13 Baptists and Missions

Baptists and Missions By Rev. A. H. Burlingham, D. D., New York.

We use the term Foreign Missions, as embracing modern efforts to evangelize heathen nations. And we view the relation of the Baptist denomination to this movement, in only a few particulars. In tracing the connection of Baptists with the origin of Foreign Missions, we must, of necessity, traverse familiar ground. The names of Carey, Fuller, Ryland, Hall, Sutcliff, Morris and Pearce, are household words to those who have read the history of the rise of Missions in England. As early as 1784, at an associational meeting at Nottingham, by the suggestion of these and other Baptist ministers, a resolution was passed, recommending a Monthly Concert of Prayer, for “the spread of the gospel to the most distant parts of the habitable globe.” This was the origin of the Missionary Concert, and was an unpurposed prophecy of the formation of the Baptist Foreign Missionary Society. This resolution was carried out for several years of the incipient period of this missionary movement. But these good men did not apprehend the silent meaning and drift of their prayers. The thought that they were making way towards forming a Missionary Society did not dawn upon them. It was three years after this, that John Ryland, Sen., rebuked William Carey, who, at a ministers’ meeting at Northampton, timidly asked: “Have the churches of Christ done all they ought to have done for heathen nations?” The words of rebuke are standard, and show how little good men may comprehend the greatness and purpose of Christ’s redemption: “Young man, sit down; when God pleases to convert the heathen world, he will do it without your help or mine either.” The effect of this severe attack was to quicken and strengthen Mr. Carey’s convictions with regard to the duty of Christians towards the heathen. Pour years after this, the ministers’ meeting was held at Clipstone, and here Carey pressed the subject of establishing a mission. But all that was done was to request him to publish a pamphlet upon the subject. The next year, 1792, May 30th, the Association was again held at Nottingham. Here Mr. Carey preached his memorable sermon from Isaiah 54:2-3, making two points: “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” Dr. John Ryland, Jun., says of this sermon: “If all the people had lifted up their voice and wept, as the children of Israel did at Bochim, I should not have wondered at the effect; it would only have seemed proportionate to the cause, so clearly did he prove the criminality of our supineness in the cause of God.” But still they hesitated to move forward. When about to part, and do nothing, Mr. Carey, unable to hold himself longer, said to Mr. Fuller, most beseechingly, “And are you, after all, going again to do nothing?” This brought a decision. A resolution was passed, “That a plan be prepared, against the next ministers’ meeting, at Kettering, for forming a Baptist Society for propagating the Gospel among the heathen.” When the meeting occurred, Oct. 2d, 1792, the Baptist Missionary Society was formed, and a subscription made of £13. 2. 6. This Society was said by friends in other denominations to have been “as disinterested in design, and as strenuous in execution, as any that the Christian world ever did or ever will employ, for the illumination and conversion of idolaters; and surpassing, beyond comparison, all of former missions, and all other undertakings in the grand article of translating the Bible into the languages of the heathen.” “Former missions,” in this quotation, must refer to the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church, of the Moravians, of Danish Christians, and of the Wesleyan Methodists, to plant missions. But up to the period of the formation of the Baptist Missionary Society of England, no organization existed for the purpose of sending the Gospel to the heathen, unless we must recognize as such the old “Society for the propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,” an institution mostly sustained by governmental patronage, and confined in its operations to the British Colonies. This Society had its origin in 1701, and received its charter from William III. Its object was “to provide for the ministrations of the Church of England in the British Colonies, and to propagate the Gospel among native inhabitants of those countries.” This institution has done and is still doing great good, yet in its inception it was not so widely missionary in its spirit and purpose as are modern societies. It contemplated no broader range than British arms and rule marked out. But William Carey saw the whole race in ruin, and saw in the Gospel the only remedy. Into his sweeping vision came mankind, regardless of nationality, and much less of British confines. The Society whose founding he inspired, covered by its reach and purpose all benighted lands. Carey was raised up for this work. Dr. Byland says of him: “As to the immediate origin of a Baptist Mission, I believe God himself infused into the mind of Carey that solicitude for the salvation of the heathen, which cannot be fairly traced to any other source.”

Carey was moved toward the heathen by studying “Cook’s Voyages Round the World.” It is well known that while at work on his shoe-bench, having rudely-constructed maps conveniently arranged, he studied the geography of these heathen countries, and was educating himself in this respect, as well as by his pursuit of linguistic studies, for the sphere which God was calling him to fill. He was the first missionary of the Society whose formation, under Divine guidance, he forced upon the Baptist denomination in England. His own brethren were timid. He was ridiculed by others as a fanatic, and was satirized as the “consecrated cobbler” by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review. He was opposed by his wife in his missionary longings, and encountered barriers to his embarkation from the East India Company; but, nerved by irrepressible conviction, and encouraged by Divine sanction—as he thought—he pushed his way on, and reached the place where God sent him; not Otaheite, where he intended to go, but India. He was willing to be thus turned in his plans. A committee of the Society had determined his destination. This committee meeting was held in Andrew Fuller’s study, at Kettering. It was at this meeting that Mr. Fuller said: “There is a gold mine in India, but it seems almost as deep as the centre of the earth; who will venture to explore if Mr. Carey listened, and said: “I will go down, but remember, you must hold the rope.” Those present solemnly engaged to do so, nor while they lived would they desert him.

Carey embarked for India, June 13th, 1793, and for forty years worked for the salvation of the heathen, becoming—from a “rustic youth plying the humble trade of shoemaker and advancing at length into a village schoolmaster and pastor, but poorly paid and limitedly known in all of these vocations—as noted a man, in learning, in philology, in science, in philosophy, as India could boast; and as to benevolence, as someone has said, “deserving a place by the side of Clarkson and Wilberforce.” The founding of the Baptist Mission at Serampore by Carey, and prosecuted by him and his coadjutors, Messrs. Marshmau and Ward, for so long a time, have vital relation to the enlistment of the Baptists of the United States in the work of Foreign Missions. The wants, the success, the appeals, the heart-throbs of this mission were felt by us as well as by our brethren in England. As early as 1811 and 1812, a year or two before anyone in this country dared to think aloud that the American Baptists would ever organize a Foreign Mission Society, the churches of our denomination in Boston and Salem alone, sent 8-1,600 to aid the Serampore Mission. Even as early as 1802, a Baptist Missionary Society was formed in Massachusetts, whose object was “to furnish occasional preaching, and to promote the knowledge of evangelical truth in the New Settlements within the United States, or further if circumstances rendered it proper.” The letters of Carey, Marshman and Ward, I have no doubt, had much to do with the insertion of this italicized sentence.

Undefined and hidden principles seemed intimating themselves, which blindly promised embodiment sometime in a Baptist organization avowedly for the purpose of giving the Gospel to the heathen. But where was the leader? We had no Baptist Carey; nor had we an Andrew Fuller in our ranks, though one of our subsequent leaders much resembled him —the Rev. Thomas Baldwin. Among the fathers we look in vain for a master, aggressive mind, to descry these intimations of Foreign Mission interest in our denomination, and to lay hold of our Baptist forces and marshal them for the Master’s work in regions benighted. Foreign Missions must be precipitated upon us by a strange and circuitous Providence. The story of the “Consecrated hay-stack” of Williamstown; of the Andover Students; of the Organization of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, in 1810, and the turning of three of the first Missionaries whom this honored society sent to India from Congregationalists to Baptists, is too well known to be dwelt upon in detail. By their convictions, Mr. and Mrs. Judson and Mr. Rice were obliged to throw themselves upon American Baptists for support in their work as Missionaries. As soon as this strange and startling news reached this country, there was as a quick response to the rallying cry of Providence. Our people seem to have been made ready to heed the call. They came together from near and far as if challenged by a bugle blast. And it was no uncertain sound that called the tribes of our Israel together. The voice was too manifestly of God to allow doubt or debate. All minds were one. Letters from Messrs. Judson and Rice came from India at once upon their change of ecclesiastical relations consequent upon their conviction that immersion of believers is the only Scriptural baptism, and reached the Rev. Dr. Baldwin, Pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Boston, in February, 1813. It is well known that, immediately upon receipt of these letters, a meeting of the leading Baptist ministers of Massachusetts was summoned, and they organized the “Baptist Society for propagating the Gospel in India and other foreign parts.” That Mr. Rice, under the exciting emergency that had arisen, came at once to America to rouse our churches to the perils of the perishing millions and to gather them in convention to devise measure? for bringing the aggregate forces of our denomination to bear upon the work of heathen evangelization, is also a fact patent to all who have ever read the thrilling story of our early enlistment in this cause. Rice’s gifts were rare. His soul was ablaze. He went through our land, north and south, and the people in masses listened to his eloquent portrayals of heathen wants and woes, to his moving appeals for action and help, and to his glowing and comprehensive exposition of the Great Commission, as to a rapt prophet, and his arguments and burning exhortations were heard with as breathless attention as was the voice of that rugged forerunner in leathern girdle, who broke upon our world crying in the wilderness of Judea.

Delegates assembled from eleven different States, and from the District of Columbia, in convention, thirty-three in number, in the First Baptist church, Philadelphia, on Wednesday, May 18, 1814. The mighty men of our denomination, the leaders of our tribes, from Massachusetts to Georgia, were there, and in their councils there was not a jarring note. As the Holy Spirit had called them together, he brooded over them and kept them in hushed oneness. The Rev. Dr. Furman, of Charleston, S. C., was made President, and the Rev. Dr. Baldwin, of Boston, Secretary. After days spent in repeated seasons of prayer, in listening to sermons and addresses, in deliberations and fraternal conferences, a Constitution for a National Baptist Missionary Society was brought forth by a committee appointed for that purpose, and was unanimously adopted by a rising vote. This was a glorious day for the Baptists of this country, and hopeful in its prophecy and promise for the world. The preamble to this Constitution is well worth recording:

“We, the Delegates from Missionary Societies and other religious bodies of the Baptist Denomination in various parts of the United States, met in convention in the city of Philadelphia, for the purpose of carrying into effect the benevolent intentions of our constituents, by organizing a plan for exciting, combining and directing the energies of the whole Denomination, in sacred effort for sending the good tidings of salvation to the heathen, and to nations destitute of pure Gospel Light, do agree to the following rules or fundamental principles.” The original designation of this Society was “The General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America, for Foreign Missions.”

It was provided in the constitution that the body should meet once in three years, hence the popular name, “Triennial Convention.” For more than thirty years this preamble remained unchanged, and the constitution continued substantially the same, though slight alterations were introduced from time to time. This old “Triennial Convention,” till 1846, commanded the support and combined the moral and religious elements of our whole denomination, north and south. The Rev. Luther Rice was appointed the first Missionary of the Board, and the Rev. Adoniram Judson the second. But though Mr. Rice was appointed a Missionary, the Board gave him special instructions “to continue his itinerant services in these United States for a reasonable time, with a view to excite the public mind more generally to engage in Missionary exertions, and to assist in originating societies and institutions for carrying the Missionary design into execution.” He expected to go back to India after “a reasonable time.” Such was Mr. Judson’s hope, and concerning which he and Mr. Rice were in anxious correspondence. But the work of quickening the energies of the churches, and of gathering funds, so grew in importance, that Mr. Rice remained the agent of the Board till 1826, and then left the position to enter upon the work of collecting funds for Columbian College at Washington. In all he spent twenty-three years in agency work, falling asleep near Edgefleld, S. C., in 1836. Long before this, most of the fathers of this sublime enterprise had passed away. They had wrought and others had entered into their labors. The great movement inaugurated by them has proved to be the grandest of all the achievements of our Denomination, and the names of its founders are immortal.

Having looked at the relation of Baptists to the origin of Foreign Missions, we now give a passing thought to the attitude of the denomination towards this inaugurated work of foreign evangelization in its progress, or while it is in its tentative state.

Mr. and Mrs. Judson soon found themselves, after being driven from Bengal by the East India Company, at work in Burmah. They toiled on for six years before the first convert rewarded their faith and patience. From time to time this mission was reinforced, and others were established. These evangelizing agencies were slow in development, but they made sure progress, as was prophesied by the spirit and consecration which attended their inception. It is a stupendous work to plant and grow a mission in the midst of unbroken heathenism. Language must be mastered; habits must be studied; confidence must be won; instruction must be communicated by speech and press; God’s word must be translated; the Gospel must be preached; hard ground must be broken up, the seed of truth sown, and the harvest waited for with patience, faith and hope. During all the time this initial work was going on under our Foreign Mission Board by those sent abroad, our people at home were praying and waiting, but not weary and heart-sick from hopes deferred any more than the toilers on the field. From the natal day of our missions to this, our churches have been growing in missionary enlistment and consecration. They have never questioned that the Divine pillar of cloud and fire was leading them on to larger and better missionary possessions. Sustained by faith and a steadiness of purpose which faith inspires, not doubting the ultimate and large success of their undertaking, they have increased in their charities and gifts, in the ratio of growing numbers, as the steady movements or exigencies of our missions have demanded. As Baptists were the pioneers in England of organized and general missionary work at the dawn of the new missionary era and by the signal interposition of God, were obliged to be nearly abreast with the first movement in this country to carry the Gospel to the heathen nations, so we have kept on in our missionary interest, not as a whole denomination to be sure, but in the fair support of our Society, in all the years needed for sowing the fields specially ours by the providence of God. For the most part, during the history of our foreign work, there has been a reasonable balance or agreement between our home interest and our mission growth abroad. Money has been wanting at times, but when the demand has sorely pressed, our churches have risen and met the exigency of the hour. In the necessarily slow growth of our work at first, amid the discouragements which must needs beset its early progress, to have held on, to have believed God, to have had faith in the ultimate triumph of the Gospel preached to the benighted, is proof of God’s grace vouchsafed to us, and a cause of unceasing gratitude to Him who says, “Lo, I am with you always.” There have been times when despair might have well-nigh come to faith, discomfiture to patience, discouragement to hope, but God kept us toned and strong through these crises. We have waited for God, waited for blessings upon our Missionaries and for heavenly dews upon their fields; and, meanwhile, have with moderate promptitude, steadiness and strength, held the rope, while our brethren have been exploring the mines.

If our faith had been stronger, our prayers more fervent and full, and our gifts far larger, men for missions would have multiplied, and results have been quicker and ampler. But let us be thankful that for sixty-five years the Baptists of this country have steadily cherished the spirit of Missions, n, spirit that has grown with their growth, and strengthened with their strength, and that now, as never before, Missions have the hearts of our people. Is it too much to say, that having kept pace, in some degree, with the progress of our missions, we are better fitted, both by the general commitment of our brethren to the cause, and by the inspiration coming from abundant blessings upon our efforts abroad, to enter upon the new missionary epoch already come?

Though of gradual accumulation, taking our mission history together, the aggregate results of our work are great. In the summary of achievements we have in mind, and of which we predicate a grandeur and a glory which divine power and love alone can create, we take into the view our whole Foreign Mission work as a denomination, north and south. We contemplate American Baptists as a unit in missions. We speak as if no rupture between north and south had occurred in our missionary administration. We unite the Missionary Union and the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, as we were originally united from 1814 to 1846, in surveying the results of our great Foreign Missionary enterprise. Statistics to any considerable extent do not befit this article. But no one can contemplate our work without pride and thanksgiving. In the sixty-five years of our Foreign Missionary life, we have gained an enviable place among the hosts of God’s chosen ones who have heard and heeded the Great Commission of the Lord Jesus. The men and women whom we have sent forth have been as the finest of the wheat. The renowned and sainted Judsons, who first cast themselves upon us from the promptings of conscience and duty, are the head of a long line of immortal names which have made our missionary annals glorious. Adoniram Judson and his earliest heroic, wife are the first of a grand procession of shining ones whom the Lord has honored us in sending as messengers of salvation to the destitute. Though the first blaze in peerless resplendency never to suffer eclipse, they have had many, many worthy successors. What interest will cluster to the final scene when all these toiling, weary, shining ones shall say to the Master, Here are we and the multitudes thou hast given us from heathen realms! How will we, that have prayed and given for their success, share in the raptures of that hour! And these trophies of saving grace brought to that final crowning shall be many—from the north they shall come, and from the west, and from the land of Sinim; the abundance of the Sea and the forces of the Gentiles shall swell the numbers which they shall bring to the great coronation. We need to be in such relations of working fellowship and spiritual reciprocity to these honored missionaries, by our faith, love and gifts, that their works and glory shall be ours, and ours theirs.

It cannot be questioned, that in results the missions of the American Baptists stand preeminent. If this were the place to array them, and it were needful to do it, we could show by comparative figures that our missions, with less money than either of the other three of the great Foreign Missionary Societies of this country, have had larger results in conversions than all of the missions of these other societies combined! Not boastingly must this truth be set forth, but humbly and gratefully, and as a pious recognition of God’s grace and approval. In our missions there have been times of great fruitfulness, followed by seasons of lull, if not of spiritual impoverishment. As at home in our churches, so abroad, God’s blessing comes in waves. There are large ingatherings in our missions at seasons. Between these periods profitable spaces often come, in which the work of compacting, centralizing, strengthening, marshalling Christian forces goes on. The first most notable period of blessing to our missions, after the long, patient faith-struggle of Judson, crowned finally by the conversion and baptism of Moung Nan, was the great Karen Movement. In a very short time about ten thousand of these people were converted and gathered into churches. Sinco that time the work has gone steadily on among that people, but not so rapidly. Perhaps twenty thousand of these Karens are now in churches, and thousands of Christian Karens have died in faith. After years of comparative quietness on the foreign field generally, and of weakness, despair, agony, at that particular mission, comes a flood of blessing upon the Teloogoo people. For years back, converts have been multiplied there “as doves flying to their windows,” till the crowning year came, and that the last of which we have definite report—1878—during a few of the latter months of which ten thousand converted Teloogoos were baptized into the church at Ongole by the Rev. Mr. Clough and his helpers! Now that seems not the crowning year after all, but this, whose report we shall have in a few months, 1879, it may be is; for Mr. Clough said, in February of ‘79 that forty thousand more of the Teloogoos were converted and awaiting baptism! And 1879 may not be the crowning year, but we may be nearing the fulfillment of the promise that “A nation shall be born in a day.” The great year shall be signalized by that, and soon the banner may be seen opening its crimson folds, to the joy of earth and heaven. May God hasten the time! Surely we are brought to a day, by the wonders of Divine grace, when we must praise the God of missions as never before, for his blessings upon our efforts as a denomination in giving us this demonstration of the saving power of the Gospel, unequalled since the day of Pentecost, if even then; and we are brought to a time when the demands upon us for enlargement are unmistakable and imperious. The accumulated appliances and interests of our long established missions, and the signal blessings of God upon them, have vastly increased their wants. To be indifferent to these, or not fully to meet them, is a turning back upon ourselves, an insult to our antecedents and traditions altogether unworthy of us. These demands upon us are at least threefold—relating to knowledge, men, money.

We put knowledge first, because if facts connected with our missions are known, helpers and means will follow. The rank and file of our church members have but little intelligence as to missions. Their early and thrilling history is a sealed book. The course of events filling up this history down to the present is not in our minds. The leaders of our churches, ministers, prominent laymen and influential women, in many instances are poorly informed as to missionary matters. The papers and periodicals giving current news concerning them are lamentably neglected. The weekly religious newspapers, and the missionary monthlies, are full of good things which are never seen by great numbers of us, because we are too poor, careless, mean or lazy, to avail ourselves of these repositories of intelligence. A good religious weekly should be found in every Baptist family in this country. The organs of our missionary societies should be as widely circulated. An epitomized history of the origin and first years of this great missionary movement of ours should come into all our homes in some way. A cheap reprint of the Memoirs of the first Mrs. Judson, put up in strong paper or flexible cloth covers, and sent generously among the Baptist families of our land, would be as remunerative an investment as our Mission Boards could mate. If pastors would inform themselves, and take missions upon their hearts, and give out their facts and fire to the people, and keep it up, our churches would soon become educated in these most vital things. We owe it to our providential relation to missions, to our honored prominence in establishing them, to God who has so blest us in them, to the memories of the dead, and to the worth of the living men and women who have given themselves to this work, and owe it to the large demands of the present, consequent upon their stupendous growth, to inform ourselves as to the origin, development and glorious achievements of our missions. To know them, is to love, reinforce and support them.

Recruits, to take the places of missionaries disabled or dead, are in constant and largo demand. Others to occupy positions incident to enlargement and God’s abounding blessing, are needed even more. These opening fields, far-spreading and waiting for the sickle, must have reapers. The barriers are now all down, and the world is an open field. The great cry is for men. The business of the churches now is to furnish the supply for which the world is clamoring, and which God’s grand movements in missions imperiously demand. As never before, all signs indicate that drafts from our churches must be frequent and large. Cords are rapidly lengthening, and the boundaries of Christ’s visible kingdom are impatient to encircle the whole earth. God’s people must grasp the situation, and provide for the wants which are so pressing. Choice sons and daughters of our churches must not hold back, nor be held back from mission altars. What Lewis Shuck, in a great missionary meeting in Richmond many years ago, said upon a subscription card when the collection was being taken—” I give myself”—must be said by many to-day, or the ripened harvests of the heathen world will perish for lack of reapers. But money, as well as men, has rightful and needed place as a factor in this divine problem of missions. To fail here, is as if an army had no commissariat. To be weak in exchequer is to leave the struggling host with no base of supplies. It would seem that the greater ought to carry the less—if men and women give themselves, it is a bold, impious, acted heresy, for others having it, holding the same relations of debt to God and the world, not to give their money. To-day, with all the rich tokens of God’s favor upon the missions of both the Foreign Boards of American Baptists, their treasuries are empty, and the men in financial place by denominational call, are asked to make brick without straw. Every year they are confronted with the grim spectacle of probable debt at its fiscal close. These things ought not so to be. Where is the fault? Largely with pastors. In too many instances are missions regarded outside a pastor’s care and effort. Pastors must educate churches in benevolence, or this withering curse of deficiency and debt will never be removed. But though we thus speak, we have faith that He to whom belong the silver and gold, and the cattle upon a thousand hills, will so rule the hearts of Christian men entrusted with these treasures as stewards, that there shall be proper proportion between offerings and demands, as to our missions. May time soon bring us to such a blessed agreement. It shall come, and money enough shall be given. An increased intelligence, a more correct view of what a church is for, and entering into sympathy with Jesus by prayer and love in his great work of saving the world, will enlarge our souls and open our pockets. But still greater things than the wonders of the present are in reserve for Christ’s church as a Missionary Institution. Great possibilities are yet to be realized. The grand enterprises of the world in the interests of commerce, prophesy this more wondrous spread of the Gospel. They mark a new epoch in its reach and in its facilities for propagation. Commerce is ever throwing up highways for the Gospel. The quickened passages to China, Japan and India, by going West over rail, or East by the Suez Canal; the longed-for and surely to be completed ship-cut through the Southern Isthmus; the proposed and probably not impracticable scheme of flooding the Great Eastern Desert so that ships may sail into the very heart of Africa—all these improved carrying facilities are rich in promise and means for an immeasurably wider heraldry of the Gospel. The fact that for the last twenty-five years all the huge undertakings for opening new carrying routes are in the direction of the great heathen populations of the earth, is profoundly significant to every student of Christian missions. Is it not time for us to go up higher and take a broader outlook upon the world? Shall we not try to ascend those mountain heights of vision upon which Isaiah stood, when he told such wondrous things concerning the growth and triumphs of Christ’s Kingdom? To help to actualize what was in the rapt vision of the prophet is our work. What Carey and Judson and their long lines of honored successors on mission fields attempted to do, must be carried forward by the great Baptist family of England and America, and by the enlisted forces of other Christian communions, so as at length “the forces of the Gentiles” and the “abundance of the sea” shall traverse that highway which no vulture’s eye hath seen, and no lion’s whelp hath trod.