Washington, D.C.’s E Street Baptist Church, the city’s leading Baptist congregation, is in turmoil. In the face of an impending split, the pastor recently resigned, and mere days earlier a significant numbers of members met to begin the formation of a new congregation (soon to be known as Calvary Baptist Church). The cause of the…
The war now fully engaged, territories controlled by the Union and Confederate armies are fluid. Thus far, battles have been fought on Southern fields, and Union armies are gradually pressing southward. In much of the upper South and Tennessee, civilians live in somewhat of a no-man’s land, their towns and farms seesawing between Confederate and…
Many Southern Baptist men are now soldiering for the Confederacy. Army life is far from easy: danger, hunger, illness, exposure to the elements, and death are all constant worries, although secondary–in the minds of preachers–to the ever-present specter of sin. Most Baptist churches in the South never refer, in their church records, to their soldiers…