The Original Free Will Baptist Convention is a North Carolina based body of Free Will Baptists that split from the National Association of Free Will Baptists in 1961.
The Original Free Will Baptist State Convention was established in 1913. In 1935 the State Convention became a charter member of the National Association. The North Carolina convention had developed along lines with slightly different polity from the midwestern and northern Free Will Baptists. They held to a more connectional form of government, and believed the annual conference could settle disputes in and discipline a local church. This view, different educational philosophies, and the desire of the North Carolina convention to operate its own press and Sunday School publishing created tensions that ended in division. The majority of Free Will Baptist churches in North Carolina withdrew from the National Association, while a minority withdrew from the State Convention to maintain affiliation with the National Association.
Headquarters of the State Convention are in Ayden, North Carolina. The Convention sponsors the Free Will Baptist Children's Home, Inc. in Middlesex, North Carolina (established 1920), the Mount Olive College in Mount Olive, North Carolina (chartered 1951), and operates the Free Will Baptist Press in Ayden. It supports foreign missionaries in Bulgaria, India, Mexico, Nepal, Liberia, and the Philippines.
In 1991 they reported over 33,000 members in 236 churches that were organized into 7 conferences. Currently (2003) the Convention has grown to about 250 churches. Most of the churches are in eastern North Carolina.
Read more about Original Free Will Baptist Convention: Churches in OFWB Convention
Famous quotes containing the words original, free, baptist and/or convention:
“In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.”
—Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835)
“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)