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.

Black Baptists and African Missions is an exceptional study tracing the development of black interests in the South. The focus upon religious developments and changes offers unique insights into the nature, changes, and function of religion in black communities, while chapters take a historical approach in tracing the African mission movement through different states and time periods.

This study is an in-depth focus upon mission idealogy as well as black Baptist evolution and activity and provides a specific focus lacking in similar literature and explorations. It will appeal to those seeking a scholarly analysis of the relationship between black social and economic struggles and religious influences.

Understanding the covenant of grace is at the heart of faith in Christ. In this inspiring book, Charles Spurgeon explores the details of God's unbreakable contract with you and points out many of its marvelous provisions, including forgiveness of your sins, inner peace, a new nature, freedom from bondage, and entrance into heaven. Often, God's blessings sit accumulating in His storehouse, just waiting to be claimed, because Christians do not realize they can have their inheritance now. Discover the riches of God's gracious covenant with you, so you can claim your abundant legacy today

Together, and separately, black and white Baptists created different but intertwined cultures that profoundly shaped the South. Adopting a biracial and bicultural focus, Paul Harvey works to redefine southern religious history, and by extension southern culture, as the product of such interaction--the result of whites and blacks having drawn from and influenced each other even while remaining separate and distinct. Harvey explores the parallels and divergences of black and white religious institutions as manifested through differences in worship styles, sacred music, and political agendas. He examines the relationship of broad social phenomena like progressivism and modernization to the development of southern religion, focusing on the clash between rural southern folk religious expression and models of spirituality drawn from northern Victorian standards. In tracing the growth of Baptist churches from small outposts of radically democratic plain-folk religion in the mid-eighteenth century to conservative and culturally dominant institutions in the twentieth century, Harvey explores one of the most impressive evolutions of American religious and cultural history. |Together, and separately, black and white Baptists created different but intertwined cultures that profoundly shaped the South. Adopting a biracial and bicultural focus, Paul Harvey works to redefine southern religious history, and by extension southern culture, as the product of such interaction--the result of whites and blacks having drawn from and influenced each other even while remaining separate and distinct. In tracing the growth of Baptist churches from small outposts of radically democratic plain-folk religion in the mid-18th century to conservative and culturally dominant institutions in the 20th century, Harvey explores one of the most impressive evolutions of American religious and cultural history.

The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church near Stanley, Virginia, was a group of fundamental Christian believers broadly representative of southern Appalachian belief and practice. Jeff Todd Titon worked with this Baptist community for more than ten years in his attempt to determine the nature of language in the practice of their religion. He traces specialized vocabulary and its applications through the acts of being saved, praying, preaching, teaching, and in particular singing. Titon argues that religious language is performed and the context of its occurrence is crucial to our understanding and to a holistic view of not only religious practice but of folklife and ethnomusicology. Titon's monumental study of The Fellowship Independence Baptist Church produced not only the first edition book but also an album and documentary film. In this second edition of Powerhouse for God, Titon revisits The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church nearly four decades later. Brother John Sherfey, the charismatic preacher steeped in Appalachian tradition has passed away and left his congregation to his son, Donnie, to lead. While Appalachian Virginia has changed markedly over the decades, the town of Stanley and the Fellowship Church have not. Titon relates this rarity in his new Afterword: a church founded on Biblical literalism and untouched by modern progressivism in an area of Appalachia that has seen an evolution in population, industry, and immigration. Titon's unforgettable study of folklife, musicology, and Appalachian religion is available for a new generation of scholars to build upon.

A brief, narrative survey of the Baptists in North America over the last three and a half centuries, from their roots in Europe to their present manifestations in contemporary America and the world. The six chapters are organized around five distinctives historically important to Baptists: the Bible, the Church, the ordinances/sacraments, voluntarism, and religious liberty. Concluding with a Chronology and extensive Bibliographic Essay, this is an ideal text for courses in Church History, North American Religious History, or American social and cultural history.

A significant contribution to the historiography of religion in the U.S. south, Forging a Christian Order challenges and complicates the standard view that eighteenth-century evangelicals exerted both religious and social challenges to the traditional mainstream order, not maturing into middle-class denominations until the nineteenth century. Instead, Kimberly R. Kellison argues, eighteenth-century White Baptists in South Carolina used the Bible to fashion a Christian model of slavery that recognized the humanity of enslaved people while accentuating contrived racial differences. Over time this model evolved from a Christian practice of slavery to one that expounded on slavery as morally right. Elites who began the Baptist church in late-1600s Charleston closely valued hierarchy. It is not surprising, then, that from its formation the church advanced a Christian model of slavery. The American Revolution spurred the associational growth of the denomination, reinforcing the rigid order of the authoritative master and subservient enslaved person, given that the theme of liberty for all threatened slaveholders' way of life. In lowcountry South Carolina in the 1790s, where a White minority population lived in constant anxiety over control of the bodies of enslaved men and women, news of revolt in St. Domingue (Haiti) led to heightened fears of Black violence. Fearful of being associated with antislavery evangelicals and, in turn, of being labeled as an enemy of the planter and urban elite, White ministers orchestrated a major transformation in the Baptist construction of paternalism. Forging a Christian Order provides a comprehensive examination of the Baptist movement in South Carolina from its founding to the eve of the Civil War and reveals that the growth of the Baptist church in South Carolina paralleled the growth and institutionalization of the American system of slavery-accommodating rather than challenging the prevailing social order of the economically stratified Lowcountry.