Southern Baptist

Guess I will jump in here since I was reading along..saw some good points and some bad points. As with any denomination, you can basically predict where it will be 5-10 years down the road by observing the seminaries and bible colleges under its authority.
I attendend an SBC seminary for several years and went pretty high up in pastoring, missions and evangelism.
Bro. White above makes good points about Southern Baptists. Mission philosophy is cooperative.. money given to the Cooperative Program is dispersed in many ways, with the bulk of it going to missions. The difference here with the IBF is that the IB churches are "local-church-sending" in their mission philosophy.
Second issue is that of Creed and confession. A creed is basically something that is to be believed by all..agreed upon by all. When I was in the SBC seminary they said a confession was the views of the majority of those who hold to or sign the confession itself. The SBC calls itself "non-credal", which is correct. It is not like the other mainline denominations that are credal and all churches in that group must adhere to what the creed says.
The problem with the SBC, as i saw it when the convention went haywire back in 1978 was that all these churches who were conservative became tired of seeing their cooperative program money being used to send out liberal missionaries and pay the salaries of liberal professors and teachers. If they had been giving in the local-church way.. as IB's do, it would not be a problem, but as they were giving into a big pot and seeing it spent in ways whicvh they could not agree, they wanted to remove the liberals. I was there in the seminary when everything went crazy and the liberals were fired or forced to resign, etc. I recall several of them running off to Samford. Some went to Baylor. I know many thought the Cooperative Program was a revelation from God.
As far as theology.. i was more conservative than most. We had FEWWWWW and i mean FEWWW premillennial dispensationalist. Matter of fact.. the majority of the professors called themselves "pan-millennialists" meaning in the end.. "all things will pan-out". Women preachers were there, i remember the housing dept leader.. also a student, was a pastor, as well as a few others. We did have a course "Introduction to Christian Proclamation" and ALL students were required to take it.
I got in trouble one time because they had a woman missionary who was preaching in chapel, banging a little bit on the podium. I sat up front and laughed excessively. She did a better impression of a real preacher than Robert Tilton. If she'd had PINK hair like that other lady on TV she might have been more convincing.
Bibles... hmmm.. the ASV was required for my O.T. Survey class.. but as for the rest..it was either NIV or NASB. When I was on my way out, the NRSV was coming up and a few teachers used that.
Stay tuned.. i plan to post a thread.. "WHY I LEFT THE SBC".. and I have to tell you now.. I miss things about it.. both SBC and IBF have their strengths and weaknesses.

tim