'Baptist Heritage in the New Millennium'
 

Who are the Baptists?
 

United States of America and Canada

USA:
The first Baptist churches in America were in the New England colonies, to which many Puritans had emigrated. Soon after arriving in Boston in 1631, Puritan minister Roger Williams adopted Separatist views. Forced to leave Massachusetts Bay, he founded the colony of Providence (present-day Rhode Island) in 1636 with complete freedom in religious matters. Two years later, he was baptized and formed the first Baptist church in America but remained a Baptist pastor for only a short time. He is chiefly remembered for his stirring writings on religious liberty.

Shortly afterwards, Dr. John Clarke left Boston for Rhode Island, where he joined Williams in the struggle for religious freedom. He established a congregation that was clearly Baptist in doctrine and polity. In 1651, Baptist Obadiah Holmes was publicly whipped in Boston for participating with Clarke in a home prayer meeting, and Henry Dunster, the second president of Harvard College (now University), lost his job in 1654 for affirming believer’s baptism. A Baptist church was formed in Boston in 1665. Its members were persecuted for several years; they drafted the first Baptist confession of faith in the American colonies.

By the 1690s, congregations existed in South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Aided by the enthusiasm flowing from the first Great Awakening, the revival that swept the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, Baptists soon became more numerous. The Philadelphia Association was formed in 1707, the Charleston in 1751, and others in New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South. In 1781, the first church west of the Appalachian Mountains was organized in Kentucky. Eighteenth-century Baptists were diverse; the main groups were the Regular Baptists, the General or Free Will Baptists, the revivalistic Separate Baptists, and the Seventh-Day Baptists.

Although some Baptists had misgivings about the War for American Independence (1775—1783), most saw it as a war for freedom, which for them meant religious freedom.

Isaac Backus, originally a New Light Congregationalist minister, was converted in the Great Awakening and became a leader of the newly emerging Separate Baptists. He wrote pamphlets criticizing taxation for religious purposes and affirming liberty of conscience. The Warren Baptist Association in Massachusetts sent him to the First Continental Congress in 1774 to argue the case for ending religious establishments; and when the War for American Independence broke out, he supported the American cause. As Backus later said, he and his brethren fought on two fronts: against British troops for civil liberty and against Massachusetts legislators for religious liberty. He helped to secure his state’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, but religious liberty was not achieved until 1833 when Massachusetts gave up its religious establishment.

In colonial Virginia, Baptists were frequently jailed for preaching, and they lobbied the legislature for religious liberty. The grievances of this “heretical” sect were ignored until their support for the War for American Independence, and their request to send chaplains for the soldiers helped to change the public’s perception of them. They also formed a coalition with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others who also wished to disestablish the Church of England (now becoming the Protestant Episcopal Church), and they achieved that in Virginia through the Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786).

Later, Virginia Baptists, led by John Leland and others, persuaded Madison to include a firm guarantee of religious liberty in the amendments to the U.S. Constitution known as the Bill of Rights. Hence, the First Amendment opens as follows:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

After becoming president of the United States, Jefferson clarified the meaning of this statement in response to a request from the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association, which had been unable to persuade its state legislature to end the Congregationalist establishment there and had asked the president for his opinion. Jefferson replied in a letter (1802) to them that religion is a matter between man and God and that government has no power to regulate such matters. The First Amendment built a wall of separation between church and state.

Many regard this principle as the new nation’s greatest contribution to civilization. It clearly opened the way for unparalleled Baptist growth in the United States. Unlike Britain, where Baptists consumed much of their energy in combating discriminatory laws preventing involvement in public life and requiring monetary support of Anglican parishes, and unlike other European countries in which the official churches persecuted Baptists, Americans were unhindered in following God’s call to preach the gospel. The separation of church and state enabled them to evangelize freely.
 

Canada:
From Britain and the United States, the Baptist message was carried to the British settlement colonies, continental Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The first churches in Canada were planted in Nova Scotia in the 1760s, and the Great Awakening in the Atlantic provinces fostered the spread of Baptist teachings. Also, some black Baptists moved northward and formed churches. Scottish Baptists and U.S. missionaries founded churches in Ontario and Quebec, but within a few years the Canadians themselves were spreading the gospel across their vast country. Regionalism, missionary work within Canada, and immigration from Europe all contributed to the complexity of Canadian Baptist development. A network of Baptist denominations grew up over the years, the largest of which are the Canadian Baptist Federation (now Canadian Baptist Ministries) and the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada.

From: We Baptists by Study and Research Division, Baptist World Alliance, (Franklin Tn, Providence House Pub., 1999) pp 4-6, 10.
 

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