General Association of General Baptists
General Association of General Baptists belongs to the Baptist family of churches.
Governance: congregational.
General Association of General Baptists reports 114 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
Frontier revival of the oldest Baptist conviction — that Christ died for all — organized from a log church near Evansville, Indiana in 1823.
Heritage
The General Baptists — "general" for general atonement, the belief that Christ died for every person — were the original English Baptists of 1609, but the American body traces to Benoni Stinson, who organized Liberty Baptist Church near Evansville, Indiana in 1823 after his Arminian convictions found no home among Calvinistic Baptists on the frontier. The Liberty Association followed in 1824, and the General Association of General Baptists grew across southern Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and the upper South, with offices at Poplar Bluff, Missouri and Oakland City University in Indiana. RCMS 2020 counts 114 congregations.
Theological family
Arminian Baptist: general atonement, grace resistible, salvation open to all and forfeitable by unbelief, with believers' baptism by immersion and the ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper — practiced with open communion, in keeping with the general-atonement logic.
Who decides what
Congregational, with local associations and a General Association meeting for cooperation in missions, education, and publishing; a small denominational staff serves rather than governs.
What a first-time visitor would find
A visitor will find warm, unpretentious evangelical worship in the small-town and rural pattern: hymns and gospel songs, direct biblical preaching, an invitation, and a congregation likely to know a newcomer's face by the second Sunday.
What it has always cared about
The free offer of the gospel to everyone without exception; open communion as hospitality with a doctrine behind it; missions modest in scale and long in faithfulness; and Oakland City University as its educational anchor.
Its gift to the wider church
A reminder that Arminian Baptists are not a modern novelty but the oldest Baptist stream — Stinson's movement kept the "whosoever will" note sounding in the Baptist heartland when Calvinism dominated it.
Commonly confused with
With Free Will Baptists, the other and larger Arminian Baptist family — kin in doctrine, separate in history and organization; and with Separate and United Baptists of the same frontier era. The name is also mistaken for a generic description rather than a specific body.
Range of views inside it
A genuinely small body varies less than large ones, but congregations differ in worship style and in engagement with the wider evangelical world; the doctrinal center is stable.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "General Baptist congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.
Sources: General Baptist Ministries — our story (General Association of General Baptists) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)
Where General Association of General Baptists churches are on the map
1 General Association of General Baptists congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.
- Kentucky — 1