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:
“The most original authors of today are original not because they create something new but because they are capable of saying such things as if they had never been said before.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“What blessings thy free bounty gives
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when man receives,
To enjoy is to obey.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“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)