Scholars and journalists have paid significant attention to the contemporary Fundamentalist tendencies of southern Protestantism. However, many studies neglect to consider how the Fundamentalist controversies that roiled the Baptists and Presbyterians of the North during the 1920s affected the Southern Baptist Convention schism of 1970-2000. Fundamentalism, Fundraising, and the Transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1919-1925 explores the scope and character of the interaction between Southern Baptists and early Fundamentalism during the late 1910s and early 1920s. By focusing more closely on the Southern Baptist Convention, Andrew Christopher Smith examines the interaction between the northernFundamentalist movement and southern religion during the era. Though scholars agree that Fundamentalism is not native to the South, no book thus far has considered the effects of the Fundamentalist movement and how it influenced southern Protestant denominational organizations, independent of southern rejection of Fundamentalist-sponsored interdenominational evangelistic and educational institutions. Smith proposes that Fundamentalist ideas, lingering in the atmosphere of the South after wafting there through hearsay, national religious periodicals, and the secular press,likely influenced Southern Baptist self-understanding during this critical period. Examining documentary evidence, Smith explains that following the First World War, Southern Baptists pushed toward bureaucratization. The "Seventy-Five Million Campaign," a fundraising and organization-building drive that the convention approved in 1919, was the denominational movement through which the selective appropriation of Fundamentalist ideas occurred. Exploring the interplay of Southern Baptist claims and northern Fundamentalist precepts, Smith fills a void in scholarly examination of early-twentieth-century Baptist history.

Although much has been written on the Afro-Catholic syncretic religions of Vodou, Candomble, and Santeria, the Spiritual Baptists--an Afro-Caribbean religion based on Protestant Christianity--have received little attention. This work offers the first detailed examination of the Spiritual Baptists or "Converted". Based on 18 months of fieldwork on the Island of St. Vincent (where the religion arose) and among Vincentian immigrants in Brooklyn, Zane's analysis makes a contribution to the literature on African-American and African Diaspora religion and the anthropology of religion more generally.

How do Filipino Baptists who sing in English, quote from James Dobson, and download sermon illustrations from Alabama understand themselves, and their faith, as "local?" Comparing four congregations of Southern Baptists in the Philippines, Howell argues that Christianity "becomes" a local context as aspects of daily life are brought together with the obviously borrowed elements of the faith. This book moves away from the split of "global" and "local" to find out how Southern Baptists are able to create a "transcendent locality." Told in rich ethnographic detail, "Christianity in the Local Context" argues that Filipino Baptists are actively constructing themselves in terms of a global faith that they have made their own.

As one of the most revered Baptist preachers of his time, Charles Haddon Spurgeon's eventful and prolific life and career offer outstanding inspiration for all Christians to this day. In the first volume of Spurgeon's autobiography, we witness his rise from modest obscurity, embarking on a long road toward fame and admiration as a representative of God on Earth. A lengthy, lively and detailed biography is helped by the fact that Spurgeon was an effusive and prolific talker and author of many documents: he would recount incidents of his life on paper and in speeches regularly. We find in this volume the famous instance in which the young Spurgeon encountered his call from God. When Spurgeon was aged fifteen, a violent snowstorm forced him from his route into a Methodist church where he felt the Lord beckon him to service. After this, he undertook parochial study with great fervor, and quickly became a respected teacher in his local Sunday School, gaining the nickname 'the boy-preacher of the Fens'.

This study describes the creation of the Primitive Baptist movement and discusses the main outlines of their thought. It also weaves the story of the Primitive Baptists with other developments in American Christianity in the Early Republic.

The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centuries of Baptist Interpretation is a landmark work of research, containing examples of specific ways that Baptists have used Acts in their confessions, sermons, tracts, commentaries, monographs, devotional and denominational literature, speeches, and hymns. Including the entirety of the Acts as translated by Baptist luminary Helen Barrett Montgomery, this commentary beautifully illustrates the diversity of Baptist responses to this book of Scripture, and in so doing, a variety of hermeneutical approaches within the Baptist tradition.

This is a reprint of the original 1845 book about the scriptural legitimacy of slavery. ""Domestic Slavery"" originated in the nineteenth century as a literary debate between two Baptist leaders over the Bible's teachings on slavery. The chapters were originally letters published in a Baptist newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts. Southern pastor Richard Fuller and Northern educator Francis Wayland were each able defenders of their respective positions. These men were also good friends who believed that a difference of opinion about slavery should not necessitate a breaking of Christian fellowship. Unfortunately, these two Baptists leaders proved naive in this regard. Just weeks after the publication of the correspondence in book form, Fuller's Southern Baptist Convention broke away from the larger Baptist denomination and formed a new ecclesiastical body. A number of issues factored into the division, though the slavery debate was what ultimately led to the creation of a separate Baptist denomination in the South. Historians of Southern religion consider ""Domestic Slavery"" to be one of the major contributions to the nineteenth-century debate over the peculiar institution. This critical edition of ""Domestic Slavery"", which includes annotations and an appendix of related documents, represents the first reprint of this important work to be published since the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars of Southern culture and religious history will benefit from a close examination of what was undoubtedly the most significant Baptist contribution to the slavery debate in the years leading to the Civil War.