Background In the 1850s, conservative Baptist preachers spoke out against the tide of progressive, liberal theology and the practice of some Baptist churches in accepting
paedobaptism and
ecumenism. Missionary T.P. Crawford wrote the booklet
Churches to the Front, a call for Baptists to return to scriptural church practices of mission work.
J.R. Graves, a prominent Southern Baptist theologian, began writing articles on "returning to the ancient landmarks" in his Tennessee newspaper. It was a call for
Southern Baptists to return to what they described as biblical ecclesiology. Graves preached that the ancient view of Baptists was that there was not an invisible, universal church of all the saved. Only local churches had authority to baptize, to administer communion, to send missionaries, and to ordain ministers. The Landmark Baptists called for the convention to give back the authority to local churches in mission work by rejecting the board system and adopting local church sponsored mission work. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a large portion of Southern Baptists still held to
Landmark Movement such as local church autonomy, rejection of alien baptism, and the practice of restricting the ordinance of communion to the members of the local church. These doctrines were debated and argued between fundamental and
progressive Baptists. In 1859, there was a push in the Southern Baptist Convention to do away with the
SBC Foreign Mission Board. Then, in 1892, T.P. Crawford, a Baptist missionary to China penned the book,
Churches to the Front, This was followed by a departure of the Baptist churches in Arkansas from the convention and founding of the Arkansas Baptist State Association in 1902. In the year 1905, a nationwide association of Landmark Missionary Baptists was formed. It was called the General Association of Baptist Churches. In the 1980s and 1990s these numbers began to drop dramatically, with many churches leaving the association to fellowship with convention churches or independent Baptists. Many other rural churches closed their doors as both population and interest in church declined in the scattered areas where these rural churches existed. By 2009, the American Baptist Association reported that there were 1,700 preachers among 1,600 churches with a total attendance of 100,000 members (Melton). The current numbers represent a remnant of only seven percent of the peak of the association. In 2017, the ABA had 44 interstate missionaries, 36 foreign missionaries, 71 national missionaries, and 10 missionary helpers. In addition, there are many other missionaries sent out by local ABA churches who do not report statistics through the associational mission office. the association now has 1,300 churches with a membership of 230,000. They support 36 American international missionaries, 29 North American church planters, 680 national missionaries, and 200 support workers. Their main offices are in Conway, Arkansas. Several of the churches that split from the American Baptist Association in 1950 joined to create the
Interstate & Foreign Landmark Missionary Baptists Association, commonly referred to as "Faithway Baptists", after the name of their Sunday school literature ministry. == Doctrine ==