Binkley: A Congregational History

＂This book examines how a Southern Baptist congregation emerged as a bastion of liberal Christianity in late twentieth-century Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Andrew B. Gardner narrates a detail-rich history, from the late 1950s to the 2010s, of the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church through the lens of its social witness mission. While it is a concrete congregational history of a single church community-with profiles of prominent members like the University of North Carolina men’s basketball coach Dean Smith and influential clergy like Robert Seymour and Linda Jordan-Gardner also uses the story to examine how congregations more generally change and evolve. He contends that recurring conflicts on various issues in the life of a congregation-in Binkley’s case, from building projects to civil rights, women’s ordination, and LGBTQ inclusion-are the primary drivers of its development＂--

ANDREW B. GARDNER, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Baylor University, is the author of Reimagining Zion: A History of the Alliance of Baptists.