Talk:Baptists in the United States

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[edit] Smaller Baptist groups?

Perhaps we should rethink the goal and format of this article. For example, there is a distinct heading for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and another for Smaller Baptist groups. Yet I think some of these "smaller Baptist groups" may be nearly as big or bigger than the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (1850) -- e.g. the American Baptist Association (1867), General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (over 1500), National Association of Free Will Baptists (2400) and the Primitive Baptists (probably over 2000 churches). Is this a case of an editor trying to make a "POV" statement, or just a case of misinformation? Do we need to rethink this? -- Rlvaughn 2:37 pm CDST.

One of the reasons CBF is considered larger is because, while it may have comparable numbers of churches to smaller groups, it often has very large "First Baptist" type churches that have a lot of members. Membership and location may be a better way of determining size than just church numbers. Sighter Goliant 02:41, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Good point, Sighter. Do you have any membership statistics for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship that we can compare to these other groups? Thanks - Rlvaughn 03:42, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I have scaled back the CBF entry to be more comparable to the entries for the SBC, ABCUSA, etc. The detailed info on CBF belongs in the main CBF article. However, # of members (people) in CBF and other denominations would be very appropriate for this general article. (I'm not a member of the SBC or the CBF - my only interest is improving this article, as an overview with links to more detailed information.) Timotheos 18:28, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Timotheos. Looks like good work to me. - Rlvaughn 00:10, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Founding dates

First Baptist Church in America's bylaws state "The First Baptist Church in America was established in 1638 by Roger Williams and has been in continuous operation as a church since that date."([1] Article I). Was the state of this entity not really "Baptism, the religion, as we know it" or his group not fully organized as a "church" until the following year? DMacks 04:28, 4 July 2007 (UTC)