Academic literature on the topic 'First Baptist Church (LaPlace, La.) Church growth'

This article provides an overview of the relationships between churches in the Baptist Union of Scotland and other Christian denominations, not only at home but also in an international context in the first half of the twentieth century. Consideration is also given to the impact of three para-church agencies on this Scottish denomination during this period of time. The article reveals a growing input to and confidence in the growth of ecumenical relations up to the 1940s, however, more critical questions were then raised concerning the direction of the inter-church movement, which would provide the stage for a more hesitant appraisal of ecumenism in the second half of the twentieth century.

The issue of racial reconciliation has been a major concern for me since the days of my youth in Youngstown, Ohio. I was blessed to see the growth and development of African American people during the civil rights era. There were, however, racial tensions of a major magnitude during my days in junior high and high school. It was the first time we (students from Thorn Hill) had ever experienced racism because our elementary school was 99.8 percent black. I had to live in a whole new world when six primary grade schools were condensed into one junior high school. In high school, it became increasingly evident to me that there was a white world and a black world. Attending Howard University definitely heightened my anger and resentment towards white people. Howard was the Mecca of black power and intellectual thinking. By God's grace, after eight years in corporate America, I accepted my call to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and realized that hatred had no place in the heart and mind of a servant of the Son of God. The seminary experience at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was equally frustrating at times even though I had the blessings of the seminary's leadership, thus becoming the first Martin Luther King, Jr. Fellow. Through twenty-five years of pastoring and thirty years of spreading the Gospel, I have gained additional insights into how we must eradicate racism in our society. Through my position in the Progressive National Baptist Convention as National Chairperson for “Social Action on Public Policy,” I realize how difficult is the task at hand. Research and writings on “Racial Reconciliation” are my own convictions and struggles to support the Church of God in becoming all that Jesus Christ had intended for it to be.

The emergence of Baptist seminaries in Ukraine was influenced by Western churches or missions and in some cases by the Ukrainian diaspora, which had lived outside Ukraine for a long time. The decisive influence was exerted by representatives of churches, educational institutions and Christian universities in the United States. Seminaries went through a number of stages of their own development, during which the forms of collective leadership changed. The first stage is the emergence of seminaries and the harmonization of seminars to unified standards. In the first stage, immediately after the seminary was established, they had very friendly relations with local churches, the programs were very flexible and responded to the needs of the churches. Church leaders saw these initiatives as part of church ministry. The second stage is the extensive development of seminaries, by which the author means the involvement of additional resources in the work of seminaries and the growth of seminaries, associated with the number of students, and for some seminaries - the opening of branches or field programs. This type of growth was also due to the fact that seminaries began to become more independent of national churches, and partnerships with Western organizations became more formalized, which was most often seen in the participation of Western partners in the board of trustees. The third period is a reassessment of the work of seminaries. The beginning of this period is largely related to the global economic crisis of 2007-2008, and its result was the resumption of dialogue between seminaries and churches. The fourth period - institutional changes - is associated with the reaction of the Ukrainian state to the Bologna process and the adoption of the new Law of Ukraine "On Higher Education". The process of preparation for state accreditation and formation of a culture of openness in the national educational environment has begun.

Brad Powell, the newly hired senior leader of a Christian church, must lead the organization to reverse a three-decade decline and return to fulfilling its mission. Brad spent the first six months assessing the situation, building relationships, and reiterating the longstanding mission of the organization. Now, with an understanding of its history, an intimate knowledge of the immediate challenges, and a clear vision of what the organization should become, Brad is considering his strategy and next steps. As the leader of a nonprofit organization resourced by members and volunteers, Brad must lead change that produces results without compromising the mission. The B case summarizes Brad's actions and the results.To allow students to evaluate Brad's situation and advise him on the best plan for leading change at Temple Baptist Church. To demonstrate the impact of a leader on an organization's culture, and the fit between an organization's style and its mission. To allow discussion of the paradoxes a leader must manage in changing a culture, measuring financial versus nonprofit results, leading volunteers versus paid staff, upholding mission versus tradition, and leading change with limited resources.

Over the last decade or so, much has been written about the possibilities offered by the internet for creating sites of community based on exchange, collaboration, and reciprocity. Since Howard Rheingold published his polemic, The Virtual Community, in 1993, much has been written on this subject. The notion of just what constitutes ‘virtual reality’ has been extensively debated; however, ‘community’ is almost universally assumed to be good. There are failed communities and successful communities, but the critique of ‘community’ itself as a concept stops there. How, then, do we account for websites that create a sense of community precisely through the promotion of hatred and violence, and on which hatred of others is what the community ‘has in common’? Community as Good: The Origins of Virtual Community The term ‘community’ suggests communication; indeed, the work derives from the Latin communicare, which, as Peter Gould explains, ‘originally meant to share, to join and to unite” (3), and from which is also derived the verb ‘to communicate.’ Hence, accounts of online culture draw on this definition of community, suggesting that computer technology brings people together by allowing them to communicate. Such proximity is, therefore, privileged over geophysical location. In recent debates about cyber-culture, definitions of online community tend to define community through the concept of ‘shared interests’. What is more, some accounts of cyber-culture share a certain view of online community as inherently liberating. The Bad Community: God Hates Fags God Hates Fags is perhaps one of the best-known far-right sites on the Web. It is a non-interactive website, set up and maintained by Benjamin Phelps, pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, in association with his grandfather Fred Phelps, who originally founded the church in 1964. Phelps first achieved notoriety in 1991 when he organised a picket of the San Francisco Pride Parade, to ‘warn this evil city that they’re going the way of Sodom’. In 1997, the church’s members were ordered by the American Supreme Court to limit their picketing activities after they targeted a local Episcopalian church that they claimed had promoted gay rights. Since the ruling, church members have continued their campaign of homophobic picketing. However, it is as an online promoter of homophobia and other forms of hatred that Phelps has achieved notoriety on an international scale. On paper, Westboro Baptist Church’s Website seems like the perfect example of the Net’s utility as a means of giving voice to small, marginalised community groups, and of bringing together people who share ‘a commonality of interests and goals’. However, this, like other Christian fundamentalist sites, challenges the view of such networks as essentially liberating (though they are certainly utopian in tone), since their shared interests happen to include insisting that creationist dogma be taught in schools, picketing the funerals of those who die of Aids or as a result of homophobic attacks, and promoting violence against lesbians and gay men. God Hates Fags sees itself as both a site of community and as a pressure group fighting a desperately immoral liberal society. It also draws on the idea of a society becoming good through the erasure of certain marginalised subjects, with the erasure to take the form of individuals suppressing their sexual identity in real life, not just online. While God Hates Fags and other sites like it primarily express the fantasy of a post-apocalyptic New Jerusalem. They do so by referring to fantasies of the nation (as a space that must be purified in order for this apocalyptic transformation to take place), of the online community (here imagined as a community of haters), and of the local community producing the site (who, far from being a small, marginal force, are re-presented as a community of ‘knowers’ attempting to promote ‘the truth’ about life in the United States: that is, as a force for good). Fantastic communities are often unaware of their own violence, and the community that hates is no exception, although its claims to peacefulness often stretch credulity to a greater than usual extent. Here is Westboro’s description of its ‘peaceful’ protests: WBC engages in daily peaceful sidewalk demonstrations opposing the homosexual lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth. We display large, colourful signs containing Bible words and sentiments, including: GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, GOD IS NOT MOCKED, FAGS ARE NATURE FREAKS [sic] … FAGS DOOM NATIONS, etc. (God Hates Fags) The site’s authors are able to claim such sentiments as ‘non-violent’ precisely because of the way that violence is imagined purely in terms of the physical act; that is, as embodied. Discursive violence, the violence of the text, is not recognised as such. Reading the passages above, I find it hard to maintain any sense of critical distance at the notion of picketing a funeral, and then going online to publicise the activity and exhort others to do the same. The site is frustrating precisely because it assumes the reader’s sympathy. For Phelps, a community of ‘fag haters’ already exists within the wider, corrupt national community of the United States; the site merely serves to unite this community and to provide it with resources. Nevertheless, the statement is itself part of the process by which the site attempts to construct a community through a process of rehabilitation, which aims to re-position hatred of homosexuals both as a political position and as an identity position. The site assumes that the experience of hatred, like that of other extreme emotions, has been wrongly constructed as essentially private, even impossible to articulate. Phelps assures us that it is not, that our hatred (and the reader is always assumed to be on side; the site is never defensive in tone, and never attempts to address its critics) is shared by others. The community exists in the bodies of individuals; by making hatred public and visible, the community can finally become visible in the public domain. This site, and others like it, provide a chilling new perspective on the notion of ‘shared interests’ as a basis for community, as well as giving an insight into the ways in which inequalities might not only translate from geophysical into online communities but actually be heightened, not least by the liberal rhetoric of free speech in which the intended victims of such assaults are urged simply to ignore them, even as they are imposed an ever-increasing number of victims (Porter 234-5). In order to justify their attacks on outsiders, hate sites reproduce discourses of virtual community alongside fundamentalist dogma. So, for example, Westboro Baptist Church claims that it is necessary to draw together a community based on a shared homophobic response in order to protect the larger community of the nation from destruction. In order to construct the virtual community then, it is necessary to mobilise fantasies of the nation as it might be in an ideal world. The community does not simply represent the wider community of the United States; that is, it is not a ‘virtual America.’ Rather, it draws upon a fantasy of the nation as perfectible, and this fantasy assumes a desire to purify the nation by destroying or expelling strangers. Despite the dystopian violence of Phelps’s vision, however, I do not think it is enough to argue that such manifestations are simply an example of a medium with great potential for spiritual growth falling into the wrong hands. Margaret Wertheim seems to predict the use of the Internet to promote hatred when she writes that ‘[t]here is every potential, if we are not careful, for cyberspace to be less like Heaven, and more like Hell’ (298). This reading of virtual culture tends to normalise the idea of a utopian internet community, from which deviations occur only as the result of insufficient vigilance. What is more, the invocation of a group of right-thinking cyber-citizens—the ‘we’ who must be ‘careful’—reproduces the very liberal rhetoric which, as I have argued, tends to perpetuate, or at least obscure, power structures within online communities. Indeed, the notion of ‘the online community’ invoked here seems, ironically, to reproduce the notion of a single unlimited community which, if it is not conterminous with all mankind exactly, is certainly conterminous with all (responsible) users of the internet. As I have shown, it is by drawing on the notions of universality and redemption that underpin utopian theories of cyber-culture that Phelps is able to present his site as a site of community. I would suggest, then, that the notion of a community that has the potential to be good but is constantly under threat from deviant outsiders, is inadequate. Rather, it is necessary to pay attention to the ways in which utopian rhetoric might in itself play a role in reproducing inequalities that exist in society more generally, both online and off. References Gould, P. “Dynamic Structures of Geographic Space.” Collapsing Space and Time: Geographic Aspects of Communications and Information. Eds. S.D. Brunn and T.R. Leinbach. London: HarperCollins, 1991. 3-30. Porter, J.E. “Liberal Individualism and Internet Policy: A Communitarian Critique.” Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century Technologies. Eds. G.E. Hawisher and C.L. Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. HarperPerennial, 1993. 16 Oct. 2002 http://www.well.com/www/hlr/vcbook/index.html>. Wertheim, M. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. London: Virago Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ferreday, Debra. "Bad Communities: Virtual Community and Hate Speech." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/07-ferreday.php>. APA Style Ferreday, D. (Feb. 2005) "Bad Communities: Virtual Community and Hate Speech," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/07-ferreday.php>.

Thesis (D. Min.)--New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 2007.
Abstract and vita. Includes final project proposal. Description based on Print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-165).