SBC Missions since 1845

by Mary Speidel                                                                                                 Vol. VIII, No. 2, February 1995

Virginia Baptist J. Lewis Shuck (1812-1863) once dropped a note into the offering plate at a Baptist gathering. “I give myself,” read the slip of paper.

In 1835 Shuck was named a missionary to china by the General Missionary convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions, known as the Triennial Convention. Established in 1814, the Triennial convention was the first national effort of American Baptists to help churches do the work of Christ’s kingdom. The Triennial convention was modeled after the British Baptist society system of denominational administration.

Missionary Shuck founded the first Protestant church in China in 1842, notes William R. Estep in Whole Gospel – Whole World, a recently published 150-year history of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission board. Later Shuck transferred from the Triennial Convention to the newly formed Foreign Mission Board. That board and the Board of Domestic Missions( now the Home Mission Board) were created when the Southern Baptist Convention met for the first time in 1845 and separated from the Northern Baptists.

The split was a painful chapter in Baptist history. But through it missions emerged as the fabric of the Southern Baptist Convention. In fact, many perceived the new convention as a missionary society.

Marion, AL, became the first home of the convention's domestic board while its foreign board was based in Richmond, VA. The domestic board changed names several times and eventually became the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, now in Atlanta, GA. The domestic board's early tasks were sending preachers to frontier settlements, helping weak churches in the South – with special focus on New Orleans – and evangelizing African Americans.

Southern Baptists' first foreign field was China. Other early overseas fields were in Africa – Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Yoruba (Nigeria).

The War between the States took an emotional and financial toll on Southern Baptists. Because of rising inflation and debts, at times neither board could pay regular missionary salaries. The domestic board dropped most of its mission work to provide chaplains for Confederate forces. To remain on the mission field, some foreign missionaries supported themselves through secular jobs overseas.

Despite these hardships, Southern Baptists emerged from the war as committed to missions as ever before. In fact, within two years after the war's end, the Home Mission Board appointed 124 missionaries to 15 states and Indian territory. The board also sent out self-supporting evangelists.

Because of the War, the foreign board did not enter any new countries until 1870, when it sent a missionary to Italy, Estep reports. Three years later the board appointed to China the woman who would become the most legendary missionary in Southern Baptist history – Lottie Moon (1840-1912).

It was Moon who launched the idea that Southern Baptists collect a Christmas offering for foreign missions. But it was Annie Armstrong who suggested in 1918 the offering posthumously bear Moon's name.

Armstrong (1850-1938) was the first corresponding secretary for the Woman's Missionary Union, established in 1888 as an auxiliary to the convention. The denomination's annual Easter offering for home missions is named for Armstrong, who involved Southern Baptist women in mission work among immigrants, African Americans and Native Americans.

Since it was launched in 1925, the Cooperative Program has been the flagship channel through which Southern Baptists have funded their home and foreign mission work. For the denomination's 150th anniversary in 1995, meanwhile, both of the missions offerings will carry a combined goal of $150 million – $50 million for home missions and $100 million for foreign missions. That's a big vision for a denomination which set its first foreign missionaries' salaries at $750 a year for couples. But Southern Baptists have come a long way in missions, though not without cost or conflict.

Southern Baptists in recent years have measured some of their progress in global missions against Bold Mission Thrust (BMT), a plan for mission advance adopted in 1976 by the convention. Bold Mission Thrust calls for every person on earth to hear the gospel by the end of the century. One of the plan's goals is to place 5,000 missionaries overseas by AD. 2000.

Currently the Foreign Mission Board has 4,045 missionaries working in 130 countries. As of November 1, 1994, a total of 4,903 missionaries serve through the Home Mission Board. They work in all 50 states, American Samoa, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than 100 ethnic groups worship in about 100 languages in churches throughout the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Southern Baptist Convention was constituted in 1845 to do missions. Continued faithfulness to that original purpose will serve Southern Baptists well as they enter the 21st century.