First Baptist Knoxville began as a Child of Missions yet quickly evolved into a Mother of Missions. Through its mission work, First Baptist Knoxville started four major area churches: Broadway Baptist, Deadrick Avenue Baptist, Calvary Baptist, and West Hills Baptist. Broadway Baptist: In the...
We need to be more missions-minded... This phrase, oft-repeated by a long-time friend, has always grated on my nerves. Perhaps because of the sanctimonious way in which it is invariably delivered, I immediately dismiss it with an inward eye-roll. It could be that this gut response is a holdover...
"The Fervor for Missions Brought this Church into Being" In “A Fountain-Head of Hope – A Story of a Hundred Years of the Mission Work of the First Baptist Church of Knoxville, Tennessee” Dr. Charles Trentham, who was pastor of First Baptists Knoxville from 1953 to 1974...
Many elements make up a worship service, most of which the congregation is already accustomed to. We can look up the scripture. We recognize and know who is delivering the sermon. We are given the names of music composers and arrangers in the Order of Worship. There is one aspect of worship...
“The history of the First Baptist Church of Knoxville, when it shall be fully written, will present pictures of an [sic] humble beginning, a varying progress, an alternation of light and shadow, of strength and weakness, combined with examples of unswerving fidelity, and of a...
Advent. Epiphany. Shrove Tuesday. Ash Wednesday. Lent. Maundy Thursday. Tenebrae. Why is a nice Baptist girl like me spouting Catholic-sounding words like that? Aren’t they the domain of stuffy, extremely boring, high church tradition? Growing up in a conservative Baptist church in...
Describing Knoxville in the Civil War’s aftermath, historian Jack Neely noted, “Progress was slow, especially at first. With its raw trenchwork, muddy streets among shot-scarred and army-abandoned buildings, postwar Knoxville could appall some visitors, who remarked that Knoxville...
Knoxville Baptist’s (later renamed First Baptist) plight during the Civil War was poignantly described as follows: “…the tragic war years were a prolonged struggle for mere survival—a contest in which it seemed more than once as if the church had perished. During these...
During East Tennessee’s antebellum years, the Black population was smaller than the rest of the state’s, primarily because of the absence of large-scale plantation-based agriculture. Both enslaved and free Blacks lived and worshipped in Knoxville.1 Of Knoxville Baptist...
It is easy enough to find reference to First Baptist’s involvement through the church itself or, by extension, through various members. Most of this is of the surface variety; brief notations on which prominent member of the church became a prominent member of which Board of...