News

April 18, 1688:  Settlers in Germantown, PA adopted an anti-slavery document, the first one in America.  American Baptists have made Policy Statements and Resolutions on issues that affect people’s lives.  ABHS has a record of these statements which researchers often reference when visiting to do research.

April 17, 1666: Thomas Goold and his associates were fined by a Massachusetts court for holding illegal religious meetings.  There have been many posts on our page about the conflicts between the Baptists in Boston and the Massachusetts officials.  Laws did not allow for the freedom to start new churches, or to not baptize infants.  Church attendance was compulsory.  Baptists have had a long history of fighting for the separation of Church and State.  ABHS has the record of this long fight, including writings of early Baptists and resolutions of official bodies.

April 14, 1773:  Thomas Paul, a free black from New Hampshire was born.  He was self-taught, and in 1805 was ordained at Nottingham West, New Hampshire.  Reverend Paul formed the African Baptist Church in Boston (later known as the Joy Street Baptist Church) and served as pastor for more than 20 years.  He also helped establish the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York.  He was greatly respected wherever he was known.   ABHS has an extensive collection of annual minutes of Black associations and state conventions dating from 1835 – 1965.

April 12, 1850.  Adoniram Judson, the first Baptist missionary from the United States, died at sea on a voyage to the Isle of France.  He was 62 years old and had been a missionary in Burma for 37 years.  ABHS has the original manuscript letters he sent to Baptists in the United States.  The mission to Burma was the catalyst that organized people to form mission societies to raise money for mission work.  ABHS also has the official records of various foreign missionary societies.

April 9, 1525: In the fourth month of Anabaptist history, 500 Anabaptists were baptized in Zurich, Switzerland.  Hulrich Zwingli and a group of reform-minded men were questioning infant baptisms and other practices of the Catholic Church as early as 1522, The Zurich Council ruled, in 1525, that all who continued to refuse to baptize their infants should be expelled from Zurich. In an act of defiance, in January 1525, a group of reformers took a believers baptism and thus began the Anabaptists (re-baptizers).  ABHS has many pamphlets and other writings dating from the early 1500 for and against Anabaptists.

April 7, 1657: Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard, rejected infant baptism after studying the issue thoroughly.  He began preaching against it from the pulpit in Cambridge, and was forced to resign his presidency in 1657.  He was brought to court because he didn’t baptize his child.  His preaching and witness was the center of the influence that brought about the First Baptist Church of Massachusetts Bay.

 

April 4, 1969:  Martin Luther King, Jr. minister and civil rights leader was assassinated in Memphis, TN.  ABHS has a record of his attendance at Crozer Theological Seminary (pictured here), from which he graduated in 1951 and where he was elected president of the student body.  ABHS also has many books and magazine articles about his life and ministry, books by him and several recordings of a sermons he preached at various conferences.

April 3, 1871 The Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society was organized in Boston.  Two hundred women came together to form the society which sent women as missionaries to women in foreign lands.  The WABFMS joined with the Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society of the West (Chicago), to form the Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society.  ABHS is the official repository for the records and magazines of WABFMS.

April 2, 1667.  Three Baptists were fined for ‘absence from the Ordinances of publicke worship’ in Cambridge, MA.    ABHS has original church records for Broadway Baptist church in Cambridge for the years 1862-1967.  ABHS also has several books published in 1667 and 1668 that deal with the necessity for people to attend church and hear sermons.  There is also one, by Sir Charles Wolseley promoting the idea that force should not be used to attend church.

March 31, 1836.  Philadelphia Baptist Association granted a charter to Haddington Theological and Literary Institution.  Haddington was the only school belonging to the Baptist denomination in Pennsylvania and is the first established by the oldest association in the United States.  It was originally located about 4 miles west of Philadelphia, but in 1838 it was moved to Germantown and renamed the Germantown Collegiate Institution.  In another few years it went out of business.  But, the Association’s interest in education resulted in the rise of Sunday schools and other educational institutions.  ABHS has records of the Philadelphia Baptist Association from 1707 and many pamphlets and reports on Sunday or Sabbath School.

March 30, 1974, Rev. G. P. Vins was arrested and, in January, 1975, he was sentenced to five years in concentration camps followed by five more years of exile in Siberia.  His ‘crime’ was to be desirous of and fight for the principle of religious liberty.  He refused to have the local churches and their pastors controlled by the (Russian) government.  He was arrested in 1966, and again in 1970, and after serving his sentences, he went underground to carry on his ministry covertly.  In 1980 Vins was one of five dissidents exchanged by the United State, for two Russian spies.

March 28, 1665.  First Church Boston was organized with seven men and two women in the home of Thomas Goold.  Three years later Goold was banished from the state (see posts on March 6 and 7).  ABHS has Boston First Baptist records from 1771-1960.

March 25, 1783. Luther Rice was born in Northborough, MA.  He sailed with Adoniram Judson, but returned to the United States to raise money to support the Judson mission to Burma.  Through his work, the Triennial Convention first met in 1814 and then every third year.  This first national organization of American Baptists was called the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions.  The picture above is a drawing of the Triennial Convention.  ABHS has board minutes, artifacts, and correspondence from the successor organizations, which now is known as International Ministries.

March 24, 1638. John Clarke (a physician, Baptist minister), with Anne Hutchinson, William Coddington,  Philip Sherman, and other religious dissenters settled on Aquidneck Island (thereafter known as Rhode Island), which was purchased from the local tribes.  Clarke was the author of the charter, which founded Rhode Island on the principles of religious freedom.  Roger Williams who was forced out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded Providence Plantation (now known as the city of Providence) as a free proprietary colony seeking religious and political tolerance.  ABHS has records of First Baptist, Providence, dating from 1638-1903.

March 19, 1893, Tremont Baptist Temple burned for the third time.  Originally built as a theater, in 1843 Baptists in Boston purchased it and remodeled it as a church which would also provide ‘free seats’ for the poor and strangers coming into the city to seek work, and were not able to rent pews (which was the common practice then).  In burned for the first time in 1852, was rebuilt, and burned again in 1879.  After the third fire in 1893, it was rebuilt again and still serves the people of Boston.  ABHS has many items in the Congregational Files from Tremont Temple.

March 18, 1913, Reverend Edward W. Clark passed away after serving, with his wife, as a missionary for forty- two years in India.  In 1868 he took charge of the mission printing press in Assam, India. Clark developed the language into writing, translated some of the Gospels and printed many books for use in the schools.  His last work was the Ao-Naga-English Dictionary.  ABHS has 13 folders of correspondence between Clark and the mission board, including one folder of correspondence from his wife, Mary.

Join us for the “Legacy of Walter Rauschenbusch Conference” at Mercer University’s Atlanta Campus! Hosted by the American Baptist Historical Society and Mercer’s Center for Theology and Public Life, these lectures will address Rauschenbusch’s continued impact as the most significant Baptist ethicist of the 20th century. An extraodinary variety of topics will be addressed, including race, gender, Kingdom of God theology, and social ethics.

The international group of scholars presenting will include David Gushee, Gary Dorrien, Christopher Evans, Andrea Strubind, Roger Prentice, Adam Bond, Wendy Deichmann, Dominik Gautier, and Rauschenbusch’s great-grandson, Paul Rauschenbusch.

Registration is open until March 25 and FREE to all students (though student registration is still required).

For more information, visit: https://author.mercer.edu/www/mu-ctpl/sponsored-events/the-legacy-of-walter-rauschenbusch.cfm

March 15, 1843.  Richard Henry Boyd, publisher for the National Baptist convention, USA, was born in Shelby, NC.  ABHS has issues of the National Baptist newspaper 1865-1894, and the National Baptist convention Series for 1900, 1902, and 1936. National Baptist Convention) is the largest predominantly African-American Christian denomination in the United States. It is headquartered at the Baptist World Center in Nashville, Tennessee.  The denomination claims approximately 31,000 congregations.  The Convention reports having an estimated 7.5 million members.