PHILADELPHIA -- Most people picture the typical Southern Baptist church as being, first off, in the South, perhaps at the intersection of two roads named after trees in a quiet neighborhood of freshly mowed lawns and conservative Caucasians.
Most probably wouldn't picture something like the Service Baptist Church, located in a storefront on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia.
But Service is one of a rapidly growing number of black churches to affiliate with the Southern Baptists -- a stunning irony given the church's history.
It has been 155 years since the Southern Baptist Church was formed in Georgia by rural whites who, insisting the church could not deny them the right to own slaves, split from the Northern Baptists.
It has been fewer than 50 years since blacks were routinely turned away from many Southern Baptist churches in the Deep South.
And it has been only five years since the Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution of repentance, apologizing for "condoning and/or perpetrating" racism.
Despite all that, the Southern Baptist Convention -- already the nation's largest Protestant congregation with nearly 16 million members -- is managing to add blacks and other minorities to its rolls, and in some cities at an astonishing rate.
In southeastern Pennsylvania, since 1984, the number of predominantly African-American churches affiliated with the Southern Baptists has grown tenfold, from eight to 80.
Partly to improve their image and partly because it's where the potential for growth is, Southern Baptists are "pouring a tremendous amount of money" into drawing immigrant and minority members, said the Rev. David Key, director of Baptist studies at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta.
"There are simply not enough white rural people to sustain the numbers and the growth for Southern Baptists," Key said. "They would not grow without ethnic populations -- blacks, Asians, Hispanics."
Since 1998, the Southern Baptists have been targeting two large cities a year -- Philadelphia is designated to be one of them in 2002, a Southern Baptist Convention spokesman said -- and flooding them with door-to-door missionaries, billboard advertising and block parties as part of what it calls its Strategic Focus Cities Initiative.
Even before that, it was making significant inroads in urban areas.
