Tag Archives: Southern Baptist Convention

Ironic Innocence at Trinity Christian Academy

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It was pastor Bob Gray who gave my mother permission to marry the man who’d become my father in 1972. I didn’t attend the school until after my mother died. My 1989 yearbook is dedicated to Dennis Cassell, Trinity Christian Academy’s first football coach, who’d soon be fired for speaking out against how Trinity’s coverup of decades of child sexual abuse. Ironically, I miss my own innocence, and my few friendships, from those years. 

New Story: First Baptist Church

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First Baptist Church has perhaps received more love and more hate than any other entity in Jacksonville. It dates to a ca.-Civil War split with black church members who retained the original name, Bethel Baptist. In 1923, Pastor W.A. Hobson welcomed 200 Klansmen in full regalia into his farewell sermon. In the 1980s, Pastors Homer Lindsay and Jerry Vines ignited a showdown with more “liberal” members of the Southern Baptist Convention. In 2019, what once seemed unthinkable occurs: the church plans to sell 90 percent of its downtown campus.