Evangelical churches sing hymns written between 1870 and 1920 so often that many children learn them by rote before they are able to read religious texts. A cherished part of communal Christian life and an important and effective way to teach doctrine today, these hymns served an additional social purpose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: they gave evangelical women a voice in their churches. When the sacred music business expanded after the Civil War, writing hymn texts gave publishing opportunities to women who were forbidden to preach, teach, or pray aloud in mixed groups. Authorized by oral expression, gospel hymns allowed women to articulate alternative spiritual models within churches that highly valued orality.These feminized hymns are the focus of "I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent." Drawing upon her own experience as a Baptist, June Hadden Hobbs argues that the evangelical tradition is an oral tradition—it is not anti-intellectual but antiprint. Evangelicals rely on memory and spontaneous oral improvisation; hymns serve to aid memory and permit interaction between oral and written language. By comparing male and female hymnists' use of rhetorical forms, Hobbs shows how women utilized the only oral communication allowed to them in public worship. Gospel hymns permitted women to use a complex system of images already associated with women and domesticity. This feminized hymnody challenged the androcentric value system of evangelical Christianity by making visible the contrasting masculine and feminine versions of Christianity. When these hymns were sung in church, women's voices and opinions moved out of the private sphere and into public religion. The hymns are so powerful that they are suppressed by some contemporary fundamentalists today.In "I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent" June Hadden Hobbs employs an interdisciplinary mix of feminist literary analysis, social history, rhetoric and composition theory, hymnology, autobiography, and theology to examine hymns central to worship in most evangelical churches today.

Southern Baptists have a unique and colorful story. Birthed in the time of slavery controversy, their theology on this and human rights issues has changed as cultural and societal developments occurred. One thing that never changed, however, was their zeal for evangelism. They eventually grew to become the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Later, a major controversy in the late twentieth century pitted conservative Baptists against moderates. Both sides, however, wrote histories of the controversy from their own perspectives. These histories were significant for understanding how each side interpreted the events. These pages attempt to fill a missing gap. Readers will hear the Southern Baptist story from both sides. Understand from this how Southern Baptists work, think, grow, argue, and have changed over time. They have weathered the ups and downs of history to reveal an ever-growing heritage.

A biography of L. W. Marks, an early 20th century progressive Baptist leader, minister, publisher, businessman, and mayor of Edmond, OK.

The Christian Church has been "welcoming the children" in everygeneration since Jesus' earthly life. The early church, and generations of Christians since, would find expressions of care, appropriate for their times, to help needy families and dependent children.This story is about how the Christian church, with the major focus upon Arizona Baptist Children's Services (ABCS), has responded to the mandate of Jesus to "welcome the children" whose families have been crippled or absent. To tell that story, the writer has chosen to go back in time to create a context of historical examples. What ABCS and other Christians are doing in the Year of Our Lord, 2010, is little different than the experience of how the church responded to the needs of children in the first, fifth or eighteenth centuries. Only the methods have changed.The methods have evolved from foster family care to specialized services for children and families. These state-of-the art modern methods of care are described in detail. This should be helpful and informative to social workers and others who work with troubled families and children in out-of-home care in a faith-based context.

Perspectives on Church Government presents in counterpoint form the basic models of church government which have developed over the course of church history with a view toward determining which is most faithful to Scripture. Each chapter will be written by a prominent person from within each tradition—with specific guidelines dealing with the biblical, historical, and theological issues within each governance tradition. In addition, each writer will have the opportunity to give a brief response to the other traditions.