William Carey's Instructions to Missionaries

In 1814 Baptists in America formed their first national foreign missions board, known as the Triennial Convention (it met every three years). Meanwhile, in England Baptists were in their third decade of doing foreign missions. William Carey, father of the Baptist missions movement, penned instructions to new missionaries, as follows:

Pay the utmost attention at all times to the state of your own mind both towards God and Man. Cultivate an intimate acquaintance with your own heart, labour to obtain a deep sense of your own depravity and to trust always in Christ. Be pure in heart and meditate much upon the pure and holy character of God. Cherish every amiable and right disposition towards men. Be mild, gentle and unassuming, yet firm and manly. As soon as you perceive anything wrong in your spirit and behaviour set about correcting it and never suppose yourself so perfect as to need no correction. ....

Behave affably and genteelly to all but not cringingly or unsteadily towards any. Feel that you are a man, and always act with the dignified sincerity and truth which will command the esteem of all. Seek not the society of worldly men, but when called to be with them act and converse with propriety and dignity. To do this labour to gain a good acquaintance with History, Geography, Men and Things. A Gentleman is the next best character after a Christian, and the latter includes the former. Money never makes a, Gentleman, much less does a fine appearance, but an enlarged understanding joined to engaging manners. ....

(For Carey's full listing of instructions, click here.)

Carey's instructions are to a large degree a product of his time. Penned in the early era of Baptist mission work when many Baptists remained unconvinced that Christians should be doing mission work in the first place, Carey placed great emphasis on self-reflection and displayed an inquisitiveness for disciplines and knowledge beyond the realm of religion. An understanding of self and an appreciation of other cultures - or at the least, an attempt to understand and an oppeness to appreciating other cultures - underpinned Carey's pioneering efforts in preaching the Gospel in foreign lands.

Much has changed since 1814, but perhaps some of William Carey's instructions yet remain relevant to this day.

A Future Without Baptists? Who Cares?

In the 17th century and into the middle 18th century, more than a few people envisioned a future without Baptists. From the English monarchy to the clergy of the Church of England in America and the Congregational and Anglican theocracies in colonial America, Baptists were heretical undesirables who needed to be eradicated (preferrably) or tightly contained (at the least).

While their ill-wishers were many, few cared for the people known as Baptists. The relative handful of Baptist churches that existed were small congregations. Converts were infrequent. Baptist faith convictions of freedom of individual conscience, believer's baptism, democratic church polity, religious liberty for all, and church state separation did not solicit the good graces of the American public.

Yet a funny thing happened along the road of the government and church's campaign to rid the world of Baptists.

Instead of taking down their church signs and fading into oblivion, Baptists double-downed on their faith convictions and began growing in number in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the 1770s and early 1780s, Baptist support for the American Revolution helped ensure victory over the British. And in the late 1780s and early 1790s, to the amazement of their many detractors, Baptist faith convictions of freedom of individual conscience, democracy, religious liberty for all, and church state separation emerged as the foundation of the new American nation.

It is not an exaggeration to say that without the Baptist witness - without the survival of the very people that governments and clergy wanted to eradicate - it is possible that America might not even exist today.

And so now, in the 21st century, we Baptists stand at another crossroads. The Baptist name is fading. Some (again) envision a world without Baptists. Does anyone care? And what would a 21st century world without Baptists look like?

Join the Baptist History & Heritage Society for a Tampa CBF General Assembly work entitled: A Future Without Baptists? Who Cares? on Friday, June 24 at 2 PM.

The workshop features Andi Sullivan, co-founder of HisNets; Emily Hull McGee, minister to young adults at Louisville's Highland Baptist Church; David King, missional congregations assistance at CBF National; and Doug Weaver, Associate Professor of Religion and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Religion.

The workshop is free, and registration is not required.

Bapto-Mormons: A Heritage Hijacked

The past week's annual meeting of the Baptist History & Heritage Society, hosted by Dallas Baptist University, examined contemporary Baptists' unease with their own faith heritage. John Ragosta, historian and lawyer from the University of Virginia (and not a Baptist himself), brought to life the Baptist voice and witness of the American Revolutionary era, reminding today's Baptists - in no uncertain terms - that strict church-state separation is the denomination's great contribution to the American nation.

On the other hand, Stephen Stookey (pictured), professor of church history at Dallas Baptist University, offered a fresh-examination of fake historian David Barton. Barton, a Texan political figure with no historical credentials, has attained rock star-like status in many Baptist congregations. He is well-known for fabricating or (at best) cutting and pasting historical tidbits in order to create a historical mythology craved by today's Christian evangelicals who desperately want to believe that - contrary to clear documentary evidence - America was founded as a constitutionally Christian nation.

Stookey, however, moved beyond a mere rundown of David Barton's deceptions (Barton has been lying about America's history for several decades; here's a recent rundown of some of the lies) and instead examined the source of his fabricated history. Offering fresh historical perspective on the man who would refashion America into a theocracy, Stookey traced Barton's mythological constructions to the late Mormon conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen, "a former FBI agent and professor at Brigham Young University who became a frequent speaker on the John Birch Society circuit in the 1970s" whose views on Mormon orgins and eschatology are the foundation of Barton's thinking and writing.

Stookey's new contribution to the historiography of David Barton makes it all the more difficult for Baptist followers of Barton to continue supporting his fake history. Not only is the forsaking of Baptist heritage necessary in order to follow Barton, but also the embracing of extremist Mormon conspiracies. Yet so loyal to Barton are many American evangelicals - Baptist and otherwise - that some will yet choose mythology and conspiracy over truth.

Stookey's presentation will be published in a future edition of the Baptist History & Heritage Journal.

Sunday Mail Delivery

In our technologically-evolving twenty-first century world, a centuries-old communications medium is suffering: postal mail delivery this year continues a decades-long pattern of slumping volume and declining revenue. While able to withstand and thrive through changes in modes of mail transportation over the centuries - from horse to automobile, boat to airplanes - the challenges facing today's postal service come in the form of tiny electronic bytes that collectively make first class letters increasingly rare.

One proposed solution to restoring profitability to the U.S. Postal Service is the cessation of Saturday mail delivery. The concept seems to be gaining little traction thus far.

Two hundred years ago this year, the Post Service faced a different weekend problem: Sunday mail delivery.

At the time of America's founding, Sunday mail delivery was common practice. In a nation separating church from state, Sunday was treated like other days from the perspective of government. Post offices - first established in 1775 in the Second Contintental Congress - were typically open for at least part of the day both Saturday and Sunday. Mail sorting and delivery was a seven-day-a-week job, and it was not uncommon for church folks to drop by the post office after church on Sunday to pick up their mail.

During the 1780s, few Americans actually attended church. Historians estimate that roughly 7-10% of Americans were church folk, a trend that did not change until after the beginning of the Second Great Awakenining at the turn of the nineteenth century. The revivals characterizing the Awakening, made possible by the free marketplace of religion ensured by religious liberty for all and the separation of church and state, increased public interest in Christianity. At the same time, this newfound religious fervor provided an opportunity for Christian leaders - many of whom remained angry over America's founding as a secular nation - to Christianize the culture in a way that the government refused to do. 

Against this backdrop of revivals seeking to Christianize American culture, in 1809 in Washington, Pennsylvania, a Presbyterian elder was expelled from his church. Just what was Hugh Wylie's sin? As the town postmaster, he followed the custom of Sunday mail delivery.

Wylie's expulsion from church signaled the first popular backlash against Sunday mail delivery, with Presbyterians at the forefront of the charge. None other than Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University and one of the most prominent Presbyterians in America, had stirred up the sentiment that led to the 1809 incident.

In order to quell the controversy in Washington, Pennsylvania from spreading, U.S. Postmaster General Gideon Granger in 1810 enacted federal legislation officially forbidding the nation's 2,300 post offices from closing on Sundays.

Yet instead of putting a stop to the controversy, the 1810 Postal Service act eventually unleashed the anger of many more Christians. By 1815, the government had received over one hundred petitions from angry Christians demanding the cessation of Sunday mail delivery. While the petitions were relativley few in number at that time, they typically voiced a new - and false - argument kindled by the revival fervor of the early nineteenth century: America was a Christian nation, and the U.S. government a Christian government.

As revival fires spread throughout New England, upstate New York and to the Western frontier, church attendance increased dramatically, while opposition to Sunday mail delivery grew proportionally. In 1828, the General Union for the Promotion of the Christian Sabbath was formed in New York City for the purpose of boycotting businesses that operated on Sundays. Within a year, nearly 500 petitions against working on Sundays had been submitted to Congress.

Politicians and many citizens, alarmed by the religious backlash, charged that a new Christian political party was forming with the intent of seizing control of the government and making America a Christian nation. Congress felt the heat, and by 1830 individual states began filing petitions opposing a repeal of the 1810 Sunday mail delivery act.

Ultimately, a combination of state petitions and the strong leadership of a few notable Baptists helped provide the U.S. Congress with the fortitude to stand up to the anti-Sunday mail delivery crowd. The Chair of the Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post roads was none other than General Richard M. Johnson, a national hero of the War of 1812, and a committed Baptist. In January 1829, Johnson and fellow minister Obadiah Brown - pastor of Washington's First Baptist Church - led in the formation of the Senate's "Report on the Transportation of Mails on Sunday." The report opposed efforts to repeal the 1810 law, and reiterated the nation's founding upon a secular Constitution and the strict separation of church and state.

In part the Report declared:

"What other nations call religious toleration, we call religious rights. They are not exercised in virtue of governmental indulgence, but as rights, of which government cannot deprive any portion of citizens, however small. Despotic power may invade those rights, but justice still confirms them. Let the national legislature once perform an act which involves the decision of a religious controversy, and it will have passed its legitimate bounds. The precedent will then be established, and the foundation laid for that usurpation of the Divine prerogative in this country, which has been the desolating scourge to the fairest portions of the old world. Our Constitution recognises no other power than that of persuasion, for enforcing religious observances. Let the professors of Christianity recommend their religion by deeds of benevolence -- by Christian meekness -- by lives of temperance and holiness. Let them combine their efforts to instruct the ignorant -- to relieve the widow and the orphan -- to promulgate to the world the gospel of their Savior, recommending its precepts by their habitual example: government will find its legitimate object in protecting them. It cannot oppose them, and they will not need its aid. Their moral influence will then do infinitely more to advance the true interests of religion, than any measures which they may call on Congress to enact."

Thanks in large part to Johnson's leadership at a pivotal time in 1829, United States postal operations continued for many more decades, with the Sunday movement of mail continuing until after the Civil War and Sunday post office operations continuing until 1912. Brought about because of opposition from a coalition of non-Baptist ministers and postal clerks who wanted one day a week off of work, the 1912 closing of all post offices on Sundays precluded a new era of Civil Religion in the decades following.

On Not Forgetting: Edwin S. Gaustad

Edwin S. Gaustad, one of the premier historians of American religion in the twentieth and early twenty-first century, died last month. His passing has been noted and his life remembered by Baptist news services and historical organizations, as well as the New York Times. Gaustad himself was a Baptist who was appreciative of his faith roots.

A prolific author, his books have been read by many. Much of his work focused on the colonial era in American history, and Gaustad relentlessly reminded us of the importance of religious dissent. Central to the narrative of dissent is the story of Baptists. From Roger Williams (first Baptist in America and founder of Rhode Island) to John Leland (national Baptist leader in the late eighteenth century), Baptists' refusal to conform to approved orthodoxy and the will of colonial theocratic communities bore fruit in the birth of America as a nation of religious liberty and separation of church and state.

A national teacher, Gaustad's influence extended far beyond the classroom. He taught America about herself, and reminded Americans of the best of their heritage - liberty and freedom. At the same time, he reminded Baptists to be proud and protective of their contributions to the American story.

Thanks to Edwin Gaustad, countless Americans today realize that our nation's history cannot be fully understood apart from the religious dimension - both the good and the bad. May we never forget this truth.

Thanks to Edwin Gaustad, we are less likely to forget who we are. His is a legacy of remembering.