Liberty Baptist Fellowship is a fellowship of independent Baptist churches that grew up around Jerry Falwell, Thomas Road Baptist Church of Lynchburg, Virginia, and Liberty University. Most pastors of the Fellowship are alumni of Liberty University. In 1994, the Liberty Baptist Fellowship had 100 churches, including the 21,000 member Thomas Road church, which was also affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship International. In 1996, the Thomas Road church joined the newly formed Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia, thereby aligning itself with 3 Baptist bodies. With its leading church and pastor affiliated with Southern Baptists through the Virginia Convention, the future of Liberty Baptist Fellowship is unclear.
The Liberty Baptist Fellowship (LBF) was started in 1981 with the mission of planting New Testament local churches and endorsing chaplains in the military. Since then, hundreds of churches have been planted and 24 chaplains are currently serving around the world.
LBF pastors/churches and their full-time staff receive a scholarship to the External Degree Program at Liberty University and its schools. Many have taken advantage of this scholarship. In addition, students sent from churches to Liberty University receive a scholarship.
Famous quotes containing the words liberty, baptist and/or fellowship:
“... liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)