Most Alabama Baptists do not remember, if they ever knew, that Baptists in America got their start in the area known today as New England. The first Baptist church in America was founded in Providence, R.I., in 1639. The second church was started five years later in Newport, R.I. The first Baptist church in Boston began in 1665 and was widely influential, adopting perhaps the first confession of faith by a Baptist group in America.
The first association was located in Philadelphia (1707) though the majority of churches were found in New England.
The pastor of the first Baptist church in the South, First Baptist Church, Charleston, S.C., was credentialed by the Boston church. In fact, the Charleston church came into existence when First Baptist Church, Kittery, Maine, migrated en masse to Charleston and reconstituted in that city in 1696.
The first Baptist mission society was in Massachusetts and dates from 1802. That is one reason the foreign missions efforts of Baptists’ first national body, the Triennial Convention organized in 1814, were housed in Boston.
Baptists’ first college, now Brown University, was located in Providence. One of its presidents, Francis Wayland, ultimately defeated Richard Furman of South Carolina and W.B. Johnson of South Carolina in the argument over the Triennial Convention’s structure. The Baptist stalwarts from the South advocated a convention organization. Wayland argued for a societal organization.
In the early part of the 19th century, New England was strong Baptist territory and provided leadership for most things Baptists did together.
By the middle part of the 20th century, all that had changed. In the 1950s, Baptist work had withered and only a handful of American Baptist churches were the primary remains of the great legacy of Baptist beginnings in America. Southern Baptists entered New England in the late 1950s with a church start in New Hampshire.
Against that backdrop, the question posed by Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM) Executive Director Rick Lance is haunting. “What will Alabama Baptists look like a generation or two from now?” he asked SBOM members Feb. 27.
Lance warned that without a comprehensive approach that includes church planting, revitalization of existing churches and holistic evangelism, Alabama “could look a whole lot different a generation or two from now.”
Providing a comprehensive program for Alabama Baptists is becoming more challenging with the push for more and more Cooperative Program (CP) money for the International Mission Board (IMB) and the decision of the North American Mission Board (NAMB) to concentrate primarily on church planting as its strategy for reaching America for Christ.
Picturing the future
That is why IMB President Tom Elliff’s words should be heard by all Alabama Baptists as well as all Southern Baptists. In response to a proposal to cut CP funding for seminaries and give the money to IMB, Elliff told Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Executive Committee members, “Should IMB receive a greater and greater percent of CP funds, this would directly impact the effectiveness of our other entities.”
He said spiritual vitality would wane and so would sacrificial giving, which is essential to fulfill the Great Commission.
Elliff described a future when seminaries have fewer students, NAMB plants fewer churches and The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission is less “salt and light” on a perverse society. He warned that churches might lose their grasp of the power and effectiveness that comes from trusted and faithful cooperation with others. State conventions might gaze inward in attempts to maintain necessary ministry functions within their states.
“The net impact of the scenario painted above could very well be that all our SBC entities would find themselves attempting to garner more and more out of a convention that was itself becoming less and less,” Elliff said.
“IMB believes that we are part of a team called Southern Baptist Convention. What is good for each of us must be good for all of us. Working together … will amount to more for the Kingdom than a greater percent of a lesser amount.”
Elliff added, “The question may be asked as to whether, in light of the great lostness of the world, we should not seek a greater and greater percentage of Cooperative Program funds. Our answer would be that the greatest benefit will come instead by ensuring the health and spiritual vitality of our SBC churches that, in turn, will go, pray and give sacrificially.”
To many observers, Alabama Baptists appear to make up a strong Christian body today. Numerically Alabama Baptists are the largest Christian denomination in the state. The state convention sponsors excellent ministries through a number of cooperating entities. Every year, between 20,000 and 25,000 new believers are baptized.
But trend lines raise warning signals. Primary worship attendance is slipping. So are Bible study enrollments, stewardship indicators and missions and ministry participation. National studies find younger generations, sometimes called Gen Xers and Mosaics, disengaging from the church.
To quote Elliff again, it is because “we also have hearts on fire for the nations” that Alabama Baptists need a comprehensive program to reach the lost and revitalize existing churches in Alabama as well as to the ends of the earth.
No other Baptist convention is charged with reaching Alabama for the Lord. If we fail, then what will Alabama’s spiritual condition be in a generation or two? Will our story be one of continuing service through healthy and spiritually vital churches, or will Alabama Baptists go the way of this nation’s earliest Baptists, who became little more than references in history books?
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