This is a small book with a large scope. It is a tightly focused, thoroughly-researched institutional history of what is now called the First Baptist Church of Georgetown, South Carolina. But that seemingly narrow church history spans three centuries, and, in Talbert's and Farish's telling, reveals how Baptist beliefs and practices came to the South and changed over time.

First Baptist traces its origins to the work of William Screven, an English immigrant and a dissenting Baptist preacher who had tangled with Congregationalist authorities in Maine before heading south in the 1690s. What began as a frail congregation planted at the edge of the British empire is now a thriving church that counts itself a member of the massive Southern Baptist Convention. What is clear is that today's First Baptist owes its existence to its enslaved ancestors. By 1808, the church's white congregation had died off. Slave membership, however, continued to increase, and on the eve of the Civil War the church housed 1,044 African Americans to just twenty-eight whites.

While Talbert and Farish mention that these black believers founded their own church after the war, we hear little of that African American church during the second half of the book. But Talbert's and Farish's sweeping chronicle forces us to ask whether a church's real history is found in the perpetuation of its name or in the changing lives of its people, almost all of whom decided to reconstitute themselves in those first days of freedom as the Bethesda Missionary Baptist Church, a self-proclaimed house of mercy that lives today just around the corner from First Baptist.