the Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements and their
vibrant experience with the Spirit were key in shaping Baptist
identity and theology.
As the story goes, an itinerant preacher once visited the Bluegrass
region and proclaimed heaven to be "a mere Kentucky of a place."
The Commonwealth's first Baptists certainly thought so as they
began settling the region a decade before statehood. By 1785 a
group of pioneering preachers formed the Elkhorn Association,
widely regarded as the oldest Baptist association west of the
Alleghenies. Often portrayed in the historiography as the vanguard
of a new frontier democracy, the Elkhorn Association, on closer
inspection, reveals itself to be far more complex. In A Mere
Kentucky of a Place, Keith Harper argues that the association's
Baptist ministers were neither full-fledged frontier egalitarians
nor radical religionists but simply a people in transition. These
ministers formed their identities in the crucible of the early
national period, challenged by competing impulses, including their
religious convictions, Jeffersonian Republicanism, and a rigid
honor code-with mixed results. With a keen eye for human interest,
Harper brings familiar historical figures such as John Gano and
Elijah Craig to life as he analyzes leadership in the Elkhorn
Association during the early republic. Mining the wealth of
documents left by the association, Harper details the self-aware
struggle of these leaders to achieve economic wealth, status, and
full social and cultural acceptance, demonstrating that the Elkhorn
Association holds a unique place in the story of Baptists in the
"New Eden" of Kentucky. Ideal for course adoption in religious
studies and students of Kentucky history, this readable work is
sure to become a standard source on the history of religion on the
Kentucky frontier.
In Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism's
Public Reemergence, Keith Bates embarks on a thematic and
chronological exploration of twentieth-century Baptist
fundamentalism in postwar America, sharing the story of a man whose
career intersected with many other leading fundamentalists of the
twentieth century, such as J. Frank Norris, Bob Jones Sr., Bob
Jones Jr., and Jerry Falwell.Unique among histories of American
fundamentalism, this book explores the theme of Southern
fundamentalism's reemergence through a biographical lens. John R.
Rice's mission to inspire a broad cultural activism within
fundamentalism - particularly by opposing those who fostered an
isolationist climate - would give direction and impetus to the
movement for the rest of the twentieth century. To support this
claim, Bates presents chapters on Rice's background and education,
personal and ecclesiastical separatism, and fundamentalism and
political action, tracing his rise to leadership during a critical
phase of fundamentalism's development until his death in 1980.
Bates draws heavily upon primary source texts that include writings
from Rice's fundamentalist contemporaries, his own The Sword of the
Lord articles, and his private papers - particularly correspondence
with many nationally known preachers, local pastors, and laypeople
over more than fifty years of Rice's ministry. The incorporation of
these writings, combined with Bates's own conversations with Rice's
family, facilitate a deeply detailed, engaging examination that
fills a significant gap in fundamentalist history studies.
Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism's
Public Reemergence provides a nuanced and insightful study that
will serve as a helpful resource to scholars and students of
postwar American fundamentalism, Southern fundamentalism, and
Rice's contemporaries.
The Mountain District Primitive Baptist Association enfolds
churches in four counties in the Blue Ridge Mountains-North
Carolina's Ashe and Allegheny counties and Virginia's Grayson and
Carroll counties. Primitive Baptists are found throughout the
United States and are related to the Strict and Particular Baptists
of the United Kingdom. They are Calvinists, adhering to the
theologies of John Calvin, John Bunyan, and British theologians
such as Henry Philpott. As Calvinists, they teach
predestination-that before the creation of the Earth, God chose who
would be saved and damned. No one knows who is which and no one can
change this destiny. Originally published in 1989, Pilgrims of
Paradox is based on extensive fieldwork conducted in the 1980s.
Despite what may seem a fatalistic doctrine, Peacock and Tyson show
that the Primitive Baptists of this region live vigorous, sturdy
lives marked by self-sufficiency and caring for their community.
They also inspire others in the area with the beauty of their hymns
and ""discourses"" and by accomplishments bounded by humility.
In step with the #MeToo movement and third wave feminism, women's
roles provoke lively debate in today's evangelical sphere. The
Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has a complicated past regarding
this issue, and determining what exactly women's roles in home,
church, and society should be, or even what these roles should be
called, has been a contentious subject. In A Marginal Majority:
Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists, editors
Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat and eight other contributors
examine the SBC's complex history regarding women and how that
history reshapes our understanding of the denomination and its
contemporary debates. This comprehensive volume starts with women
as SBC fundraisers, moves to the ways they served Southern Baptist
missions, and considers their struggles to find a place at Southern
Baptist seminaries as well as their launching of "teaching" or
"women's" ministries. Along the way, it introduces new
personalities, offers fresh considerations of familiar figures, and
examines the power dynamics of race and class in a denomination
that dominated the South and grew into a national behemoth.
Additionally, the essay collection provides insights into why the
SBC has often politically aligned with the right. Not only did the
denomination become increasingly oriented toward authoritarianism
as it clamped down on evangelical feminism, but, as several
contributors reveal, even as Southern Baptist women sought agency,
they often took it from others. Read together, the chapters strike
a somber tone, challenging any triumphal historiography of the
past. By providing a history of contentious issues from the
nineteenth century to the present day, A Marginal Majority provides
invaluable context for the recurrent struggles women have faced
within the United States' largest Protestant denomination.
Moreover, it points to new directions in the study of American
denominational life and culture.
Perhaps no person exerted more influence on postwar white Southern
memory than former Confederate chaplain and Baptist minister J.
William Jones. Christopher C. Moore's Apostle of the Lost Cause is
the first full-length work to examine the complex contributions to
Lost Cause ideology of this well-known but surprisingly
understudied figure. Commissioned by Robert E. Lee himself to
preserve an accurate account of the Confederacy, Jones responded by
welding hagiography and denominationalism to create, in effect, a
sacred history of the Southern cause. In a series of popular books
and in his work as secretary of the Southern Historical Society
Papers, Jones's mission became the canonization of Confederate
saints, most notably Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis,
for a postwar generation and the contrivance of a full-blown myth
of Southern virtue-in-defeat that deeply affected historiography
for decades to come. While personally committed to Baptist
identity, Jones supplied his readers with embodiments of Southern
morality who transcended denominational boundaries and enabled
white Southerners to locate their champions (and themselves) in a
quasi-biblical narrative that ensured ultimate vindication for the
Southern cause. In a time when Confederate monuments and the
enduring effects of white supremacy are in the daily headlines, an
examination of this key figure in the creation of the Lost Cause
legacy could not be more relevant.
Explores the roots of evangelical Christian support for Israel
through an examination of the Southern Baptist Convention. One week
after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, delegates
to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) repeatedly and
overwhelmingly voted down resolutions congratulating fellow
Southern Baptist Harry Truman on his role in Israel's creation.
From today's perspective, this seems like a shocking result. After
all, Christians - particularly the white evangelical Protestants
that populate the SBC - are now the largest pro-Israel constituency
in the United States. How could conservative evangelicals have been
so hesitant in celebrating Israel's birth in 1948? How did they
then come to be so supportive? Between Dixie and Zion: Southern
Baptists and Palestine before Israel addresses these issues by
exploring how Southern Baptists engaged what was called the
'Palestine question' whether Jews or Arabs would, or should,
control the Holy Land after World War I. Walker Robins argues that,
in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, most Southern
Baptists did not directly engage the Palestine question
politically. Rather, they engaged it indirectly through a variety
of encounters with the land, the peoples, and the politics of
Palestine. Among the instrumental figures featured by Robins are
tourists, foreign missionaries, Arab pastors, Jewish converts,
biblical interpreters, fundamentalist rebels, editorialists, and,
of course, even a president. While all revered Palestine as the
Holy Land, each approached and encountered the region according to
their own priorities. Nevertheless, Robins shows that Baptists
consistently looked at the region through an Orientalist framework,
broadly associating the Zionist movement with Western civilization,
modernity, and progress over and against the Arabs, whom they
viewed as uncivilized, premodern, and backward. He argues that such
impressions were not idle - they suggested that the Zionists were
fulfilling Baptists' long-expressed hopes that the Holy Land would
one day be revived and regain the prosperity it had held in the
biblical era.
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