the primitive baptist church with Tom Griffin and Paul Lindsey (ep 3, 18).

Drive the back roads between Rogers and Pea Ridge and you'll pass a small white church that gave its town a name. Little Flock Primitive Baptist Church was constituted in 1843, planted out of the older Shiloh congregation whose building is now a museum in downtown Springdale. It belongs to one of the oldest and least understood strands of American Protestantismm a people who broke from the wider Baptist world in the 1830s by refusing the machinery of organized religion: the mission boards, the seminaries, the Sunday schools, the paid clergy. They kept the name "Primitive" not because it meant backward, but because it meant original, a return to the apostolic pattern. Family worship, congregational singing with no band and no production, and a conviction that salvation is God's finished work, not a transaction to be earned.In this conversation, Elder Tom Griffin and Deacon Paul Lindsey open the church's original minute books and tell its story: a sanctuary Union troops turned into a hospital during the Battle of Pea Ridge, a town that later incorporated to keep a landfill out, hand-hewn oak beams older than the building they hold up. But the history is only the frame. What these two are really describing is a way of belonging that runs against the grain of a region that measures nearly everything by growth, a church that has never once asked how to get bigger, only how to stay faithful, and that believes it blossoms under burden rather than under plenty. The episode closes with a recording of the congregation's singing, shared as a gift. What can a people who choose to endure teach a place that has staked everything on expansion?Link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-primitive-baptist-church-with-tom-griffin-and-paul-lindsey-little-flock-arkansas/About the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch