page_title: American Baptist Churches USA
section_title: American Baptist Convention
hierarchical_section_title: American Baptist Churches USA / History / American Baptist Convention
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Riverside Church , een neogotische kerk in het centrum van New York City.English: Riverside Church, in the City of New York is an interdenominational American Baptist and United Church of Christ church in New York City, famous for its elaborate Neo-Gothic architecture and its history of social justice.
context_page_description: The American Baptist Churches USA is a Baptist Christian denomination within the United States. The denomination maintains headquarters in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The organization is usually considered mainline, although varying theological and mission emphases may be found among its congregations, including modernist, charismatic and evangelical orientations. It traces its history to the First Baptist Church in America and the Baptist congregational associations which organized the Triennial Convention in 1814. From 1907 to 1950, it was known as the Northern Baptist Convention, and from 1950 to 1972 as the American Baptist Convention.
  In 2017, ABCUSA had 1,145,647 members in 5,057 congregations.
context_section_description: The name of the Convention was changed in 1950 to the American Baptist Convention (ABC), and it operated under this name until 1972.  It was the second step at bringing together on a national level Baptists with ties to the mission societies.  The ABC was characterized from 1950–66 with annual resolutions at its conventions having to do with the Civil Rights Movement and race relations.
   Without exception, these resolutions were progressive and genuinely encompassing. They addressed both the need for individual change in attitude and action, and the need for broader social change that could only be instituted through political action.
  As in many cases, the rhetoric of the annual conventions was sometimes ahead of local activity, but the denomination gradually made progress. In 1964, it created the Baptist Action for Racial Brotherhood (BARB), which early the next year produced a pamphlet outlining actions for change in local churches. In 1968, the national convention was challenged by "Black American Baptist Churchmen Speak To the American Baptist Convention," demands that challenged how the denomination had "conducted its business relative to black American Baptists." The black churchmen said the Convention had excluded them from decisionmaking positions, even while working with good intentions on behalf of black American Baptists. The following year, Dr. Thomas Kilgore Jr., pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Los Angeles, was elected the first black president of the Convention. The 1968 Convention also voted to create the Study Commission on Denominational Structure (SCODS). Its recommendations changed the denomination in a variety of ways, after being adopted at the 1972 Convention.
caption: Historic Riverside Church (1930) in Upper Manhattan retains its association with ABCUSA.
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