In 1821, nine messengers gathered around one table and started the South Carolina Baptist Convention. Twenty-four years later, 157 new churches had been planted across the state, fueled by a simple, shared conviction: missions and education.
But the story doesn't stop there. In the wake of the Civil War, Black Baptists, long excluded from full membership in the very churches they helped build, took that same playbook and formed their own convention in 1877, planting churches and pursuing the Gospel.
In this episode of Together with SCBaptist, pastor of Church At The Mill Lake Cooley Dylan Baxter sits down with Tony Wolfe and Cliff Marshall to trace this remarkable, and at times painful, history of cooperation, division, and redemption. They don't shy away from the hard parts: slavery, exclusion, and the racial divide that shaped South Carolina Baptist life for generations. But they also point to something bigger than any one era or any one leader: the grace of God that has sustained this movement from nine people at a table to 600,000 South Carolina Baptists today.
This is a conversation about honest history, hard lessons, and the hope that comes from the Gospel to see every life saturated and transformed by the hope of the Gospel!
This podcast is made possible by the Cooperative Program. www.scbaptist.org
