Check this statement

[Ed Pettibone]

In looking over some of the newer additions to the list of blogs linked to the Baptistlife.com Home page I found this statement "The pastor presented a history of the denomination
known as the American Baptist Church U.S.A. It was formerly known as the Northern Baptist Convention, which separated from its Southern brethren before the Civil War. The dividing issue was the appointment of missionaries who were slave owners."

Before I comment on this brief statement I would like to see if others approve or if you think it needs some revision.

[Haruo]

I think they have the history precisely backwards, and the chronology smudged.

The NBC wasn't actually formed till 1907. What occurred in the 1840s was the withdrawal of the Southern Baptists from the Triennial Conventions. They left because the home mission society (a constituent agency of the Triennials) refused to appoint a missionary because he was an unrepentant slaveholder. The Triennials as a denominational convention more or less lapsed until the NBC was founded, but the constiuent agencies (home and foreign mission societies, and the publication society) continued unabated.

This is off the top of my head, and it's been years since I read my Vedder.

Can you tell from the source whether it was the pastor or the notetaker who screwed up?

Haruo

[Ed Pettibone]

[Bruce Gourley]

The statement above was/is simply too brief to tell the larger story of the division of Baptists North and South (after the two groups had cooperated via the TC from 1817 until that point). And I would say that the dividing issue was slavery itself - the missionary test cases were a way of forcing the hand of Baptists in the north over the already divisive issue of slavery.

[Haruo]

Ed, did you mean to post a reply to my post, or did you just want to see what it looked like indented on a different-colored background?

Haruo

[Ed Pettibone]

[Haruo]

Still interested in what the source is and whether the pastor cited really misspoke as quoted or if the writer misremembered.

Haruo

[Ed Pettibone]

[Bruce Gourley]

[Haruo]

In this case the statement doesn't seem to have come from a southerner, though, but rather from the pastor of the church, Doug Scalise. This is a northern Baptist name, an Italian Baptist name (like Aita), and at first I thought they were talking about Charlie Scalise, a prominent member of Good Shepherd Baptist here in the Evergreen Region, my pastor's mentor at Fuller and the preacher at her ordination.

Question is still whether (their) Dr. Scalise misconstrued the history, or whether the blogger, perhaps out of newbiness, perhaps out of concision, or perhaps out of southernness, misconstrued Dr. Scalise.

Haruo

[Bruce Gourley]