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"There ought to be but three denominations in the world," an Episcopal bishop once said: "the Catholics, standing on one side for the authority of the church, the Baptists, standing on the other side for the authority of the Bible. All the other denominations should be united, for the difference between them is that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee." Christian history knows the Baptists as a dissident people—crotchety, intransigent, sometimes rude, if not downright dangerous in the eyes of the orthodox.
Yet in the 20th century no Protestant group has been more successful. In the U.S. today, the 18.4 million Baptists form the country's largest, fastest-growing Protestant denomination. And in all the U.S., no minister of his church is more widely respected than Richmond's Theodore Floyd Adams.
Boom in Russia. In Washington last week. Pastor Adams met with members of the executive committee of the Baptist World Alliance, of which he has been president since last summer, to make plans for his five-year term, and to consider the state of Baptists throughout the world. The picture before the committee was impressive. In Asia there are now close to 650,000 Baptists, in Africa 223,000, in South America 134,000, in Central America and the West Indies almost 100,000. In Europe there are approximately 1,100,000 Baptists, 500,000 of them in Russia, where their movement is booming. But it is in the U.S. that the Baptists have really come into their own.
There are about two dozen recognized Baptists bodies in the U.S., which add up to about one in every three Protestants in the country and one in five Christians.* They include: 1) the American Baptist Convention (which the Northern Baptists began calling themselves in 1950, numbering 1,600,000); 2) two principal Negro Baptist denominations, the National Baptist Convention U.S.A., Inc. (4,500,000) and the National Baptist Convention of America (2,600,000); 3) the Southern Baptist Convention, with 8,200,000 members, which is by far the biggest and most lively Baptist group in the U.S. The Southern Baptists have broken the steady, onward-Christian-soldiers march of U.S. churches and are moving forward on the double. Items: ¶ In the last five years, they have baptized an average 1 ,000 new members a day.
¶ Their 30,000 affiliated churches in 24 states, the District of Columbia, Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska own properties valued at approximately $1.2 billion, up from $276 million in 1945. Yearly contributions amount to about $305 million.
¶ Sunday school membership gained 597,-361 last year for a total 6,356,489.
¶ They currently support 30 colleges and universities, 22 junior colleges, six seminaries, eight academies and four Bible schools. Total enrollment: 50,080.
¶ They run 33 hospitals, 23 newspapers.