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May 1, 1845. The Triennial Convention approved the (Executive) Committee’s recommendation that if a slave holder wanted to be a missionary, he or she had to be approved by the whole convention. In the previous December, the Alabama Convention had sent a question about this, which the Committee answered. This vote supported the Committee’s answer that it would be against their conscious to appoint a slave holder. This was the reason that the southern churches withdrew and formed the Southern Baptist Church and their own Foreign Missionary Society.

April 30, 1915:  Ellen Cushing died in Providence, RI.  Cushing was first an educator who assisted freed slaves in entering post-war society.  Later she went as a missionary to Burma with her husband, Josiah, where they collaborated on an English-Shan dictionary.  In the late 1890s, she started the Baptist Training Institute in Philadelphia to train single women missionaries.  The BTI later became Ellen Cushing College.

 

April 29, 1840:  the American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention held its first session in New York.  Until then, the Baptists had maintained a strained peace by carefully avoiding discussion of the topic of slavery. But in 1840, an American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention brought the issue into the open.  The Baptist Foreign Mission Board denied a request by the Alabama Convention that slave owners be eligible to become missionaries. Finally, a Baptist Free Mission Society was formed and refused Southern money. The southern members withdrew and formed the Southern Baptist Convention.  The split was completed in 1845. ABHS has the original minutes of the Foreign Mission Board which details the discussion of the Alabama request.  

April 22, 1834: Johann Oncken was one of the first Baptists in Germany to be baptized. Hamburg. Born in Germany, but raised in Scotland and England, Oncken embraced believer’s baptism by immersion after much study and consultation.  The Continental Society appointed him as a missionary to Germany where his ministry, although plagued by civil and religious persecution, prospered beyond his wildest expectations. In 1834, Barnas Sears, an American Baptist visiting on the continent baptized Oncken and his wife, along with five other believers, in the Elbe River. The following day they were organized into a Baptist church with Oncken as their pastor.   It is estimated that Oncken was responsible for distributing over two million Bibles and untold millions of gospel tracts in Europe. His motto was “Every Baptist a missionary.”

April 19, 1836.  A. J. Gordon was born in Hew Hampton, N.H. For over 30 years he pastored two churches in Boston.  A respected evangelist, he founded Gordon College with his wife, Maria (first called Boston Missionary Training School).  He was involved in the American Baptist Missionary Union and founder of the prophecy magazine The Watchword.  The American Baptist Quarterly recently published an issue devoted to him “Adoniram Judson Gordon: American Baptist Pastor and Evangelical Leader.”

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.

If you are quarantined at home, and suddenly find yourself homeschooling, perhaps you can draw some inspiration from this story found in our archives.

American Baptist missions in Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan were disrupted by the Kanto earthquake of September 1, 1923. Much of the mission activity in Japan centered around educational programs from kindergarten through college. The missionaries in Japan generally spent their summers at Takayama, near Sendai in the Tohoku province. Because many of the schools and houses of the missionaries were damaged or destroyed by the earthquakes and subsequent fires in Tokyo and Yokohama, the missionary families stayed at Takayama in the fall. In the ABHS collection is the written reminiscence of Felicia Gressitt Back. This is what she writes about that fall:

With so many families bereft of their homes there was nothing for them to do but remain at Takayama until a place could be found for them. Thus the mothers got together to plan lessons for the children so they would not get behind in school. Carol Noss taught the older ones, others took the tiny tots and Edna Gressitt taught her own and others of similar age. There was reading, numberwork and some lessons in natural history. Having studied Zoology in college, Edna was pleased when someone caught a snake out in the sunny hollow back of the house. She promptly got a sharp kitchen knife, slit the shake open and pinned it to a surfboard. As she pointed out its still active circulatory system, Phil and Elizabeth German stared in awe at the dead snake that was still alive! Lin watched the whole procedure in silent wonder. 

Image: Edna Gressitt, Japan Baptist Convention, 1930

Links to the collections: 

The recollection comes from the Charles and Grace Tenny Papers, Folder 3

https://libraries.mercer.edu/archivesspace/repositories/2/resources/567

The photo is from the BIM picture files, Japan, Box 3, Folder 3

https://libraries.mercer.edu/archivesspace/repositories/2/resources/681

April 4, 1968:  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, 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 a tape of a sermon he preached.

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 minutes, correspondence and magazines of WABFMS.

April 2, 1667.  Three Baptists were fined for ‘absence from the Ordinances of publicke worship’ in Cambridge, MA.   Church attendance was required of all residents.   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.