Baptist History and Denominational Development — Unit 7: Division and Growth: The Southern Baptist Convention, African American Baptists, and Landmarkism

Key Verse

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28, NKJV)

Learning Objectives

When you finish this unit, you should be able to:

1. Describe the growth of Baptists in the United States in the early 1800s and the organizations they formed.

2. Explain the immediate causes of the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, and state fairly how historians weigh them.

3. Describe the early history of African American Baptists, naming George Liele, Andrew Bryan and the National Baptist Convention of 1895.

4. Describe Landmarkism: its leaders, its main teachings and the Baptist answer to it.

5. State the main objections to the Baptist account of this period and give the Baptist answers.

The Voice of This Unit

This unit is written from inside the Baptist tradition, for Baptist students. It is conservative. We hold that the Bible is God's inspired Word and our final authority. Some parts of this story are painful, for they show Baptists failing to live by the Word. We tell them honestly, because a church that hides its sins cannot repent of them. When historians disagree, we state their views fairly and then give the Baptist answer. Scripture says, "Test all things; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Growth in the Young Nation

After the American Revolution, Baptists grew faster than almost any other Christian family in the United States. The Second Great Awakening, which began around the year 1800, brought revival in the new settlements on the frontier. Baptist farmer-preachers, who had little formal schooling but great zeal, went with the settlers, and their churches multiplied. They were helped by the same principles we have studied: a church of believers needs no bishop's permission, and any congregation may call a preacher from its own midst.

As the churches grew, they formed organizations for common work. We saw the Triennial Convention of 1814 for foreign missions. In 1832 Baptists in the North formed the American Baptist Home Mission Society for work within America. State conventions arose in the South and elsewhere. Baptists also founded colleges and newspapers. All these were voluntary bodies, created by the churches and answerable to them.

The Division of 1845

The slavery question

By the 1840s slavery was dividing the American nation, and it divided Baptists. In the North, many Baptists believed slavery was sinful and wished the mission boards to have no part in it. In the South, many Baptists owned slaves, and many of their leaders defended slavery as permitted by Scripture. For a time the two groups worked side by side in the same societies, but the strain grew.

In 1844 the question came to a head. Baptists in Georgia put forward a slaveholder as a missionary candidate, and Baptists in Alabama asked the Triennial Convention's board whether a slaveholder could be appointed. The answer from the North was that the boards could not appoint a slaveholder. Southern Baptists took this as a refusal to treat them as equals. In May 1845, delegates from the South met in Augusta, Georgia, and formed the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). William B. Johnson of South Carolina was its first president. The new body had a Foreign Mission Board at Richmond, Virginia and a Domestic Mission Board at Marion, Alabama. Northern Baptists continued their own societies, and in 1907 the Northern Baptist Convention was formed, which is today the American Baptist Churches USA.

How do historians weigh the causes?

Historians weigh the causes differently, and we should state both views.

Some, including many modern historians, say that slavery was the central cause. The break came when the South insisted on its right to appoint slaveholders as missionaries, and the founders of the SBC defended slavery in their own words.

Others, especially earlier Southern writers, stressed other points: the question of whether the national societies were treating all regions fairly, the control of mission boards, and the principle that a missionary board should not set a test of fellowship on a matter that the Bible does not clearly make a test. They said the South was defending freedom of the churches, not slavery itself.

The Baptist answer is to accept the truth in both, but to be plain about the main matter. The immediate trigger was the slaveholding missionary. The founders did hold that the Bible allowed slavery. We believe they were wrong. Scripture condemns the stealing and selling of human beings (Exodus 21:16; 1 Timothy 1:10), it calls masters to treat servants justly (Colossians 4:1), and in the letter to Philemon Paul asks a master to receive Onesimus as a beloved brother, more than a slave (Philemon 16). The gospel teaches that in Christ all are one (Galatians 3:28). The defense of slavery from the Bible was a serious misreading of it.

In 1995, at the 150th anniversary of its founding, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that acknowledged the Convention's roots in the defense of slavery, and asked forgiveness of African Americans for racism, past and present. This is a good example of what a church should do when it finds it has sinned.

Later growth of the SBC

After the Civil War the SBC grew steadily through the South and later across the nation. It created the Sunday School Board in 1891 and the Cooperative Program in 1925, a plan by which the churches support missions, education and other work through one channel. The SBC became the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. We will meet its later history in Unit 8.

African American Baptists

The earliest years

The story of African American Baptists begins before the Civil War, and some of its first chapters were written by people who were enslaved or only recently freed.

During the 1700s, the Baptist preaching of the Awakening reached enslaved Africans in the South, and some of them were converted and baptized. A Black Baptist church was formed at Silver Bluff, South Carolina, in the 1770s. Its first pastor is said to have been David George.

George Liele (about 1750-1820) was an enslaved man in Georgia who was converted and baptized, was freed by his owner, and was ordained about 1775. He preached to Black and white hearers around Savannah. About 1782 he went to Jamaica, where he began preaching and formed a Baptist church in Kingston. He went as a missionary about ten years before William Carey sailed for India. Liele deserves a place of honor in Baptist missions.

Andrew Bryan (about 1737-1812), who was baptized by Liele, became the leader of the Black Baptists in Savannah. His church, First African Baptist, was constituted in 1788. Bryan and his people were punished and persecuted for meeting for worship, but they kept on.

Lott Carey (about 1780-1828) was born into slavery in Virginia, bought his freedom, and became a Baptist minister in Richmond. He helped found an African missionary society and in 1821 sailed as a missionary to Liberia in West Africa.

Historians have a lively discussion about the religion of the enslaved. Some describe an "invisible institution," in which the enslaved met secretly, away from the eyes of the masters, to worship in their own way. Others show that much of Black Christian life took place in churches shared with whites, and that Black believers often became members of white-led Baptist churches. Both were true in different places. The Baptist church order, in which a local church could call and ordain its own pastor, made it easier for Black Baptists to form their own congregations than for people in churches ruled by outside bishops.

After the Civil War

When slavery ended in 1865, hundreds of thousands of freed people left the white-led churches and formed their own. They did so partly because they were not given equal place in the white churches and partly because they wanted to be free to lead and to worship in their own way. These churches became the center of Black community life, with schools, mutual help, and leadership.

In the following decades Black Baptists formed national organizations. In 1895, at Atlanta, three earlier bodies were joined in the National Baptist Convention of the U.S.A. In 1915 a dispute over control of the publishing board led to a division, and in 1961 another group formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Today the African American Baptist family is among the largest groups of Baptists in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, was among those who led the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Baptist answer to a hard question

Someone may ask: if Baptists believe that all are one in Christ, why are there separate Black and white Baptist bodies? The honest answer is that the division came partly from sin and partly from freedom. White Baptists did not always welcome Black Christians as equals. At the same time, Black Baptists were not forced out of the family but built institutions of their own with great gifts. The Baptist hope is the unity of Galatians 3:28, expressed in genuine fellowship. Many Baptist churches and conferences today work for it.

Landmarkism

What it is

While the Convention was young, another movement arose within it. It was called Landmarkism. Its name comes from Proverbs 22:28, which warns against removing the ancient landmark that the fathers set. Landmarkers held that Baptist practices were the ancient landmarks that must not be moved.

The leaders were J. R. Graves (1820-1893), editor of a Baptist newspaper in Tennessee, James M. Pendleton (1811-1891), a pastor in Kentucky, and A. C. Dayton. In 1854 Pendleton published An Old Landmark Re-set, a short work that argued the main case. In 1880 Graves published Old Landmarkism: What Is It?

What Landmarkers taught

Landmarkers taught several things.

1. Only Baptist churches are true churches of Christ. Churches of other denominations are not churches in the New Testament sense.

2. Baptist churches have existed in an unbroken line back to the New Testament, a view called succession (see Unit 2).

3. Only a baptism performed by a Baptist church has authority. Immersion done by another group, called alien immersion, is not valid.

4. The Lord's Supper should be taken only with the members of one's own local church (a practice called close or closed communion).

5. Missionary work should be done by churches directly and not through conventions or boards.

The Baptist answer

Landmarkism was not all wrong, and it was not all right. We should be fair.

Its strength was its high regard for the local church and for believer's baptism, both of which are true to the New Testament. It reminded Baptists not to treat church membership lightly. Pendleton himself later wrote the Church Manual (1867), a useful and gentle book that Baptists have used for generations.

Its weaknesses are serious. The claim of an unbroken succession of Baptist churches cannot be proved from history, as we saw in Unit 2. Christ promised that He would build His church and the gates of Hades would not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). That promise was kept by the Lord's own power, not by the survival of any Baptist chain of churches. The New Testament also speaks of the whole company of the redeemed as Christ's church (Ephesians 5:25-27; Hebrews 12:22-23), so to deny that other believers belong to Christ is to go beyond the Bible. Most Baptists say that other Christians are brothers in Christ, even when we disagree on baptism and church order. As for mission boards, most Baptists hold that churches may cooperate freely to send missionaries, as the churches at Antioch and Philippi did (Acts 13:1-3; Philippians 4:15-16).

Landmark ideas affected many Baptists in the South for a long time, and some Landmark churches left the SBC in the twentieth century to form their own bodies. The questions of baptism by immersion and of communion will be taken up again in Courses 2 and 4.

Dr. Wayne Cook, the founder of this seminary, remembers a Landmark Baptist pastor telling him that, as he understood it, Southern Baptist preachers simply got their sermons from the Sunday School Board. The remark was unfair, but it shows what Landmarkers feared: that boards and conventions would take over what belongs to the local church. In the two Baptist churches he first pastored, Dr. Cook served near several Missionary Baptist churches that, as he understood it, had separated from other Landmark Baptists around the 1930s. They held strict standards of separation: women did not wear pants, cut their hair or wear makeup, and members did not watch television. Such standards came from their convictions about personal holiness, not from Landmark teaching itself, and Baptists who do not share them should still respect the sincere desire behind them to be separate from the world (2 Corinthians 6:17; Romans 14:4). Yet Dr. Cook also found that many members of his own churches had come from that background, and the focus on what was forbidden had been so strong that they wanted something different. That is a lesson for every pastor: holiness that is taught only as a list of prohibitions can drive people away, while holiness taught as joyful love for Christ draws them in (John 15:11; 1 John 5:3).

Objections and the Baptist Answers

Objection 1: A convention founded in defense of slavery has no claim on our loyalty.

Our answer. The sin of the founders is real, and we do not excuse it. But a Baptist church is not bound to any convention. Each church is free before Christ, and cooperation is voluntary. The SBC itself confessed this sin in 1995. A body that repents is not the same as a body that denies. The gospel work of the SBC, among both Black and white believers, remains a genuine fruit of the Lord's grace, though not a reason to forget the sin.

Objection 2: Baptists failed to practice Galatians 3:28.

Our answer. In many cases this is true, and we say so. The remedy is not to drop the verse but to obey it more fully, as the Spirit has led many Baptist churches to do.

Objection 3: Landmarkism is the only consistent Baptist view.

Our answer. Landmarkism is consistent in its own terms, but its starting claim depends on history that cannot be shown, and it passes judgment on the churches that the Bible does not pass. Baptist convictions about baptism and the local church can be held firmly without it.

Pastoral Application

You are a pastor in a Baptist church in a country in Latin America. A man named Carlos asks to join your church. He was converted at 20 in a church of another denomination, and he was baptized there by immersion after he professed faith. A Landmark-minded deacon says that Carlos must be baptized again, since only a Baptist church can baptize.

A wise pastor will not make this a battle. First, he listens to Carlos and asks about his conversion and the baptism: did he trust Christ before he was baptized, and was he immersed? Second, he reads Matthew 28:19, Romans 6:3-4 and Acts 8:36-38 with the deacon, and shows that these passages describe the meaning of baptism, a believer immersed in the name of the Triune God. Third, he follows what his own church's constitution and practice require, since local church autonomy means each church decides. Fourth, he explains the Landmark view kindly to the church, and does not mock the deacon. Fifth, he welcomes Carlos as a brother in Christ whichever way the church decides.

Summary

Baptists grew rapidly in the early 1800s and formed national societies for missions. In 1845 slavery brought a division, and Southern Baptists formed the Southern Baptist Convention at Augusta, Georgia, with William B. Johnson as president. Historians weigh the causes differently, but the immediate trigger was whether slaveholders could be missionaries. The Baptist answer is that the defense of slavery from Scripture was wrong, and the SBC repented of it in 1995. African American Baptists include George Liele, who went as a missionary to Jamaica about 1782, Andrew Bryan, and Lott Carey, and after 1865 they formed their own churches and, in 1895, the National Baptist Convention. Landmarkism, led by Graves, Pendleton and Dayton, claimed that only Baptist churches are true churches and that they have an unbroken succession. Baptists honor its love of the local church, but answer it from Scripture. In Christ there is neither slave nor free, and we are one.

Further Reading

• James M. Pendleton, An Old Landmark Re-set (1854) and Church Manual (1867), public domain.

• J. R. Graves, Old Landmarkism: What Is It? (1880), public domain.

• H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (1987).

• Bill J. Leonard, Baptist Ways (2003).

• David W. Bebbington, Baptists Through the Centuries (2010).

• Anthony L. Chute, Nathan A. Finn and Michael A. G. Haykin, The Baptist Story (2015).

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