The First Baptist Church of Jacksonville is a large Southern Baptist church located in Downtown Jacksonville, Florida, U.S. With its current membership at 28,000 and with an average attendance of around 7,500 for Sunday services, it is the third largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention. First Baptist Church has its origins in the oldest Baptist congregation in Jacksonville, Bethel Baptist Church, established in 1838. The church experienced a period of considerable growth in the mid-20th century, and now encompasses eleven square blocks of downtown Jacksonville. Several former pastors, including Homer G. Lindsay, Jr. and Jerry Vines, were widely influential in the Southern Baptist Convention, leading it in both growth and a shift towards conservatism and fundamentalist Christianity.
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Famous quotes containing the words baptist and/or church:
“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“He prayed more deeply for simple selflessness than he had ever prayed before—and, feeling an uprush of grace in the very intention, shed the night in his heart and called it light. And walking out of the little church he felt confirmed in not only the worth of his whispered prayer but in the realization, as well, that Christ had become man and not some bell-shaped Corinthian column with volutes for veins and a mandala of stone foliage for a heart.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)