Baptist Beginnings in the United States

A lecture delivered by Zoom to Baptists in India

by Rev. Dr. Reid S. Trulson
April 5, 2022

Thank you, David Sagar, for the kind invitation to speak today about Baptist beginnings in the
United States. One cannot adequately summarize almost 400 years of Baptist life in the time
available to us today, so I will talk about Baptist beginnings from the early 1600s to the mid-
1800s. Along the way I will point out some important threads that weave themselves through
American Baptist life, continue to be present today and are relevant, I believe, to Telugu
Baptists.

All of us are born into a particular context that influences our lives. Baptists in America began
to develop their life together at the same time that the English colonies in North America were
also developing a life of independence and unity.

One of the earliest Baptist leaders in colonial America was Roger Williams (1603-1683).
Williams was ordained in the Church of England and became a Puritan while he was a student
at Cambridge, England. In 1630, Roger Williams and his wife Mary left England and sailed to
the English colony of Massachusetts. Williams came to believe the colony was immorally
occupying its land. Even though the King of England had granted permission for English
people to settle in America, the land belonged to the Indigenous people and the colony had not
purchased it from them.

During these early years in Massachusetts, Roger Williams had conversations with a woman
named Catherine Scott. Those conversations and his study of scripture led him to Baptist
convictions. These included the belief in the baptism of believers and the conviction that the
government had no authority over a person’s faith. It had no right to force people to observe
particular religious beliefs and practices. Instead, people should be free to read the scriptures,
pray, worship, and follow their own conscience in matters of faith. Roger Williams’ preaching
and his beliefs about freedom of conscience, baptism of believers and separation of church
and state led the colonial government to view him as a dangerous person.

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In July 1635 the general court of Boston summoned Roger Williams to question him about his
religious beliefs. Three months later the court convicted him of heresy and of urging people to
rebel against the authority of the state. They banished Roger Williams from the colony for his
religious beliefs but delayed sending him back to England because winter was arriving and he
was sick. During a severe winter storm in January 1636, Roger Williams slipped away from
his home just before the sheriff arrived to arrest him. Williams survived only because
Indigenous Native American people took him in and sheltered him through the winter. When
spring arrived, Roger Williams purchased land from them and established the colony that
would become the state of Rhode Island.

In 1638 Roger Williams formed the first Baptist Church in America. Several months later,
another Baptist leader, John Clarke (1609-1676), founded the second Baptist church.
Williams and Clarke sailed to England to get a charter for the new colony of Rhode Island
from King Charles II. That process took a long time, so Roger Williams sailed back to tend to
things in America while John Clarke remained. After twelve years of effort, Clarke finally
succeeded in getting a charter for the colony. The charter protected Rhode Island from
encroachment by other English colonies.

The citizens of the new colony decided by majority vote to guarantee “liberty of conscience.”
Rhode Island became the first place in North America that practiced separation of church and
state and guaranteed religious liberty to all. The oldest Jewish synagogue building in America
still stands in Rhode Island.

Roger Williams and John Clarke helped people make decisions by majority rule while also
protecting the rights of the minority. And they respected and protected the human rights of the
Indigenous people whose ethnicity, culture and religion was so different from theirs.

The guidance of scripture, freedom of conscience, religious liberty and protecting the
rights of the minority are four of the basic threads that continue through American
Baptist life.

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As more Baptist churches gradually began to form in the American colonies, those churches
had many differences among themselves.

Some were ethnic and cultural differences. Although many of the early Baptists in America
were English, Roger Williams had been born in Wales. By the mid-1600s many Welsh
Baptists began arriving with their Welsh language and culture.

Some of the Baptists were Native Americans. Roger Williams had helped to translate the
Bible into Algonquin, the language of the Indigenous Native Americans known as the
Wampanoags. In 1693 tribal members formed a Baptist Church at Gay Head on Cape Cod,
Massachusetts. One of those founding member, Stephen Tackamson, was the church’s first
Indigenous pastor. That church continues today after 329 years of continuous ministry among
the Wampanoag.

The first African-American Baptist church was started in 1773 at Silver Bluff near Savannah,
South Carolina.

Some of the differences among colonial American Baptists were theological. Regular Baptists
had a Calvinist theology. They were more formal in their worship, favored having paid and
educated male pastors, and opposed emotionalism in worship.

The sixth Baptist church that was organized in America was not a Regular Baptist church but
a Seventh Day Baptist church formed in Rhode Island in 1672. The Seventh Day Baptists
worshipped on Saturday rather than Sunday.

In 1652 the first Six Principle Baptist church was formed in Rhode Island. Those churches
looked to Hebrew 6:1–2 for six things that they believed were mandatory for all churches.
The laying-on of hands was the only doctrine that was really distinctive to these Baptists.

Free Will Baptists formed their first church in 1727 in North Carolina. The Free Will churches
believed that Christ died for all and that people had the free will to accept or reject Jesus as
their Lord and Savior. They generally practiced foot washing before celebrating the Lord’s
Supper.

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The Separate Baptists formed during the Great Awakening – a time of spiritual renewal in
New England that began in the 1730s. They were moderate Calvinists who separated from
the Congregational churches to practice believers baptism rather than infant baptism. They
allowed women to preach, they gave altar calls in worship, and discouraged the practice of
having paid clergy.

There was even a community of Baptist monks, nuns in colonial America. The Seventh Day
German Baptists in Pennsylvania formed a community in 1732 that included celibate men and
women alongside married families. They spoke German, worshipped on Saturday, and owned
property in common.

So some differences among colonial American Baptists were ethnic and cultural, some were
theological, and still other differences were political. It is commonly said that most Baptists
supported the cause of independence from England. It would be more accurate to say that
most European-American Baptists supported the Revolution because they believed an
independent America would protect their freedom and liberty. One example was David Jones,
a Pennsylvania pastor who became a chaplain in George Washington’s army.

Many enslaved African-American Baptists were loyal to King George III because they
believed that England offered them freedom and liberty that they would not be granted by the
Americans that kept them enslaved. One such person was George Liele, the first ordained
Black Baptist pastor in America.

And a few Baptists were committed to non-violence and refused to support the war efforts of
either the English or the Americans. For example, Peleg Bourroughs was a pacifist pastor in
Rhode Island who refused to urge his church members to fight in the war on either side.

This diversity is another thread that continues among Baptists in the United States.

In spite of the many differences among them, Baptists in colonial America recognized that
they needed one another. They believed that God gave each individual congregation the

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spiritual gifts that were essential to be a true church. But they also recognized that each
individual congregation was part of the larger body of Christ. So they sought ways to balance
autonomy and interdependence by forming associations in which they could pray, study
scripture and seek God’s guidance together, where they could discuss issues, seek solutions to
common challenges and assist one another in their areas of need.

The Philadelphia Baptist Association was formed in 1707 and essentially functioned as a
national denomination for Baptists until other associations formed.

In the 1600s and 1700s Baptists faced discrimination and persecution. Some states had
officially established churches (eg., Congregational church in Massachusetts, and the
Episcopal Church in Virginia.) The official relationship these majority churches had with the
government enabled them to control minorities such as the Baptists by refusing to give
Baptists a license to preach or permission to gather.

Obadiah Holmes was a Baptist pastor in Connecticut who was not licensed to preach in
Massachusetts and was warned to stay out of that state. He chose to enter Massachusetts to
visit and pray with an isolated Baptist. The local authorities arrested Holmes, convicted him
and punished him by whipping him in public.

Baptist pastors who preached without a license in Virginia were often fined or imprisoned.
When John Weatherford was jailed, the news circulated throughout the county that he was
imprisoned. Weatherford preached at the door of the prison, and when that was forbidden, he
preached through the bars of the jail. The authorities erected an outer brick wall to prevent
him from preaching, but that did not stop him. He devised a plan to have people who gathered
outside raise a cloth on a pole when they were ready to hear him preach. Although he could
not see them, he preached to the people gathered outside his prison window. Weatherford's
voice was strong and could be heard by people outside the prison. Some people became
believers by hearing Weatherford preach from inside the jail. Nine people were eventually
baptized because of Weatherford's preaching from jail.

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After the American revolution, Baptists experienced rapid growth. This enabled them to
participate in shaping the government. For instance, the Constitution that was adopted in 1788
as the governing document for the new nation, did not guarantee religious liberty. Baptists
such as John Leland helped lead a movement to amend the Constitution. The result of their
work was the Constitution’s first amendment that contained a bill of rights guaranteeing
religious liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peacefully assemble and
the right to seek the government’s assistance to correct a wrong, without fear of punishment
or reprisal. Leland worked to protect religious liberty for all, and not just for Baptists or
Christians. Leland also rejected the idea of a “Christian nation.” There were Christians in the
nation, but a nation included all people and established laws by which to govern. But the
government did not have the power to legislate and govern people’s faith.

This interdependence in church life as well as public life was a thread that continues
among Baptists.

Baptist individuals, churches and associations became increasingly active in mission both
within and beyond the United States. In 1782, George and Hannah Liele sailed from the
United States to Jamaica as the nation’s first foreign missionaries. The Lieles had previously
been enslaved, but George’s owner had freed him to enable him to preach to enslaved people
on neighboring plantations. The Lieles worked as self-supporting missionaries. They formed
the first Baptist church and birthed the Jamaican Baptist movement that grew to some 8,000
Baptists in their lifetime. By the 1840s the Jamaican Baptists sent some of their own
missionaries to Cameroon in western Africa.

In 1814 Baptists from eleven states and the District of Columbia met in Philadelphia and
formed the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States
of America for Foreign Mission. This was the first time that Baptists in the United States had
organized themselves on a national basis. The organization’s board of managers was called
the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions. The new Board immediately appointed Adoniram
Judson to be its first missionary. Adoniram and Ann Judson were already working in Burma
translating the Bible into Burmese. (The Board did not appoint Ann or any of the other

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missionary wives at that time.) With Judson’s appointment, American Baptists began mission
work in Asia, first in Burma, then Siam [Thailand], China and Japan.

In 1817 the Board began appointing missionaries to the Indigenous Native American nations
of America.

In 1820 American Baptists began work in Africa by appointing Lott Cary, a formerly enslaved
man, as its first missionary to Liberia. Carey started churches, led schools, and developed
business ties between Liberia and the United States to sustain the mission. He ministered to
the African American immigrants, and also worked cross-culturally by going inland to
establish a mission among the Mandingoes. Carey’s life came to a tragic end in 1828 when the
mission and settlement came under attack by Bassa raiders. While Carey and others hurried to
make bullets, a candle in their work area was accidentally knocked over. The explosion of
gunpowder injured Lott Carey. Two days later he was dead.

In 1832 American Baptists began work in Europe in the countries of France, Germany and
Greece.

American Baptist work in India began in 1815 when Charlotte White (1782-1863) became the
first American woman to be officially appointed as a missionary. Her appointment was
controversial because no other denomination or mission agency in the United States had ever
appointed a woman. Indeed one member of the Board attempted to revoke her appointment.
He failed because the Board’s constitution used the word “missionary” but did not define it.
The Jesuits had coined the word in the 1500s, but the Board’s constitution did not stipulate
that the word “missionary” referred only to an ordained man. Although Charlotte had been
legally appointed, several members questioned whether the Board had sufficient funds to send
her. Charlotte may have anticipated that objection, for she had a modest estate – whether from
her deceased parents, or her deceased husband, or both. Charlotte donated her estate to the
Board on the condition that they use that money for her own expenses. For the next decade
Charlotte funded her mission work by herself.

Charlotte sailed to Kolkata on her way to Burma. In Kolkata she met a British Baptist
missionary named Joshua Rowe who was working with William Carey. Joshua Rowe’s wife

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had died several years earlier leaving him the father of three young sons. Charlotte and Joshua
married and served at Digah, some 360 miles northwest of Kolkata on the Ganges between
Patna and Danapur. They served under the auspices of the British Baptist Missionary Society
that had sent Joshua Rowe to India. Charlotte Rowe was an educator. She was especially
concerned for the education of girls and women. She faced much opposition from European
expatriates in India. This reflected the attitude of the British East India Company that opposed
education for Indian people for fear that it would threaten colonial rule and the company’s
profits. Some local people were also wary of education, especially for girls. In one community
a rumor circulated that “as soon as the girls had received a competent education, they were to
be kidnapped, tied up in bags, and shipped for England!” All of the girls fled from that school
and it took some time for Charlotte to convince their families to all them to return to continue
their education.

Joshua Rowe died in 1823 leaving Charlotte the single parent of six children. For the next
three years she worked at Digah without assistance from any missionary colleagues. She alone
managed the mission, supervised 10 schools, taught, organized the construction and repair of
school and mission buildings, led the Hindi-language church at Digah, and oversaw the
ministries of indigenous evangelists who called her “their pastoress.” As her philosophy and
practice of mission matured, she adapted to the local culture, critiqued the role of money in
missions, and challenged the system in which new missionaries were taught Hindi by people
in England for whom it was a second language, rather than by local people in India for whom
Hindi was their mother tongue. Because she was a woman, Charlotte Rowe’s work was
largely overlooked and omitted from written reports so that her work as a missionary and
educator faded from memory.

Charlotte had arrived in India in 1816. Twenty years later, all in the year 1836, American
Baptists began working in three other areas in India.

In 1836, Nathan and Eliza Brown arrived in Assam with Oliver and Harriet Cutter. This
marked the start of American Baptist mission work in what is now North East India.

In 1836 Jeremiah and Mary Philips arrived in Orissa with Eli and Clementine Noyes as the
first commissioned missionaries sent by the Freewill Baptist Foreign Mission Society. The

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Freewill missionary society would later merge with the American Baptist Foreign Mission
Society.

Also in 1836 Samuel and Roenna Day arrived in South India. We will return to Samuel Day
in a few moments for the commitment to mission is a thread that continues among
American Baptists.

For many years the Baptist churches in the North and South had argued about slavery. In 1845
the Baptist churches in the South broke fellowship with the churches in the North and created
the Southern Baptist Convention. The division took place because of slavery and mission. The
Baptists of Georgia requested that the American Baptist Home Mission Society appoint James
Reeves as a missionary to the Cherokee nation, specifically noting that he was a slaveholder.
The society refused to appoint him. Several months later the Alabama Baptist Convention
asked the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions if slaveholders could be appointed as foreign
missionaries. The Board replied, “If anyone should offer himself as a missionary, having
slaves, and should insist on retaining them as his property, we could not appoint him.” The
Board’s president wrote that it could never be a party to any arrangement which would imply
approval of slavery.

The Southern Baptist Convention formed home and foreign mission boards that would
appoint slaveholders as missionaries. Following the Southern Baptist withdrawal, the General
Missionary Convention changed its name to the American Baptist Missionary Union. (In
1910 it would again change its name to the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society –
ABFMS. This is still its official name today when it is more commonly known as
American Baptist International Ministries.)

It’s important to notice that since 1619 when the first ship arrived in North America
bearing enslaved African men and women, a caste system developed in America that was
based on race. The struggle against the injustices caused by that caste system is
another thread woven through Baptist life in the United States.

The struggle over slavery in the United States would eventually lead to Civil War in the
1860s. But the struggle was also carried out in other ways. In the early 1800s, many

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southern U.S. states enacted laws that prohibited anyone from teaching enslaved people to
read and write. John Berry Meachum (1789-1854) was born into slavery in Virginia. He
learned the trade of carpentry. By age 21 he had earned enough as a carpenter to purchase
freedom for himself, his wife and his father. The Meachums moved to St. Louis, Missouri.
There he started the oldest African-American church in the state. Meachum operated a school
in the church building where he taught religious and secular subjects to Black children,
whether they were free or not. In 1847 the state of Missouri passed a law that forbid educating
any African-American child. Beachum could no longer teach in his church building, so he
secured a steamboat that he prepared as a school. Children would board the boat, and the boat
would move out into the middle of the Mississippi River where it was beyond the reach of
Missouri law and the children could be taught. The steamboat was called the Freedom School.

After Baptists in the south separated and formed the Southern Baptist Convention, Baptists in
the north sought to maintain their unity by participating in associations, state conventions, and
mission societies such as the American Baptist Missionary Union, the American Baptist
Home Mission Society, the American Baptist Education and Publication Society, and the
American Baptist Historical Society. In 1907 those bodies formed the Northern Baptist
Convention which is now the American Baptist Churches in the USA.

The ABC is today the most ethnically diverse religious denomination in the United States. It
is, I believe, a wonderful gift that God has given to us.

The ABC cooperates ecumenically with other Christian denominations. It ordains women and
affirms their call from God to serve in all areas of ministry. My own local church is led by a
wonderful woman pastor.

American Baptists believe that the gospel applies to all of life, not just one’s spirituality and
one’s Sunday worship. As a result, American Baptists are deeply involved in working for
racial justice continuing the earlier civil rights work of many women and men before us, such
as Martin Luther King, Jr. who was an American Baptist pastor. We are active working with
immigrants to the United States and helping refugees to resettle in America. We seek to
protect religious freedom for all, and have created a network of churches working to heal and
care for the environment.

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Just as it was in colonial America, Baptists in the United States still have many differences
among ourselves. But we also continue to seek unity with one another. Over the past 400
years, we have not found unity through adopting official creeds or confessions of faith.
Instead, we have tended to experience unity when we engage with one another in mission.

In the United States, our mission societies tended to come into existence first and our
denominational unity grew out of our shared mission. Indeed, the most well-known American
president who is a Baptist, Jimmy Carter, launched an initiative in 2007 called the New
Baptist Covenant to help Baptists in the United States network together to work for racial
justice, to serve needs in local communities and to worship together. The initiative recognized
that Baptist unity is rooted in serving together in mission.

Next month you are anticipating a lecture on the beginnings of the Baptist mission in South
India, so we won’t speak about that in great detail today. But it is appropriate for us to return
and make several comments about Samuel and Roenna Day.

Samuel Day was born in Canada and came to the United States for theological education and
training in ministry. At first he considered ministry among the first nations Indigenous people
in Canada, but God called him to India. He and Roenna Clark married in 1825, and in 1836
they sailed to Kolkata. There they were assigned to South India. They want first to
Vizagapatam, then Madras and finally in 1840 settled in Nellore which for the next 26 years
was the only station in the Telugu mission.

Samuel and Roenna Day were sustained through times of discouragement and suffering by
their commitment to God’s call and their love for Telugu people. It is right for us to
remember the sacrifices made by them and their missionary colleagues. They endured illness.
In 1848 Samuel and Roenna Day were forced to return to the United States due to sickness
and the need to recover. They experienced loneliness and separation. The Days had seven
children. Roenna had to remain behind in the United States while Samuel returned to pick up
the work at Nellore. There was frustration when the ministry was slow to develop fruit.
Several times the Board in the United States questioned whether it should continue to invest
resources in the mission which seemed to produce so few results. It was providential that

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illness brought Samuel Day back to the United States at the very time that the Board was
meeting to decide the fate of the Telugu mission. The called it the “Lone Star Mission”
because a large map hung in the mission office in State. On the map were placed stars at all
the locations where American Baptist mission was being conducted. In south India there could
be found only one single star – the “Lone Star” at Nellore. Samuel Day was able to attend that
meeting and help the Board reclaim the vision of God at work in the Telugu mission. As a
result, the mission was allowed to continue.

In addition to sharing the good news of God’s love through Jesus Christ, the missionaries
started schools. Like Charlotte Rowe had done in Digah, they opened schools in which girls as
well as boys could receive an education. Medical clinics and hospitals were opened to heal the
body as well as the spirit.

And through it all, they remembered God’s command in the scriptures, “Make every effort to
keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:3) The very reason those
words are found in scripture is that even in the early church there were divisions: different
understandings of scripture; different ways of worshipping; different personalities that drew
followers in one direction or another. The Holy Spirit spoke through these words urging them
to make every effort to keep the unity that was the Spirit’s gift to them. We need one another
for our own sake and for the sake of God’s mission in the world. I ask Telugu Baptists to pray
for unity among Baptists in the United States even as we in America continue to pray for unity
among Telugu Baptists in India.

Thank you, and may God’s blessing remain upon you.

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