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Southwide Baptist Fellowship, founded in 1956, is a fellowship of Independent Baptist preachers.

There were 147 charter members from eight southern states. These included Lee Roberson, John R. Rice, Harold B. Sightler, John Waters, Wayne Van Gelderen, and Bob Gray. The statement of faith was drawn up by George W. Dollar, author of A History of Fundamentalism in America. Other prominent preachers in the Fellowship were Lester Roloff, Jack Hudson, Dolphus Price, Gary Coleman, and Raymond Hancock.

Most of the annual two-day conferences were held at Highland Park Baptist Church, Chattanooga, Tennessee, but Southwide also met at Bob Jones University, Liberty Baptist Church of Lynchburg, Virginia, First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, and elsewhere. I attended four Southwide Conferences in the 1970s.

Southwide had 3,000 members at its peak in the 1980s.

Southwide was not a fighting fundamentalist, separatist organization even from its inception. Speakers at the first conference included new evangelical Warren Wiersbe, who despised “separatism,” and Southern Baptists R.G. Lee and J. Harold Smith.

There were no clear warnings about error at Southwide conferences. The names of heretics and compromisers were not mentioned. There was plain preaching against some sins, but there wasn’t preaching against the compromises of fundamental Baptists or even of Southern Baptists and Evangelicals. The broad tent mentality wouldn’t allow it, and the vast majority of the preachers didn’t believe in that type of thing.

The preaching was shallow. There was plenty of shouting, hooping and hollering, but strong biblical substance was largely absent. An expository Bible message would have seemed strange and out of place. An individual could listen to the Southwide sermons repeatedly and never learn even the fundamentals of how to handle the Word of God properly.

Southwide was big on exalting man (the great this and the great that) and pushing big numbers (the largest this and the largest that) as if the numbers actually represented true holiness and biblical soundness.

Southwide promoted Quick Prayerism in a major way. Repentance was a big omission.

Southwide never promoted a regenerate church membership. Instead, there were puffed up, meaningless membership statistics (i.e., 5,000, 10,000 20,000, 100,000 members) when most of the members were nowhere to be found.

As a reflection of Independent Baptists at large, Southwide Baptist Fellowship was rocking out by the early 21st century and capitulating openly to the New Evangelical philosophy.
Consider the Southwide Conference in October 2003. Many of the speakers who preached that year were from churches with rock & roll worship services. Bo Moore, moderator of Southwide that year, was the pastor of Heritage Baptist Church of Kentwood, Michigan, which advertised itself at the time as “a progressive Independent Baptist church” with a “High Impact” Sunday evening service consisting of “praise and worship choruses led by our worship leader, praise team and band.” Another Southwide speaker that year, Johnny Hunt, was pastor of First Baptist Church, Woodstock, Georgia, a rocking Southern Baptist congregation that decidedly rejects “separatism.” A man wrote to me in 2003 and testified, “I visited there [Hunt’s church] and got up and left because of the wild, party-like atmosphere in their ‘worship’ service.”

Jerry Falwell spoke at the 51st Southwide Baptist Fellowship, October 22-25, 2006, at Trinity Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida. Falwell was the founder of the Moral Majority, and in 1986 he told Christianity Today that Catholics made up the largest constituency (30%). In his autobiography, Strength for the Journey, Falwell referred to the “Catholic brothers and sisters in the Moral Majority” (p. 371). Falwell endorsed Chuck Colson’s 1992 book, The Body, which describes the “body of Christ” as having “Baptist feet, charismatic hands, and Catholic ears.” The music at the 2006 Southwide Fellowship was led by Mike Speck. His choral book Everlasting Praise features many songs that are on the CCLI list of top 25 contemporary “praise and worship” songs in America, including “Shout to the Lord” by the radical ecumenist Pentecostal Christian rocker Darlene Zschech.

By 2007, the number of Southern Baptist speakers at Southwide equaled the number of independent Baptists, and two contemporary musicians provided music, including one who had appeared on the Crystal Cathedral television program with Robert Schuller (Don Boys, “Rise and Fall of Southwide,” CSTNews.com, May 16, 2007).

The 2009 Southwide meeting was held at Marcus Pointe Baptist Temple in Pensacola, Florida. The pastor, Gordon Godfrey, also spoke at Southwide in 2006. Marcus Pointe has been on the slippery slope of spiritual compromise for decades, and the effect is obvious. In January 2016 the Marcus Pointe choir backed up entertainer Barry Manilow on his One Last Time Tour. The church’s choir accompanied Manilow in a worldly rock & roll show that included Manilow’s hit song “Copacabana.” The lyrics begin like this: “Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl/ With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there/ She would merengue and do the cha-cha/ And while she tried to be a star/ Tony always tended bar/ Across the crowded floor, they worked from 8 til 4/ They were young and they had each other/ Who could ask for more?” When a concerned brother in Christ communicated to one of the Marcus Pointe choir members that Manilow is a homosexual who “married” his long-time partner in 2015, the choir member knew about it but “didn’t seem to care.”

The downward slide of Southwide Baptist Fellowship can be illustrated by its prominent churches, such as Highland Park Baptist Church of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Trinity Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida (which recently removed the name “Baptist” from its college), New Testament Baptist Church of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and Emmanuel Baptist Church of Pontiac, Michigan.

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For more on Southwide and the aforementioned churches, see The History and Heritage of Fundamentalism and Fundamental Baptists, www.wayoflife.org.