Thoughts: How Will Baptists Work Together?

It has been almost 200 years since Baptists organized their first national body in the United States, and still we are trying to figure out how to work together in the cause of Christ.

On May 18, 1814, 33 Baptist representatives from various local and regional missionary societies met in Philadelphia to form the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions. It was more commonly called the Triennial Convention because it met every three years.

Foreign missions was the catalyst for the organization as Baptists rallied to support the work of the Judsons in Burma. But three years later, at the urging of its president, Richard Furman of South Carolina, the body expanded its concerns to include home missions and education. Two missionaries were appointed to the Missouri Territory. In 1821, Columbian College in the District of Columbia opened under Baptist sponsorship.

The convention approach, multiple benevolent ministries related to one body, was new to Baptists. More common was the societal approach in which autonomous organizations formed around one cause and those who contributed to that cause provided the governance.

It would not take long for this traditional method of cooperation to challenge the convention model.

In 1826, Francis Wayland, who became president of Baptist-affiliated Brown University in Providence, R.I., in 1827, led the charge to scrap the new convention approach of cooperation and return to a societal approach for each type of work, foreign missions, home missions, education, Sunday School and Christian literature.

At the core of Wayland's concern was local church autonomy. Wayland so feared that a convention might overshadow a local church that he later argued that state conventions should be abolished in favor of missions societies.

Interestingly Boston Baptists reclaimed control of the foreign missions society and moved its headquarters from Washington back to Boston, where the first Baptist foreign missions society in the nation had been formed. Also, without convention financial support, Columbian College was eventually lost to Baptists. It is known today as George Washington University....