"in Respect of Christ, The Church Bee One": The New Baptist Covenant for a New Century (Report‪)‬

For four hundred years, Baptists have understood their congregations to be linked to one another in Christ and called to make alliances with one another. The first Baptist confession affirmed, "in respect of CHRIST, the Church bee one." (1) Over the centuries, the general trend among Baptist church alliances in the United States has been toward more centralized and rind connectionalism with its concomitant tendency to fragment, or as Baptists often wryly observe, to "multiply by dividing." The New Baptist Covenant (NBC), a fresh effort at alliance among Baptists in North America, was designed to buck this trend. Its form and future reside in the postmodern culture confronting twenty-first century Baptists rather than modern aspirations to universal uniformity. NBC's freshness comes clear when four centuries of Baptist church alliances are compared with this new movement in a new century.