The Myanmar Baptist Convention is an association of Baptist churches in Myanmar.
The famous American Baptist missionaries, Adoniram and Ann Judson, moved to Yangon in 1813 when British authorities refused to allow them to stay in India. The Judsons were in Burma six years before their first convert was baptized. Adoniram Judson gathered a group of believers and labored under many trials, but his missionary tenure of almost 40 years helped firmly establish the Baptist work in Myanmar. His monumental work included translating the Bible into Burmese, which was completed in 1834. George Dana Boardman began a work among the Karen peoples in 1828. Today the Karen Baptist Convention is the largest member body of the Myanmar Baptist Convention, which was formed in 1865.
HIV/AIDS is a significant problem in Myanmar. In 1992, the Baptist Convention created a 32-member AIDS commission, because they see the problem as spiritual, as well as social and medical.
In Myanmar about 6% of the population is Christian, with two-thirds of them being considered Protestant. Almost half of these Protestants are Baptists. In 2012, the Convention had over 1.6 million members in 4722 churches. The Myanmar Baptist Convention has 18 affiliated conventions and two directly affiliated local churches under its umbrella, and is a member of the World Council of Churches and the Baptist World Alliance.
The Convention operates the Myanmar Institute of Theology, the leading Christian seminary in Myanmar, founded in 1927 and located in Insein.
Read more about this topic: Protestantism In Burma
Famous quotes containing the words baptist and/or convention:
“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)