Baptist

English Separatist exiles concluded that baptism belongs to professing believers only; Smyth baptized himself and the congregation (1609), and Helwys's remnant carried the practice — with history's first sweeping English plea for universal religious liberty — back to London. The 'General' name marks their general (unlimited) atonement.

Calvinistic Separatists of London who concluded, congregation by congregation, that baptism belongs to believers and then that immersion is its scriptural mode; their 1644 confession protested they were 'commonly (though falsely) called Anabaptists,' and the 1677/1689 Second London Confession aligned them with the Westminster family — Reformed Protestants by their own account.

The first national Baptist body in America, formed in 1814 to sustain foreign missions; its societies (missions, publication, home missions) were the denomination until the slavery division of 1845 left it northern, and its 1907 reorganization produced the Northern Baptist Convention.

Baptists who judged the new mission boards, tract societies, and seminaries to be human institutions without scriptural warrant and withdrew fellowship from them — a dispute over means, not over the Calvinism both sides professed; strongest in the southern uplands, with African-American Primitive Baptist bodies a distinct continuing stream.

When the mission boards refused to appoint enslavers as missionaries, the southern associations withdrew and organized at Augusta in 1845 to continue missions on their own terms — a division over slavery the convention itself formally apologized for in 1995. Now the largest Protestant body in the US; the conservative resurgence (from 1979) and membership decline since 2006 are node-timeline facts.

The 1895 Atlanta union of three national Black Baptist conventions — a merger-formed body and, ever since, the largest African-American Christian denomination; the white publication society's 1890 refusal to publish Black ministers' writings, more than anything, drove the founding of its own convention and publishing arm. Cross-link: Mason and Jones were expelled from NBC-affiliated churches (1896–97) for Holiness preaching — the origin of COGIC.

The northern continuation of the Triennial line, reorganized as a convention in 1907; its 20th-century history includes the fundamentalist departures of the GARBC (1932) and Conservative Baptist Association (1947).

The 1915 division over ownership and control of R. H. Boyd's National Baptist Publishing Board: the board's party organized separately (unincorporated), the continuing convention incorporated — a governance dispute over accountability, litigated until both principals' deaths in 1921.

Born of the tenure fight over J. H. Jackson's presidency and his 'gradualism' toward the civil rights movement: the Taylor-team ministers organized a convention committed to activism, and Martin Luther King Jr. affiliated, addressing every annual session from 1961 to 1967.