Academic literature on the topic 'United Baptists'

"By the Dear, Immortal Memory of Washington" Americans have long used the Founding Fathers as symbols of patriotism, invoking their names and using their images whenever they wish to demonstrate that a particular way of thinking or acting is true to American ideals. The vague patriotic image of the founders tends to eclipse their actual character, allowing diverse and competing movements to all use them. This has been especially true of George Washington, who long enjoyed a preeminent and almost mythic status among the founders. During the 1860s, both secessionists and unionists claimed him as their own in order to show that America's chief founder would have supported them. Politicians freely tossed his name about in their speeches, and ordinary citizens in the North and South wrote about carrying forth his legacy once the Civil War began. For this reason, Washington's symbolic status is a significant but frequently ignored factor in understanding American thought at the time of the Civil War. The Baptists, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Virginia Throughout Virginia's colonial existence, the only established church was the Church of England. By law, all Virginians had to be baptized into it and had to pay taxes to maintain it. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, the colony had acquired a sizeable population of Protestant dissenters. While they disliked the restrictions that the government had placed on their faith, most were content to submit to the law in order to enjoy the benefits of toleration. The Baptists, however, resolutely refused to submit to any law which attempted to control their "God-given" rights to preach and assemble as they felt proper. Rather than moving to the margins of society, the Baptists repeatedly engaged with the Anglican-dominated culture around them, seeking to transform society and bring it more in line with the principles they held sacred. Foremost among these was the conviction that no sincere faith could exist if church membership was compulsory. Throughout the Revolutionary era, the Baptists led the fight for religious freedom, bringing about a complete separation of church and state.

A detailed study of local Baptist communities in Tidewater Virginia, "Drawn Together, Drawn Apart" explores the interactions of black and white evangelicals both under slavery and following emancipation. Significant bonds of fellowship between black and white Baptists persisted throughout the antebellum years. The majority of black Baptists continued to engage in baptismal, worship, and disciplinary gatherings with their white neighbors. Baptists of both races participated in the national culture of reform through their commitment to temperance, mission work, and other forms of "benevolence.".;At the same time, a pattern of black religious autonomy was developing. as Christian paternalists, white Baptist leaders sought to bolster supervision of black members, but by frequently commissioning black deacons to do the actual work this monitoring entailed, they fostered opportunities for black leadership, preaching, and literacy; several large all-black congregations were founded during the antebellum period.;The aftermath of Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831 plays a central role in this study. Scholars have seen that event as the beginning of a period of repression that lasted until general emancipation. Virginia did indeed adopt much stricter black codes in 1832; these included a complete ban on black preaching, exhorting, and independent religious activity. Yet this dissertation presents many examples of how such practices survived, sometimes with the support of white Baptists. Some blacks continued to preach---a fact of which whites were well aware---and black Baptists increasingly met separately from whites. While white leaders sometimes attempted to provide supervision for such meetings, their efforts were often cursory, leading to the conclusion that they either did not care enough about the law to enforce it or that they disagreed with it in the first place. What did bring an end to interracial religious activity was not the Turner revolt, but rather emancipation. Some church splits were initiated by whites, some by blacks, and some were ironically the result of a cooperative effort.;Through the careful examination of local Baptist records, this work illuminates the varied exchanges that took place between nineteenth-century blacks and whites. Amid an increasingly entrenched slaveholding system and an expanding body of black codes, followed by a cataclysmic Civil War, the ways in which black and white Baptists experienced fellowship---both together and separately---reveal much about the development of southern society before and after emancipation.

Cold Warriors in the Sunbelt studies the ways in which the Cold War experience shaped the attitudes, values, and beliefs of white evangelicals in the South. It argues that for Southern Baptists in particular—the region’s most dominant religious majority—the Cold War provided a cohesive and unifying fabric that informed the world views Southern Baptists constructed, shaping how they interpreted everything from global communism, the black freedom movement, the Vietnam War, and controversies regarding the family and gender. This dissertation further contends that the Cold War experience, and the formative influence it had over several decades, laid the groundwork for the political realignment of the South, gradually entrenching Southern Baptists within the Republican Party.

Dr. W. A. Criswell is the well known pastor of the twenty-seven thousand member historic First Baptist Church in downtown Dallas, Texas. He has held the position for the past forty-three years. Until now no one has attempted an in-depth study of Criswell's educational contributions to the First Baptist Church (which have also been adopted into the Southern Baptist denomination, America's largest Protestant religious organization). Although Criswell has been the Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas for many years, this was by no means his introduction to the pastorate. In 1928 he was ordained as a seventeen year old minister of the gospel in Amarillo, Texas. He has been a pastor for over sixty years. Criswell has made a lasting impact on the church staff, school staff (Criswell College and First Baptist Academy), students in those schools, the Southern Baptist denomination and also the city of Dallas. He has been one of the key figures in evangelical national movements. Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Senators, and Governors are no strangers to a Sunday morning service held in the large sanctuary in downtown Dallas. Much of the research for this project originated from the Oral Memoirs of W. A. Criswell. a program for oral history done by two professors (Charlton and Spain) from Baylor University. The study begins with a historical review of the setting of the First Baptist Church in 1944 when Criswell came to be pastor. Next there is a review of Criswell's early life that reveal influences which molded his educational philosophies. The body of knowledge is then presented which points out significant events, contributions, institutions and associations provided by Criswell. Finally, seventeen conclusions are drawn from the data presented. The study provides helpful information to pastors, church administrators, seminary students, theological professors and other individuals involved in education and administration.

Premarital programs have been in existence for over fifty years. A majority of the programs are church-based. The purpose of this study, using a random sample survey of Southern Baptist churches, was to compile a description of what these churches were doing in premarital preparation work; examine what effects, if any, church size had on the type of program offered, church program leader characteristics and topic coverage. Descriptive material was compiled. Churches were divided into five size categories. Statistical significance was detected based on size and type of format used. Larger churches were more likely to see couples in a group format setting versus individual or couple-only counseling. With consistency, larger churches were much more likely than the smaller to cover a broad range of topics in sessions. The pastor remained the primary individual to conduct the premarital program within their churches, regardless of church size.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kentucky, 2009.<br>Title from document title page (viewed on September 16, 2009). Document formatted into pages; contains: viii, 234 p. : ill., maps. Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 220-233).

The report entitled Canadian Archives (1980) speaks of a future Canadian archival "system" in which archives of government, business, and institutions are to be bound together through networking. Although churches are to be a part of this system, the Report does not specify their role. Yet the professional world of both archivists and historians in Canada, the United States, and Britain, has been divided over the question of custody of religious archives. Whether the churches themselves are expected to care for their own archives or whether public archives are expected to take up systematic and regular acquisition of religious archives will seriously affect the role of churches in the future development of the Canadian archival system. This thesis then addresses the question of how best to go about preserving religious archives by studying in detail the record keeping attitudes and practices of the Anglican, Baptist, and United Churches in British Columbia. Through a survey of church government and archival programmes, we delve into the nature of the relationships between creator and record. As well as examining the record keeping practices of the three churches, the survey touches upon the policies of secular, public archives in British Columbia towards church archives. The thesis then analyzes the backgrounds of the churches in Europe and in early British Columbia in order to determine why discernible differences exist in the record keeping of the three denominations. In conclusion, the thesis notes that the attitudes and practices of churches with regards to their records are affected by their theology and organization. On the one hand, such fundamental determinants, it is argued, are not easily overcome by public archives which set out to collect religious archives. On the other, those churches which have mounted archival programmes demonstrate a networking capability that so far exceeds that of the secular archival world. In any case, church archives appear destined to play a vital role in any future systematization of Canadian archives.<br>Arts, Faculty of<br>Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of<br>Graduate