Bill J. Leonard

"...one could even question the advisability of attempting a single volume history of Baptists. It seems to be one of those things you can't live with or without. Everything about Baptists could not be told in 4250 pages, much less 425. But someone must try, because that's as far as some will ever explore the landscape of Baptist history. Better that they get an overview than nothing at well. In addition to what Leonard reveals about Baptists in the book, the book reveals something about his show more passions (missions and education), his priorities (ecumenism) and his prejudices (separatism, landmarkism). Despite a few reservations, I recommend that the lover of Baptist history add this book to his or her library. Students, teachers, and pastors will find Baptist Ways to be a useful tool. In the end we may all learn with Edwin Gaustad that "It is true that Baptists embrace religious liberty -- in their best days for all of humankind. It is also true that Baptists embody religious liberty -- in their worst days in the unending multiplicity of denominational tags and labels and nicknames."
Excerpt from my comments here: http://baptistsearch.blogspot.com/2008/01/baptist-ways-opinion.html show less

This is a very informative survey-level history of Baptist churches, associations, missionary groups, etc. through the end of the twentieth century.

The weakness is that the editing and the publication quality are unacceptably poor. With the extreme number and degree of typos that reduce entire paragraphs to near-gibberish, it's probably not the author's (a history professor) fault and possibly not even the editor's; someone or something probably screwed up in the printing process. If author show more Bill Leonard publishes a revised version, hopefully he uses another publisher, because this edition's publisher, a Judson Press, looks amateurish. show less

This book is probably the best, for now, explanation of what happened to the SBC back in the 80's and 90's. Leonard gets behind the scenes to give the reader an understanding of the forces that ripped the convention apart.