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Good point, although the Southern Baptist Convention doesn't speak for a great many Baptists on this particular matter. For example, Baptist Sunday School teacher and former President Jimmy Carter spoke to last week's Baptist World Alliance Centenary Congress in Birmingham, England, and Baptists from all over the world were in attendance to hear him. The editor of the North Carolina Biblical Recorder blogged the gathering from beginning to end. There is, then, a good deal more sitting down together than current appearances often suggest.

I find it interesting that conservatives worked quite diligently to gain power over a long period of time using persuasion and working through the democratic process, back in the 70's and 80's. Now they are just picking up and leaving.

I guess their successes in American politics and the Southern Baptist Convention have given them a sense of entitlement to power. Now they're so used to life in the driver's seat, they can't bear the idea they might be out-voted on anything. What our world needs is less polarization, not more. Sad.

The SBC is loosing ground because of it's stand on women in the ministry. While the old hard line leadership may be in favor of holding women back from the ministry, many of the younger leaders are acclaiming women in ministry. Here in the mountains ,w here one would think would be last bastion to allow women in the pulpit, we see the walls crumbling and more and more women taking leadership roles as pastors. As a former Baptist, I say , Amen, it's about time. It would appear that the old ones have forgotten to read their Bibles and find that many women were leaders in the early church and that is the way the church must move if it is to do the work that was set forth for it to do.
I think that is why you are seeing more and more churches move from the "liberal" (what ever that connotates) organizations and back toward what the 1st century church was all about, and that was preaching Jesus, Him crucified, buried, raised again on the third day and assended into Heaven to sit on the right had of the Father until he comes to gather up his church (body of beleivers) to sit at the table where the feast has been prepared for them.
Perhaps this sitting down at "the table" is the begining of preparation for this feast to come.

I'm still waiting for someone to show me the part about denominations in the Bible. And Councils, Alliances, Conventions... wow. All I see in Scripture is the Body of Christ. Can you pull out of that? Would you want to?

It would seem that many have Missy. How unfortunate for them.

Nancy asked for further comments on this question, so here's my take on it:

> I'm still waiting for someone to show me the part about
> denominations in the Bible.

First off, I wonder why your correspondent thinks that the
Bible is the only place to find information on how to "do
church."

> And Councils, Alliances, Conventions... wow. All
> I see in Scripture is the Body of Christ. Can you pull
> out of that? Would you want to?
>
Second, I note that the Christian world, at the time the
New Testament was written, was just a few thousand folks at most, residing in singular gatherings in a few widely-scattered
cities in the Roman Empire.

The fact is that just like any human social entity, the
Church faced new problems of organization as its numbers
grew, and as the diversity of opinions (always a troubling
thing) grew as well. The options for dealing with these
problems weren't covered in the Bible because when they
came up, the Bible as we know it had been written years
before. The letters that make up the NT were circulating,
but they weren't the "holy writ" they later came to be. The
means for handling these "churchy" things came up through
people guessing at them... and once they had their guesses
ironed out, they became "tradition."

That's how a historian would explain such things as
councils and denominations. How a person could find such
stuff in the Bible to help this lady... I couldn't say.

Hmmm. Early on, there was only one church. Luther was a devout Catholic
theologin who first translated the Bible into his native German. The
significance of this cannot be overstated. For the first time, anyone could read the Bible for themselves.

Prior to Luther's translation, there were many different sects within the Roman Catholic Church. And there were many rituals and teachings employed by church leaders that were contrary to what the Bible taught. Precious few monks were educated and fewer still ever read the Bible.

After Luther, the Protestant movement began. Revelation, the sudden discovery of truths within the Bible, led to the creation of other denominations.

"Early on, there was only one church."

Where'd you hear this, Chip? Ever study any history outside of the New Testament? Once again, I urge you to widen your reading base outside of the bookstore at James Kennedy's web site. {;-)

bloody english... okay AFTER Rome accepted Christianity, there were 3 main churches: Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic. In the Western world, Rome became the one church.

I don't trust anyone named Kennedy.