Current
The Baptist General Conference operates the Bethel Theological Seminary and Bethel University in Arden Hills, Minnesota near St. Paul, and maintains business offices in Arlington Heights, Illinois. The primary headquarters are now in Orlando, Florida. The official periodical is Converge Point, and Harvest Publications offers a wide range of Christian education material. The Conference labors in national and world missions, with missionaries in Central America, South America, southern Europe, former Eastern Bloc nations, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Asian Pacific rim. Greg Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills Church, and John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church and leader of Desiring God Ministries, are perhaps two of the most well known BGC ministers in the 21st century. Bethlehem Baptist Church was organized as the First Swedish Baptist Church of Minneapolis in 1871.
In 2006, the BGC had 194,000 members in 950 churches in the United States. These churches are also organized into 11 regional bodies: Northwest, Southeast, Great Lakes, Heartland, Minnesota-Iowa, MidAtlantic, Converge MidAmerica, PacWest, Northeast, Rocky Mountain, and Southwest. There are a further 105 churches in Canada organized into 5 district bodies. These congregations cooperate nationally through the Baptist General Conference of Canada.
The BGC cooperates with the National Association of Evangelicals led by President Leith Anderson (who also pastors the BGC Wooddale Church), the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and the Baptist World Alliance, and was a charter member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.
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Famous quotes containing the word current:
“Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)