The Largest of the Seven Historic Black Baptist Bodies

Elias Camp Morris did not live to see the National Baptist Convention USA Incorporated become what it is today, but the shape he gave it in 1895 still holds: a national convention of Baptist churches that govern themselves. No bishop and no confession binds a member congregation to the national body's decisions, and that congregational independence is why the Convention itself has never taken a binding position on whether women may be ordained. Individual churches decide for themselves. Trudy Trimm became the first woman recorded as an ordained pastor within the Convention in 1965, and women serve today as pastors, deacons and deaconesses in many of its churches, while other member congregations continue to ordain only men.

The Convention's reach in Black American religious and civic life is hard to overstate. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya's landmark study names it among the seven historic denominations at the core of the Black Church, and by their count and later ones it is the largest of the seven, the single biggest historically Black Baptist body in the country. Joseph H. Jackson led it for twenty nine years, from 1953 to 1982, spanning the entire civil rights era, and T. J. Jemison completed its Baptist World Center headquarters in Nashville in the 1990s. The Convention that resulted from an argument over who controlled a publishing house is, a century later, one of the largest Christian bodies in America built and governed entirely by its own members.