For the incredulous

My perspective of "Baptists" must be a unique one, or I am not understanding some of the things you are posting here.

CJoshuaV says that Baptists have traditionally opted for cooperation over confessions. Dr. Bob Griffin says that Baptists have generally held to doctrinal fidelity over cooperation.

The Baptist church in which I grew up was most definitely of the latter kind. It was not willing to cooperate with any church, including other Baptist churches of like mind, if there was even one little iota of difference. I remember that we once worked with the one other fundamental, independent Baptist church in our community on an evangelistic crusade that was to last for a week, but our pastor walked out on Tuesday evening when the evangelist pulled out a New American Standard Bible and used that to read the scripture text.

However, in this church, the most common, harping, nagging sermons were reserved for the hell-bound Baptists following the "wide path straight into the pits of hell", namely, the Southern Baptists who sold their soul and all truth to the god of "cooperation". I could give you a list of what was wrong with Southern Baptists from memory, and it was a longer list than the one we also memorized about the godless Methodists. But, I also remember that Southern Baptists were far more numerous than the fundamentalists. There were only two independent, fundamental Baptist churches in the whole county, but there were more than a hundred Southern Baptist churches, including several that had an attendance of 1000 or more (compared to the 150 in our church and about 60 in the other independent Baptist. And I was also given to understand that Baptists who gather in fellowships and conventions and cooperate, outnumber the independent churches by about ten to one, even today.

So I would have to conclude, I guess, that the majority of Baptists do indeed sacrifice confessions for cooperation.

[ March 09, 2002, 09:49 PM: Message edited by: kwob02 ]