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six approved missions associations. Articles about "approved" colleges and seminaries also
begin to appear about that time.

Ketcham expressed his frustration with the BBU in this area. It was founded as a

protest movement to recover the denominations, but it was ineffective to do it:

We never won a single battle on any issue. Beginning with the 1920 meeting in
Buffalo straight through to the disbanding of the Union in May 1932 we went home
each year soundly defeated in every attempt to clean up the Convention.

For the GARBC, separation became not only a means of purifying the group from

compromising associations with infidelity (though it surely was that), it also became a means
of channeling resources to like-minded causes. For them this meant money for fundamentalist
missionaries, sending young people to trustworthy schools, etc.

Longevity

All of the above factors culminate in this final point of discontinuity between the

BBU and the GARBC. The disruptive qualities inherent in the BBU insured that it could not
long endure. It really was experimental in one sense, and the early GARBC leaders benefited
from BBU trials and errors.

The GARBC continued to grow numerically for 43 consecutive years, showing

its first net loss in 1985.

Growth was never explosive, but consistently strong until the

1980s, leveling off between 1,500 and 1,600 churches, though it has dipped now to around
1400. Early growth was generally due to churches leaving the Northern Convention, while
some of the later growth was also due to church planting. These facts beg the question of why
the movement seems to have plateaued and is beginning to decline. Though that cannot be
fully answered here, it may have much to do with the passing of the original impetus for the
GARBC as a reorganized protest movement which has lost specific relevance today.

Conclusion

It was necessary to reorganize the BBU into the GARBC in order to create a

structure based on principle rather than personality. This allowed the core convictions of
fundamentalist Northern Baptists to find expression through a separatist fellowship. While
the BBUs explosion left a great deal of fallout, enough protest energies remained to enable
the GARBC to gradually establish itself as a movement once integrity had been restored
through its leadership. A question that might face GARBC leadership today is how to
validate the organizations continued existence, now that the original driving issues have
faded and separatist questions are framed much differently.

Ketcham, "Re: BBU," 2.

Tassell, 422-423.