Also posted on the Baptist Faith and Practice board.

[Ed Pettibone]

[Ed Pettibone]

[David Flick]

Speaking of sizes of areas & regions, the Western Area of the Central region comprises the whole of the western half of Kansas and all of western Oklahoma. Draw a line north to south over the western halves of Oklahoma and Kansas and you have one large area. There are 37 churches in an estimated 90,000 sq mile area. It's about 550 miles north to south...

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[jerryl]

[jerryl]

[Ed Pettibone]

[David Flick]

[David Flick]

[Haruo]

Here in Washington we have two Regions (ABCNW and Evergreen Baptist Association) most of whose churches are in the State of Washington (there may also be one or two churches near the state line that are in ABC of Oregon, I'm not sure). Both Regions, however, also have churches in Idaho and Utah, plus ABCNW has churches in Montana while Evergreen has churches in California and Alaska. , interesting as much for its inaccuracies as for its informativeness.

ABCNW, as far as I know, still has the same Areas it had before Evergreen budded: Big Sky Area (Montana), Far West Area (Western Washington south and west of King County), North Puget Sound (King County and northward to the Peace Arch), Intermountain Area (Southern Idaho and Utah), and Inland Northwest Area (Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho).

Evergreen, on the other hand, doesn't have regions (though the churches are definitely divided into those that can and those that can't drive to Seattle in under an hour). But we have something better (or at least more ethnic ) than Areas: we have Caucuses!

But there are two other Baptist organizations complicating the picture a bit: the Washington Baptist Convention (a relic of the pre-Region era, I suppose, but it holds title to our camps—Camp Bethel, Camp Burton, Cascade Meadows, and Ross Point—and thus forces the ABCNW folks to, at least in that arena, cooperate with us Evergreens; and the Seattle Baptist Union (who knows where it came from, but it's got lots of money, and it served as the midwife when Evergreen budded). I am not sure how far a church can be from Seattle and still be entitled to benefit from the SBU's largesse. But they're who we always turn to when we need a little seed money.

Haruo