Word: baptiste
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...reached the 1,000-member point. Now, rapidly and dramatically, that pattern is changing with the rise of superchurches that boast mammoth memberships and facilities to match. Forty-three Protestant congregations in the U.S. claim 5,000 or more Sunday worshipers, says John N. Vaughan of Missouri's Southwest Baptist University in his Church Growth Today newsletter. Moreover, 116 congregations in 28 states say their attendance jumped by 300 or more in just one year. Such centralization is unprecedented...
Superchurches are unapologetic about passing the offering plate, and giant incomes make possible multimillion-dollar facilities that are another drawing card. The Texas-size Second Baptist Church of Houston, for instance, features a movie theater, weight rooms and saunas, a TV production center and outdoor and indoor gardens. The Family Life Center at Arizona's North Phoenix Baptist Church has its own gym, roller rink and racquetball courts...
There are exceptions. The nine-year-old Metropolitan Assembly of God, located in a Do the Right Thing neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., goes all-out to recruit restless teenagers and has a 9,000-student Sunday school. While many of the fastest-growing congregations are young, First Baptist Church of Hammond, Ind., famous for its armada of Sunday-school buses, has been a Fundamentalist fixture for decades...
...Education "one of the most significant cases decided by the court during this century," but later criticized the ruling on the ground that it was based on the faulty assumption that any all-black school was automatically inferior to an integrated one. Thomas has gone from being a Baptist to a Catholic seminarian to attending an Episcopalian church, from having a black wife to a white one. He has built his career in part on an intellectual rejection of government attempts to redress racial prejudice while benefiting from similar efforts...
...Pregnant with a third child, Thomas' mother lived in a dirt-floor one-room shack that belonged to an aunt and went to work at the factory next door, picking crabmeat for 5 cents per lb. The children wore hand-me-down clothes from the Sweet Fields of Eden Baptist Church and often went without shoes...