Associated with the Georgia Baptist Historical Society and the Georgia Baptist Historical Commission, Viewpoints, the historical journal for Georgia Baptists, is published every two years. The journal contains articles about Georgia Baptist events, persons, and institutions and is housed at the Georgia Baptist History Repository in the Jack Tarver Library of Mercer University in Macon.
In 1966 the executive committee of the Georgia Baptist Historical Society decided to publish the oral presentations of its annual meeting, and two years later the first volume of Viewpoints appeared. From the beginning Viewpoints has included articles by both lay people and church historians. In 1974 Robert G. Gardner, a religion professor at Shorter College (later Shorter University) in Rome, was appointed the first editor. Gardner served until 1998, when another Shorter professor, Robert N. Nash, replaced him. In 2004 Jarrett Burch, a Houston County public school teacher and Baptist pastor, assumed the editorship of the journal.
The Georgia Baptist Historical Commission, an entity of the Georgia Baptist Convention, provides the primary funding for the journal. Although most of the contributing authors are pastors and professors in the Georgia Baptist Convention, Viewpoints has included articles by Primitive Baptists and Free Will Baptists. The major contributors to the journal have been some of its founding members.
Viewpoints is a valuable resource for researching Baptist groups in Georgia, from the Georgia Baptist Convention to the congregations and associations of Freewill, Holiness, Independent, Landmark, and Primitive Baptists.
