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Southern Baptist Convention
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Southern Baptist Convention is a non- profit Christian Publisher. sells books, CDs and church furniture as well as signs and supplies. It has more than 115 locations in 21 states and handles catalog sales. LifeWay ... operates two of the country's largest conference facilities: LifeWay Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina and LifeWay Glorieta Conference center in New Mexico. These conference centers have about 5,000 beds between them and have about 200,000 visitors each year. The company's headquarters are in Nashville, Tenn. For more information, visit http://www.lifeway.com/ .
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Increasingly, for example, Baptist churches in disagreement with the Southern Baptist Convention over issues of women's ordination or gay-lesbian inclusion are exploring UCC affiliation. At least that's been the case in Virginia and Georgia. And that's quite a new twist for a Yankee-prone denomination, one that has more than 700 congregations in Pennsylvania but just one in Mississippi.
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During its history, the Southern Baptist Convention has had several periods of major internal controversy. The denomination's lack of a hierarchical form of government (polity) lends itself toward very public displays of disagreement, including:
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New York Times 6/15/00 Virginia Postrel "……The Southern Baptist Convention voted yesterday to amend its official statement of faith to declare that the Bible bars women from serving as pastors. Although each Baptist congregation is autonomous and the convention cannot stop a local church from ordaining or hiring a woman as pastor, the pronouncement is generally considered an important symbol of the denomination's increasing conservatism. Critics ... see the move as bad marketing. In a Gallup survey in May, 71 percent of Americans who expressed religious preferences said they favored "having women as pastors, ministers, priests or rabbis in your own faith or denomination." As a result, the Gallup organization said that in approving the new statement, the Southern Baptists would be "out of step with the significant majority" of religious Americans. ……… Far from being kept at home, Baptist women run many of the denomination's operations, and they have career aspirations similar to non-Baptists.
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(CR) - The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has commissioned a Texas pastor to be its "national strategist for gender issues." Bob Stith, pastor of Carroll Baptist Church in Southlake, Texas, was introduced during the convention's annual meeting in San Antonio. Stith's new position is aimed at promoting "ex-gay" ministries in Baptist churches.
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The general theological perspective of the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention is represented in the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M). The BF&M was first drafted in 1925, and then revised significantly in 1963 and again in 2000, with the latter revision being the subject of much controversy. The BF&M is not considered to be a creed along the lines of historic Christian creeds such as the Nicene Creed. Members are not required to adhere to it. Churches belonging to the SBC are not required to use it as their "Statement of Faith" or "Statement of Doctrine" (though many do in lieu of creating their own Statement). Despite the fact that the BF&M is not a "creed," faculty in SBC-owned seminaries and missionaries who apply to serve through the various SBC missionary agencies must "affirm" that their practices, doctrine, and preaching are consistent with the BF&M.
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