Baptist Churches - Part 1

Copied from the sermon notes of Pastor Don Elmore

September 21, 2025

Scripture Reading:  Revelation 18:4:

“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, My people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”

The week of September 13th was a week to remember. Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, was shot and killed by an extreme leftist from off the rooftop, or so they say. Charlie, starting at age 18, began to form a group called Turning Point, with the help of Bill Montgomery, who was described as a Tea Party Activist. It is reported that Bill died of “covid” in 2020 at the age of 80. Charlie had, unknown to most people, a strange connection to Scientology, Mormons, Freemasonry, and the CIA.

The following are some things I learned about Charlie’s murder which caused me to wonder about what it all means. I will share those with you now. Charlie would go on college campuses and debate with students. I have heard part of these debates, as there are many snippets of them on the internet. 

He stated that college was a scam for most of the students that were going there saying that they were accumulating a lot of debt and were not receiving the information that they needed to obtain a job that the college prepared them for. He advocated students to go to a four-year college if they wanted to be an engineer, or doctor, or dentist, or architect, etc.   In fact, he said that most of the students in college would obtain a vocation that they didn’t have to go to college to get. They were forced to take classes that were meaningless for their future job. 

Charlie was not a college graduate. The subject of his best debates was against abortion. He said that the baby was not a “clump of cells” but was developing from the time of conception. He said that was when the baby received its DNA from both parents, and from that time on it wasn’t the woman’s body – so, if she killed what wasn’t her body, she was wrong. She was guilty of murder, for it wasn’t her body, for it had its own DNA, which was different from the mother’s. 

And do you know that Utah just changed their flag from this flag, with slight variations, from 1913 to 2024. 1847 was the year when the Mormons, under Brigham Young, first went to Utah and 1896 was when they became a state. 

The new Utah state flag, instituted in 2024:

But why a large beehive? They had a small one in their previous state flag, but they increased it to just a large beehive. Who else uses a symbol of a beehive? It is Mormons and Freemasonry. Highly influenced by Freemasonry, the early Mormons used the symbol of the honeybee to represent hard work and industriousness. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), was a Freemason. 

The beehive stands as an emblem in Freemasonry, teaching valuable lessons in industry, unity, and personal growth. Beyond its natural wonder, the beehive displays Masonic values, serving as a reminder to a fulfilling life of service, harmony, and self-improvement. 

Mormonism is a Freemasonry religion.

Charlie Kirk said on a recent podcast that:

“Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim that they want people to stop using against them. The ADL [Jewish group] was part and parcel with Black Lives Matters … It is true that the some of the largest financiers of left-wing, anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans … Jewish Americans have been primarily financing cultural Marxist [Karl Marx was a Jew] ideas.” 

Charlie was associated with Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Newbury Park, California led by Pentecostal Pastor Rob McCoy. The two, Charlie and Rob, also founded Turning Point USA Faith together in hopes of getting church leaders more involved in politics. Turning Point Faith is part of Turning Point USA, focusing on empowering Christians.

Pastor McCoy has just announced that he is resigning as Pastor but will remain at the megachurch. The new senior pastor will be filled by a person who has been going to that church since he was a junior in high school. He is married to Molly and has six children. The new senior minister, Micah Stephens, is black and his wife is white. 

Turning Point began in Chicago and was there for a while until it moved to Phoenix, Arizona to Dream City Church about seven years ago. It is a multisite Pentecostal megachurch with a weekly attendance around 22,500 in 2013. Kirk’s wife was raised Catholic, and Charlie had been considering become Catholic. Dream City Church of Phoenix, where Charlie and his family went said this on their website: 

“The dream city church believes that God cares about every need of every person and that the church, as Christ’s body, is to show his love and care for every person.”

Then there is Candace Owens who claimed Kirk underwent a Zionist-led intervention at the Hamptons to silence his growing criticisms of Israeli, part of a spiritual transformation in his life. She said that Bill Ackman (Jew) hedge fund manager and Babylon Bee CEO, Seth Dillon, were very upset with Charlie, and threats were made. They said that they would give him a lot of cash if he agreed to stop criticizing Israeli. He refused to take the cash. Then Owens added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israeli became involved when he called the next day and invited him to Israeli for a “reeducation camp.” Charlie declined again. Is the lesson learned that when you take huge donations from Jewish donors, you can’t criticize Israeli?                       

But there are a lot of problems with the whole story of the murder and the murderer. Why did the shooter change his clothes two times and he was wearing the identical clothes that he was wearing 33 hours earlier? And he was very tidy. How did the shooter disassemble the gun and run from the roof in two seconds? When he jumped off the roof, he had no rifle on him. When the rifle was found in the woods, wrapped in a towel, it was all put back together. Was the shooter an expert rifleman? Was Charlie shot by a person very close to him in the Turning Point program with a palm gun instead of the young person with his grandfather’s rifle on the roof? And so on, and so on.

Charlie’s widow (Erika) gave a speech on Friday, September 12th. It showed that both he and his wife were missing an important link in their Christian theology. She said, and I am paraphrasing, that she would never let the organization that Charlie built (Turning Point) go down. She said that the meetings that they had planned would not stop, and they would have more of them in the future.

The grieving widow, who wears a big ring with a “G” on her third finger of her right hand (“G” is the symbol the Masons use for their god), told everyone that they needed to join the Turning Point organization, and that they needed to go to church. She uttered the following through tears, just like Billy Graham had said during his many crusades, “The most important of all, if you are not a member of a church, I beg you to join one – a Bible believing church.” 

But which one of the over one thousand different denominations, is a Bible believing church? Is it the Catholic, Jehovah Witnesses, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, etc.?

And that takes me to my sermon. What church should a person go to?  Who is a Christian, is a question that is seldom answered. It is implied by their “no answer” that everyone, or almost everyone, on the list below is a Christian. But how could all the following denominations, with large memberships, be Christian when they hold opposite theological opinions to other Christian churches? 

Here are the approximate numbers of all the members of the largest and different Christian denominations in the world:

Roman Catholic Church: 1.35 billion

Eastern Orthodox Church: 200 million

Anglican Communion Church: 85 million

World Council of Reformed Church: 80 million

World Methodist Council: 80 million

Lutheran World Federation: 77 million,

                                         Other Lutherans: 7 million

Assemblies of God: 67 million

                                  Other Pentecostals: 210 million

Oriental Orthodox Churches: 62 million

Baptist World Alliance: 50 million

                                            Other Baptists: 50 million

Other Denominations: 240 million  

The Roman Catholic Church, the largest “Christian” group in the world, has a hierarchical church system that has a Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, Abbots, Monsignors, and Nuns which are not mentioned in the Bible and have Bishops, Priests, and Deacons which are. Some Protestant churches have bishops, priests and deacons, but they serve a different role than those in Catholicism. 

Most of the Christian churches now preach an Arminian gospel (people chose God), a lot less preach a Calvinistic gospel (God choses whosoever He wants). Fewer teach an everlasting covenant-of-the-kingdom gospel (God elects the descendants of Jacob/Israel, the people of His covenant made with Abraham and confirmed with Isaac and Jacob). 

The Arminian gospel became popular in the United States with the arrival of the First Great Awakening. The Arminian gospel emphasizes God’s universal love and desire for all races to be saved. The Arminian gospel replaced the Calvinistic gospel that was prominent when the country was being settled. Arminianism differs from Calvinism by stressing that God’s atonement is for all races (God died for every person of every race), grace can be resisted, and salvation is conditional. 

Calvinism taught that God chose (from all races) the people who He would die for (Christ did not die for everyone). Calvinist-inspired reforms also advanced social causes like abolition, women’s suffrage, education, racial segregation, and humanitarian efforts worldwide. 

Very few churches preach the Covenant “gospel of the kingdom.” It differs from both Arminianism and Calvinism because it says that God elects only the descendants of the Abrahamic covenant – the race of Israel. It is not inclusive, but exclusive, like the other two gospels are.

The largest group (Catholics) believe that the bread and wine of the Mass (that they serve at every service) are the actual body and blood of their Savior. That brings up an interesting question: How tall was Jesus? Think of all the Masses that have been held throughout the world for the last 1700 years – millions and millions. And if they ate His actual body (wouldn’t that make them cannibals?) and if they drank His blood (wouldn’t that make them go against God’s law that says to not drink any blood?). How much blood did the Savior have? The average adult person has only about six quarts of blood. 

Some specialized wineries supply large quantities of wine for sacramental use. For example, a Jesuit-founded winery in Australia produces about 24,000 gallons of sacramental wine annually to supply the entire Australian region. In the United States, San Antonio Winery is the largest sacramental wine supplier and produces 20,000 cases annually. So, how could the Catholics be drinking His actual blood? Jesus would have to have millions, if not billions, of gallons of blood. The same could be said about His actual body; He would have been so tall that He would probably stretch into the stratosphere.   

But, no matter what, the Catholics are not going to change. The proof could be made very simply by taking a cup of wine, after the priest blessed it, which is how they say the wine is turned into His actual blood, and scientifically analyzing it to see if it was really blood. But it would still not matter. The Catholics would still come up with some explanation which would satisfy their minds.

The Protestants differ from the Catholics by saying that the bread and wine are symbolic, not actual. But they have their differences too. Some say that each member must drink out of one large cup. Of course, there are many others that disagree and give their members each a small cup. Others say that one must use unleavened bread. Others say that it doesn’t make any difference whether it is wine or grape juice or leavened or unleavened bread. In the early days of the country, the churches advocated that both Christians and non-Christians could take it. Some churches believe that only members of their church are permitted to participate in the Lord’s Supper.

Some sprinkle infants with water; others refuse and baptize (immerse) in water adults (older children too). Some churches pour water on the person they are baptizing. Some say that only their church can baptize, so any person who wants to join their church must submit to their baptism, even though they have experienced another church’s kind of baptism. I’ve been baptized five times.

Some believe that they can lose their salvation, others say “once saved, always saved.” Most churches say that all humans are either going to be saved or going to hell for eternity. Others (Unitarian/Universalists) say that all humans are going to be saved and there is no hell. A few say that only the descendants of Adam and Jacob are going to receive eternal life and have a place in the kingdom. A few say that all the descendants of Cain-Canaan-Edom are hell bound.

Others say that one must be a good church member to be saved. Others say that one must keep all the 10 commandments, or they will spend eternity in hell. A few believe that no missionaries are needed. Others say that one of the functions of a church is to send missionaries into all the world to try to get as many of the eight billion people of the world “saved”. 

One group says that salvation is racial. Another group says that Noah’s flood was world-wide and there were only eight people in one family left which would mean that there is only one race. Others say that Noah’s flood was a very huge local flood, that caused the earth to tilt, and as a result, destroyed all the members of the Adamic (White race), except for Noah and his family and caused many drastic changes. 

Practically all of Christendom now says that Adam was the father of all “human beings” (all races). Adam was the father of Cain. Adam was the father of Abel. Adam was the father of Seth. Adam was the great (eight times) grandfather of Noah. And if there was a worldwide flood at this time, then Adam was the father of all races. It would follow then that all peoples were made in God’s image and “born in sin” through the fall of Adam and Eve. Thus, the gospel would apply to all races equally. 

Many churches of Christianity say, what the ancient Sadducees said, that there are no spiritual beings, fallen angels, and cherubim or seraphim. Some say that there is no fallen angel named Lucifer, or the devil or Satan. Some say that there was “war in heaven,” and the rebellious angels were defeated and cast out. One group says that the fallen angels mated with Adamic and Cainite females and produced the “giants” in the Bible. Many groups say there is only one seed line in the Bible, others say there are two opposing seed lines.

One group says that the universe is only 6,000 years old. Another group says that it is billions of years old. Some Christian churches say that dinosaurs and giants were on Noah’s Ark. Many Christian churches are pro-Zionist and say that the Jews (Sephardic, Ashkenazim, Hassidic, Mizrahi, and Orthodox, Reformed, Conservative and Reconstructionist, etc.) are God’s chosen people.  A few say that God’s chosen people are part of the White race. A few black churches say that the black race is the chosen people. Most say that it doesn’t make any difference now, since all races have the same opportunity to give their life to their Savior. 

The Mormon church says that Jesus and Satan were brothers. A few other churches teach that Jesus was not divine, but a man. Others say that Jesus is part of a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The largest group of Christian churches says that the weekly sabbath is Sunday. Others say that it is Saturday. But in the Bible the day started, not at midnight, like it does today, but at sunset. And does any church keep a 48-hour annual sabbath that was kept by ancient Israel?

Some say that a man can have many wives at the same time. Others say that marriage is between one man and one wife only, until one of them dies. Others say that marriage can be between two members of the same gender. Others say that divorce is forbidden unless fornication is committed by one of the spouses. Many churches now say that racial intermarriage is acceptable to God. A few groups have said, like the Shakers, that marriage is forbidden, but now they are extinct. 

Some churches have only men as preachers, deacons, choir directors, and pastors, while there are an increasing number of churches which have in recent years, put women in every position in the church. Even many wives now co-pastor with their husband. The Catholic Church did not decide to ban married priests until the year 1139. A non-Catholic priest who converts to Catholicism can remain married and be a Catholic priest. Black churches, in their beginning, had to have white ministers. 

 Most Christian churches celebrate the holidays of Christmas (Mass of Christ) and Easter (the only version that translates this verse as “Easter” is the King James Version. Even the New King James Version has the word translated as “Passover”). So, why do Protestants celebrate the Mass of Christ holiday as the Catholics do, and why do they both celebrate Easter and not Passover? Some churches celebrate, besides Passover, the Feast of Pentecost, Trumpets, Day of Atonement, and Feast of Tabernacles. 

And on and on it goes.

ORIGIN OF BAPTIST CHURCHES

Below are two graphs on the historical origins of the Baptist Church; one up to the First Great Awakening and the second after the  Second Great Awakening:

The historical timeline of the Baptist Church after the Second Great Awakening:

And these are just a few of the Christian Church’s differences. There are a lot more. There are so many different denominations now among Christians that one can find a church that has most, if not all, of what any person believes. 

That was my conclusion when I went to college in the fall of 1960. I knew that I didn’t understand most of the Bible. I believed that Christianity was the right religion, but which denomination? My search began among other Christian denominations.

I went to many, by not all, the denominations. At the end of my search, I remained among the Baptists. But there were many kinds of Baptists, so, all the Baptist churches couldn’t be the right church either. Many Baptists have opposite viewpoints, for example, Free Will Baptist (General; Arminian) and Calvinist Baptist (Particular). 

Most church scholars believe that the Quakers, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists split off the English Separatists in the seventeenth century. The Separatists split off in 1600’s from the Church of England which was formed in the year 1534. The two men usually credited with starting the Baptist movement were John Smyth and Thomas Helmys. 

Seventeenth century England was a very dangerous time to be alive. The King of England, King Charles I, had his head cut off and consequently both the politics and the religious views of the nation went haywire. There were the religious Diggers, Enthusiasts, Ranters, Muggletonians, and Seekers, who were mainly antinomians, who flourished for a while but eventually became extinct. 

John Smyth and Thomas Helmys, both former Anglicans, moved to Holland where they crossed paths with the Anabaptists and became convinced that Christians should be baptized as adults, not infants. This is why many scholars believe that Baptists are an offshoot of Anabaptists. However, while early interaction did take place and while they did share one big thing in common – the idea that baptism shall be for adults only (or at least older children) – the two groups ended up going in very different directions. As a result, the Baptists are an offshoot of the Anglican Church, rather than the Anabaptist.

So, the Baptists gathered in two main groups, depending on the gospel they were preaching:

1.  The Calvinist, who said that God is sovereign and choses who He desires to save, went into the Particular group.
2. The Arminian, who said that man must decide to serve God, went into the General group.

After I left the Arminian American Baptist Church that I grew up in, I became a five-pointed Calvinistic Baptist. I lived in eastern Kentucky for seven years and eastern Tennessee for another seven years. I knew and visited Calvinistic Baptist churches in Norwood, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana when I came home to Cincinnati to visit my parents. 

Somewhere in the ‘60s or early ‘70s, the minister from Indianapolis moved to Montana to become a pastor in another Baptist Calvinistic church. He had a couple of teenage sons, and he invited me to visit him in the summer. At the same time, the pastor whose church was in Norwood, had been invited to go to Topeka, Kansas and preach at a church there. So, we decided to take both of our cars and travel together, first to Topeka and then the visiting preacher’s family would return home, and then I would go on to Montana. 

I drove the pastor’s son in my car, and the pastor took his wife and daughter in his car. We arrived in Topeka, Kansas and we visited with the church members and then we heard his sermon. The next day, the preacher, who lived in Independence, Kentucky, who had his Calvinistic Baptist Church in Norwood, returned home with his family. 

Instead of going to Montana on that Monday, I was invited to stay with some of the children of the pastor at Topeka. I cut grass with one of his teenage sons, who had a grass-cutting business. The church was at their house, which had a permanent setting in one part of the home as a sanctuary which could seat close to 100 people. 

After about four or five days, I left the church there in Topeka and traveled to the Big Sky Country and visited with the church that was in that state. Some of the members of the church took me overnight fishing in the Missouri River where I got the largest fishes that I ever caught – some rainbow trout.

It was many years later that the church in Topeka, where I heard the sermon from the pastor in Norwood, Ohio, was the Westboro Baptist Church. The church was formed in 1955 and was a primitive Baptist church. 

Its preacher, Fred Phelps, had been a civil rights lawyer who had won   awards from the NAACP and made up a third of Kansas’s docket for civil rights cases. He was admitted to West Point but turned that down after attending a Methodist revival meeting. He began his higher education at Bob Jones University. 

The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is widely considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group and a cult, and is known for its public protests against gay people and for its usage of the phrases “God hates fags” and “Thank God for dead soldiers.” They also said that they engaged in hate speech against atheists, Jews, Muslims, transgendered people, and other “Christian” denominations. 

WBC has been protesting homosexuality since 1989. Within a few years, the group expanded to protest across the country. They often protested at public and private events, including funerals, sport games, and concerts. The group protested at the funerals for victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the West Nickel Mines School shooting. The group is known to deface the American flag or fly it upside down while protesting. It also drew counter-protests.

Pastor Phelps had a large family – 13 children. Seven of his 13 children became lawyers like he was. One of his children, who I heard Fred identify often as “Nate the reprobate” left the church when he was eighteen and eventually became an atheist. Another granddaughter, who held picket signs at funerals of dead soldiers when she was a little girl, left the church and her family and is now married to a Jew. After the pastor died in 2014, several other family members have also left the church.

Westboro Baptists believed in five-point Calvinism, as reflected in the TULIP acronym that is displayed prominently at the front of the church sanctuary. 

They believed in:

Total Depravity,

Unconditional Election,

Limited Atonement,

Irresistible Grace, and

Perseverance of the Saints 

They believed in the double predestination of both the saved and the damned, which can weigh heavily on members as well as those who leave the church. They see themselves as coming from the Primitive Baptist movement. 

Their Primitive Baptist practices include their style of worship, approach to church discipline, liturgical preferences and seeing themselves as from a “separatist, anti-establishment” lineage. Fred preached that “Jews killed Christ.”

BAPTISTS BEFORE THE  FIRST GREAT AWAKENING

Baptists in America consisted of small churches until the First Great Awakening occurred.  Many felt that Protestantism was too intellectual. Most of the churches at this time in the early history of America were Calvinistic. And there were not as many denominations as there are now. For example, there were no:

• Methodists,
• Mormons,
• Jehovah Witnesses,
• Christian Scientists,
• Church of Christ,
• Christian,
• Southern Baptist Convention,
• Adventists,
• Black Baptists or Black Methodists,
• Wesleyans,
• Holiness,
• Nazarenes,
• Pentecostals,
• Charismatics,
• Or very few integrated churches,
• Mega churches like the Vineyard,
• World Tomorrow churches,
• Four-Square churches,
• Calvary Chapel churches,
• Unitarian/Universalism churches,
• Metropolitan Community Church with many LGBT members and clergy,
• The New Church (Swedenborgians) in which Johnny Chapman (Appleseed) was a minister,
• Frank Mesmer’s spiritualism churches,
• Church of Christ, Scientists,
• Philippine Churches,
• Brazilian Churches,
• Korean Churches,
• African Churches,
• Messianic Jews churches,
• Etc. 

While most Christians still felt it was important to get one’s theology right, they felt that Christianity at its core, should be a religion of the heart, even though “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9). This idea had shown up in continental Europe a bit earlier known as Pietism, but it didn’t come to America until the First Great Awakening. Pietism originated in Europe in the late 17th century, primarily within German Lutheranism, as a reaction against a perceived lack of spiritual vitality and formalism in established churches.

It was the beginning of Evangelical Christianity. It is more focused on the individual conversion experience. This experience is called being “born again” when the verse (John 3:3) really should be interpreted “born from above.” 

Many preachers, like Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan preacher, emphasized that a person must repent of their sins and begin to receive the gift of salvation through belief in Jesus.  Here is one paragraph from the most famous of Jonathan Edward’s sermons: “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God”:

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.”

In my opinion, Jonathan Edwards' description of our God is way off base. He has used the pronoun “you” 16 times and the pronoun “your” once in this one paragraph. Who does he mean by these two pronouns? Everyone on the planet, for Jonathan, spent much of his time preaching to Native Americas (non-Israelites).

Our LORD God is not holding us (His covenant people) over the burning fires of hell. Didn’t Jonathan know that the LORD God had already died and was resurrected 1700 years, prior to when he was preaching, for the reconciliation of His people?

After Jonathan’s dismissal in 1750 from the church that his grandfather had once pastored, over the issue of Communion and church membership, Edwards accepted a call to a Native American mission in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he remained until 1758. As evangelist and Native American school reformer, he worked tirelessly to meet the religious and educational needs of Native Americans and established the foundation for Calvinist missions in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

The church at Northampton, Massachusetts was co-founded by Eleazar Mather, cousin of Cotton Mather, in 1661, and Eleazar was its first minister. Mather’s replacement was Solomon Stoddard, who later married Mather’s widow. The third minister of the church was Stoddard’s grandson, Jonathan Edwards.

It was one of the congregations that had rejected the Halfway Covenant. When Eleazar Mather died in 1669, he was immediately succeeded by Solomon Stoddard, who was himself a champion of the new Halfway Covenant. Stoddard and the church quickly took the new way advocated by Stoddard. 

Within a few years something occurred that the plan’s proponents had not foreseen — the non-Covenant members outnumbered the Covenant members. After some years of wrestling with this, in 1700 Stoddard suggested a fundamental change in the way that the Lord’s Supper was given. He suggested that it should be expanded to include all those members (regenerate and unregenerate) who wanted to partake, excepting only those whose lives were scandalous. 

At the very heart of the controversy that led to Edwards’s being fired was church discipline and especially the question of who was to be admitted to the Lord’s Table. Jonathan Edwards had come to disagree with his venerable grandfather.

Edwards had seven more years to live. They would mainly be spent in Stockbridge, a Native Indian mission settlement further west in Massachusetts. The last few months of his life were spent in Princeton, New Jersey.

Edwards arrived in Princeton on February 16, 1758, and was formally installed as the President of the College that same day. One week later, February 23, he was inoculated for smallpox, and after about one month, on March 22, 1758, he died from it. Jonathan Edwards lived to be only fifty-four.

During Edward’s ministry, the evangelist, George Whitefield, preached in 1740, sparking the First Great Awakening. This First Great Awakening led to more churches becoming interested in missionary work that attempted to convince other races of people, all over the world, to become “born again” as well. For they believe if a person never heard “the gospel of salvation” or if they rejected it, either way, they were doomed to hell.

Thus, among Baptists, the initial division that existed between Particular Baptists and General Baptists became less important, with most Baptists unifying and joining the Arminian Missionary Baptists. This made the Primitive Baptists very much in the minority from that time on to the present.

Another major result of the First Great Awakening was that for the first time, Black Americans ended up joining a few of the Protestant churches. But after the Second Great Awakening and especially after the War Between the States, black people massively joined either the Baptist or Methodist denominations. In the South, black Baptists churches were originally required to have white ministers.

About two decades after the Second Great Awakening ended (1790-1840), churches led by black pastors started to form. The earliest still-existing black denomination in the United States was the National Baptist Convention USA, established in 1895. 

However, in 1915, some churches split off to form the similarly named National Baptist Convention of America and then in 1961, a different set of churches split off to form the Progressive National Baptist Convention, of which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a member. Finally, in 1988, a group of churches split off from the National Baptist Convention of America to form the National Baptist Missionary Convention of America. 

The Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc. (PNBC) started as a movement which reflected the religious, social and political climate of its time. The formation of the convention was wrapped up in the Civil Rights movement and was begun by some of the same persons who were deeply involved in the freedom movement for African Americans in the United States. The need for a convention which would embrace tenure of office and leadership was a shared need among a cross section of Baptists.

From a religious perspective, churches from across the United States were suffering from an identity crisis fostered by racism, and biblical conservative political policies and practices that supported segregation and United States apartheid. But was their suffering justified? Which churches were correct? The churches that supported segregation and apartheid or the ones that were opposed to it?

In a response to a letter sent out by the Rev. L. Venchael Booth, 33 delegates from 14 states met on November 14-15, 1961, at his church, the Zion Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. 

The Reverend L. V. Booth, pastor of Zion Baptist Church of Cincinnati, Ohio from 1952 until1984: 

In the early 1960s, King and his civil rights allies clashed with the leadership of the National Baptist Convention of America over its resistance to becoming more politically active. After the conflict turned violent at the 1961 convention, King and his supporters were ejected and subsequently joined the newly formed Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC). 

New generations of Progressive Baptists are continuing the struggle for: 

• Full voter registration,
• Education and participation,
• Affirmative action against all forms of racism and bigotry,
• Black economic empowerment and development,
• Equal educational opportunity,
• Freedom of religion by the restraint of all Governmental authority and dictation in matters of faith,
• Conscience and the church,
• The Abolition of South African apartheid,
• The realization of universal human rights and total human liberation. 

Is this the mission of a true “Christian” church or is it a political party? But it is a black church.

CONCLUSION

These two sermons will tell the brief story of my church life when I was not a preacher. It covers about the first 40 years of my existence here on earth. It tells of my search for the truth of what the Bible teaches.

My journey took me through five Baptist churches. The first two were Arminian:

1.  American Baptist Convention, USA in Cincinnati, Ohio. This was the church that my parents were members of, and all their three children were baptized and confirmed as members at the age of 13. We all attended there until we either left the city to go to college or to go to a new occupation.
2. American Baptist Association, in Hamilton, Ohio. This was the church that I decided to go to because of the book that they said was true. It was called The Trail of Blood. I will talk more about this book in the next sermon. 

The next three churches that I joined were small independent Calvinistic churches -- one in northeastern Kentucky, one in Southeastern Ohio, and one in Southwestern Virginia. All five of these churches were pro-Zionist churches, although they remained separated from any pro-Zionist organization, like John Hagee’s group. But they all believed in the dispensational doctrine.

But it was when I was reading through the entire Bible, once a month, that I noticed something that was opposite the Christian doctrine that I had received all my life. I noticed that it was the Jews, only the Jews, that the Bible said had attempted to assassinate both Jesus and His apostles and disciples. How could the Jews be the people of the covenant, if they hated the Savior so much, that they were constantly attempting to assassinate Him and His disciples.

So, why were we, members of a church, pro-Jewish? It seems that the Jews were our enemy and not a people that we were to support.  That was the question that couldn’t be answered by the church that I was in. I loved the people of that church, but I had to tell them that I believed that they were wrong about the Jewish question.

Today, there is a big Memorial for Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Arizona and is expected to draw tens of thousands of mourners plus a worldwide audience. President Donald Trump (pro-Jewish) and Vice President JD Vance (pro-Jewish), Tucker Carlson, Defense Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (pro-Jewish), Secretary of State Marco Rubio (pro-Jewish), Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (pro-Jewish), Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (pro-Jewish), White House chief of staff Susie Wiles (pro-Jewish) and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller (pro-Jewish), Erika Kirk, (pro-Jewish) widow of Charlie are scheduled to speak at Sunday’s service.

The President will posthumously award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.  Charlie’s widow, Erika, has taken over Turning Point and is determined to never let it die.

Will Charlie’s death be the Fourth Great Awakening that our nation has experienced? There has already been a big explosion of citizens back into the churches. That is the first step. We will see what happens next.

To be continued.

Blessed be the LORD God of Israel.