History, Heritage, Hope.
The Waynesboro Baptist Church was born in January of 1880. We first gathered in a meeting space provided for us by the First United Methodist Church of Waynesboro. We have been in several different buildings since we occupied our first building, but always in the same general location. Our church has been served by various pastors through her many years. She gained early on and has sought to maintain a genuine commitment to missions. We have served through the years as a part of our local Hephzibah Baptist Association as well as our State and National Conventions.Our name was changed from the Waynesboro Baptist Church to First Baptist Waynesboro somewhere between 1928-1930. Our fundamental theological identity was reformed, refashioned, and reframed in the early 1990s.
Southern Baptists in the USA came under the influence of theological liberalism in the 1950s. It was, by the middle of the 1960s, the primary approach in almost all of our seminaries. Most men who were coming out of our seminaries into our churches were strongly influenced by theological liberalism. It began to have a serious impact on our churches. A conservative resurgence, as it was called, emerged in the SBC in the late 1970s. It was a movement to return our SBC, her seminaries, and thus her churches back to the Bible as the inerrant, infallible, and fully sufficient Word of God. Our church was then considered a “moderate” church. This term was an appropriately acceptable alternative to “liberal.” It simply meant that we worshiped God and loved Jesus, but did not see the affirmation of the Bible as inerrant as a matter of any major importance. The conservative resurgence won the day and led to many churches like ours leaving the SBC. We stayed.
God did a massive work in this church in the early 1990s that resulted in a major theological shift from “moderate” to conservative evangelical. It was not the beginning of something new for this church. It was in fact a return to our heritage for which we give praise to God. Our hope is to live, worship, work, and witness in such a way that the roots of our commitment to the absolute Truth of the Bible grow deeper and deeper spread further and further so that until Jesus comes this church remains tethered to the Bible, being and doing all that are and do under the Lordship of Jesus and to the glory of God