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Highview Baptist Church is a Baptist multi-site megachurch based in Louisville, Kentucky. It is affiliated with the Kentucky Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist Convention. Aaron Harvie [1] is currently the church's senior pastor.
Founded as a baptist mission in 1947 and officially incorporated in 1953, the church has multiple campuses located throughout metro Louisville. As of 2022, the campuses include Fegenbush Campus (the main location) on Fegenbush Lane, which also is home of the Hispanic Campus (Highview en Español), East Campus on Shelbyville Road led by Blake Hodges, [2] and Central Campus in the former Southside Baptist Church building in the Wyandotte neighborhood led by Scott Long. Scott Long is a former University of Louisville wide receiver who also played briefly for the San Francisco 49ers. The former Valley Station Campus in the southwestern part of Jefferson County was launched as GracePointe Baptist Church in 2020. [3] Other former campuses include the Spencer County Campus, which merged with an existing church to form Redemption Hill Baptist Church. [4]
The church sponsors Whitefield Academy, founded in 1976 as Highview Baptist Christian School.
Bill Hancock served as Highview's senior pastor from 1970 until April 1995, when he resigned in disgrace over an extramarital affair. [5] Dr. Kevin Ezell was then the senior pastor beginning in 1996 until he accepted the presidency of the North American Mission Board in the fall of 2010. [6] Dr. Les Hughes was offered and accepted the position of senior pastor in the spring of 2012. [7] He held the position until his resignation effective June 1, 2015.
On June 26, 2016, Aaron Harvie was called as senior pastor. Harvie has a unique relationship with Highview: in 1999 he planted a church in the suburbs of Philadelphia with Highview as a main sending partner. In addition to financial support, Highview sent missions teams to Philadelphia help the church plant launch and reach the community with the gospel. His family returned to Highview in June 2015, and he served as Interim East Campus Pastor starting in October 2015, heeding a call from interim senior pastor Randy Overstreet.
The church was the focus of national attention in April 2005 when it hosted Justice Sunday, a rally where politically active conservative Evangelical Christians gathered to protest efforts by the United States Senate to filibuster conservative-leaning candidates for judgeships in the federal courts. The event attracted leading members of the conservative Christian movement, including James Dobson and R. Albert Mohler, Jr. The event was widely covered by the news media, and also was protested by critics of the movement. It was the first of three such events to date, with the others held in Nashville, Tennessee and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is a Baptist theological institute in Fort Worth, Texas. It is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. It was established in 1908 and in 2005 was one of the largest seminaries in the world. It is accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, and the National Association of Schools of Music to award diplomas and bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.
Bellevue Baptist Church is a Baptist megachurch in the Cordova area of Memphis, Tennessee, United States. It is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Bellevue was once the largest church in the Memphis area. Bellevue's goals are to "Love God, Love People, Share Jesus, and Make Disciples." The church's head pastor has been Steve Gaines since 2005.
Richard Albert Mohler Jr. is an American evangelical theologian, the ninth president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and host of the podcast The Briefing, where he daily analyzes the news and recent events from an evangelical perspective.
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John Steven Gaines is an American Southern Baptist pastor, and the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is currently serving at Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova, one of the largest congregations in the Southern Baptist Convention and has visited Israel 16 times. On Sunday, July 10, 2005, the Pastor Search Committee of Bellevue Baptist Church presented Dr. Steve Gaines to the church congregation. At the conclusion of the services the Bellevue family overwhelmingly voted to call Steve Gaines as the seventh Pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church. Gaines succeeds the longtime Bellevue pastor Adrian Rogers.
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The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) is a Baptist theological institute in Louisville, Kentucky. It is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. The seminary was founded in 1859 in Greenville, South Carolina, where it was at first housed on the campus of Furman University. The seminary has been an innovator in theological education, establishing one of the first Ph.D. programs in religion in the year 1892. After being closed during the Civil War, it moved in 1877 to a newly built campus in downtown Louisville and moved to its current location in 1926 in the Crescent Hill neighborhood. In 1953, Southern became one of the few seminaries to offer a full, accredited degree course in church music. For more than fifty years Southern has been one of the world's largest theological seminaries, with an FTE enrollment of over 3,300 students in 2015.
Beginning in 1979, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) experienced an intense struggle for control of the organization. Its initiators called it the conservative resurgence while its detractors labeled it the fundamentalist takeover. It was launched with the charge that the seminaries and denominational agencies were dominated by liberals. The movement was primarily aimed at reorienting the denomination away from a liberal trajectory.
Duke Kimbrough McCall was an American Christian religious leader who served as Chief Executive Officer of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Executive Committee, as president of two theological seminaries, as president of the Baptist World Alliance, and as a Baptist pastor.
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