by Rvaughn » Thu Jul 12, 2018 12:07 pm
I'd guess a good bit of the difference between East/Southeast vs. Southeast in the late 1800s, early 1900s splintering had a lot to do with age and stability. For example, the Charleston Baptist Association in South Carolina was established in 1751, Sandy Creek in North Carolina in 1758, and Ketocton Association in Virginia in 1766. In contrast the first Baptist association in Texas was formed in 1840, and the first in Arkansas doesn't go back much further than that. So the east coast organizations were older, more settled, with probably an accompanying loyalty not present in newer associations to the west. It may be, too, that there were "silent" splits not much accounted for. There are quite a few non-cooperative associations in north Georgia that have been around for many years. Other than the Jasper Association, north of Atlanta, which split between non-cooperative and SBC churches circa 1930, I'm not aware of any of these that actually split from the GBC. They seem to have more just drifted away.
It would be interesting to know more about how the Southern Baptist Convention counted churches/membership in the last half of the 19th century. I don't think there was anything then exactly like the current self-conscious identification as being "Southern Baptist." In the late 1800s, churches in East Texas that supported the Baptist General Convention of Texas participated together in local associations with other churches that did not support the BGCT, and maybe even a few that were antagonistic to it. It seems though, now, looking back, that there is default position of many historians that churches in local associations with other churches who supported the Baptist General Convention of Texas were at least nominally BGCT churches. All that said to wonder whether these churches that were not cooperating and supporting may still have been counted simply because they were in association with those other churches. One interesting thing that I ran across in the 1924 SBC annual is that for Arkansas they listed statistics for both the Arkansas Convention associations and the Missionary Baptist associations (even though the latter churches probably had almost zero to completely zero representation at the SBC, and had separated from the State Convention in 1902).