Featured Are Mission Boards Biblical

The early Baptist that came to America likewise had no Missionary Boards, they were used of God to establish Churches throughout the land. We have Elders overseas that felt led by the Spirit to go there and they did, some received help from their home church members. We have had brothers who came to this country, joined a Primitive Baptist Church and went back home as an ordained minister, preached the gospel back in their Native Country and established churches.

 

In the region where I am from the Baptist Churches were started by itinerant ministers. My Ancestors came from the Roaring River Church in North Carolina in 1781 and established the Indian Bottom Church in 1810 the Sandlick was an arm from the Indian Bottom1815 { Elder James Caudill, Elder James Webb, Stephen Caudill} This was the pattern as far back as we have the History . I have no knowledge of any Old School Baptist Churches being established by a Missionary Board. You may call Elders like Daniel Williams, Simeon Justice, William Saulsberry, Electious Thompson , Wilson Thompson , Squire Boone , Elijah Craig and such like '' Missionaries '' but they established Congregations using a Circuit Ride method. I have read in the History of a'' Board of Foreign Missions'' established on May 10th, 1845 and a ''North American Mission of 1874'' . There were donations which were made by some of the earlier Associations but they latter recanted participation in these new inventions Mission Boards , Sunday Schools {by donation and letters} these Boards were unknow in early Apostolic Times. The New Salem Association a large cluster of Churches and all her Correspondence declared a non fellowship , with Mission Boards, Sunday Schools, Auxiliaries, Secret Societies . They however expanded and had many large Churches among them. Frank Masters wrote them off, but his numbers were wrong. There are Old School Baptist . Missionary Boards have continued to be an item for debate among Baptist up to the current time period.

 

I think so yea

they would be of like faith, mindset or doctrine

face it

I would never be a part of a oneness church or missions group, nor a United Methodist et Al.

you should agree with one you support

 

Its a ridiculous proposition. No there arent any missions boards in scripture. The lack of them doesnt make it wrong. The fact that there have been men even in recent years that have gone into the field without support from a mission board doesnt prove its wrong either.


Further, the use of mission boards does not negate the work of the HS in the field. The down side to not having a mission board support is the missionary traveles home for extended periods of time to not work in the field but travel around and raise funds. Also without a board the missionary is always under a risk of losing support from a particular church because the new pastor has a new vision and that missionary isnt part of that vision.

The upside to having a board is the missionary doesnt have to leave the field

 

It's amazing that Christianity spread the way it did before the invention of 'missionary boards'. How could it have done so without man's help?

 

The Rise of the Modern Mission System Among the Baptists

Since formal opposition to doctrinal and practical departures from the faith of the Church would not occur until after the heresy has become publicly manifested, the oft-repeated charge that the Baptists had not opposed missionary operations until near the end of the eighteenth century, is ridiculous. The new system was not introduced, anywhere in the world, until 1792, in England. In America, the equivalent of this system was introduced about twenty-two years later, and faced opposition nearly as soon as it made its existence known.

Aside from the privations of the new country and dangers from both Indians and wild beasts, the question of modern "foreign missions" was the greatest trial to face the Baptists after their arrival in Illinois. The Baptists had always claimed to be a missionary people, according to the Bible design, but they had never been a people governed by or operating through "BOARDS," or separate "SOCIETIES." Through all the centuries of their existence, the Baptists had never joined with other denominations in their men-made schemes to proselyte the heathen, so-called. But trouble began, on October 2, 1792, with the formation of the FIRST Baptist missionary society in the world, in the "back parlor of Beebe Wallis" in Kettering, England, by Andrew Fuller (consistent with his heretical views on the atonement, which were opposed by contemporary John Gill) and William Carey, in the Northamptonshire Association. Missionaries from this English breed, William Carey and William Ward, converted and baptized Luther Rice and Adoniram Judson, in the fall of 1812, at Calcutta, India, (Judson and Rice were natives of Massachusetts, but had been serving as Congregationalist missionaries). But rather than uniting with the English Baptist Mission, Luther Rice soon returned to America to form a similar Society. On May 18, 1814, he organized the Baptist Triennial Convention, at Philadelphia, through delegates from various places. The administrative board of this General Convention was called the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions. Correspondence was sought with about one hundred Baptist associations, many of which Luther Rice visited personally, raising funds by collections wherever he was allowed to do so. Meanwhile, Judson removed to Rangoon, Burma, and was soon found under the patronage of this Baptist Board of Foreign Missions for the United States.

As the activities of this Board became known, and as great numbers of Baptists in New England and the eastern states fell victim to it, the strong opposition of sound Baptists began to be expressed more and more publicly. Elder George Tillman, and others, opposed Luther Rice's request for correspondence with the Concord Association of Tennessee, in 1815, the first year Rice began to seek support for the Board. Elder Daniel Parker opposed it again, the following year in the same association; and in 1817, Parker confronted Rice, face to face, publicly, at the Concord Association. Later that year, Parker moved to southeastern Illinois, and united with the Lamotte Church, and became pastor of Little Village Church, a short distance south of his new home. In 1818, Little Village Church presented a query to the Wabash District Association, to gain the voice of the churches as to whether the modern mission system was scriptural.

The modern mission system was opposed in other places as well. The New River Association of Virginia is one such example, as their minutes for 1816 show: "Item 12th. A request from Bethel Church for opening a regular correspondence with the Board of Foreign Missions - after considerable altercation, finding it could not be carried into effect, liberty was obtained to withdraw the request." - Minutes of the New River Association, 1816 fall session, held at Bethel meetinghouse, Wythe County, Virginia, October 1816.

In 1819 and 1820, two relatively short books or treatises were written, published and widely distributed, which had great influence on the Baptists on the western frontier, on this subject. Both books are still available, and show the true position taken, at the very time of the conflict on this subject, by those who opposed the setting up of a Missionary System, including the "Baptist Board of Foreign Missions," and the "Home Mission Society."

The first, Thoughts on Missions, by Elder John Taylor, of Frankfort, Kentucky, published in 1819, is a vivid account, by an eye witness, of the means and measures employed by Luther Rice. Taylor also wrote A History of Ten Churches, etc., in which is given his valuable account of the beginning and progress of the Great Revival of 1800. Here is illustrated the amazing contrast between a true spiritual revival, based on the preaching of salvation by grace, true repentance, and the work of the Spirit, as opposed to a revival based on the human efforts of the modern mission system which Taylor opposed! In 1827, Taylor also wrote a book describing the origin of the Campbellite heresy and system which divided the Baptist Church again, to which he had been a first-hand witness.

The second work opposing the modern mission system, A Public Address to the Baptist Society, and Friends of Religion in General, on the Principle and Practice of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions for the United States of America, by Elder Daniel Parker, of Illinois, published in 1820, was one of the most influential books ever written by a Baptist in the midwest. In 1823 Parker issued another pamphlet, called Plain Truth, and in 1824, a third, called The Author's Defense, as the battle over the modern mission system intensified.

These books struck a death-blow at the very existence of the modern mission work: the associations which had at first begun to correspond with this Baptist Board of Foreign Missions "smelled the New England rat," and not only severed correspondence, but also declared non-fellowship for it. Many other Associations, as they were organized, followed their example. The missionary response to these books, and to the widespread opposition to their measures, came in the form of a General Circular Letter to the Baptists of All Parties, written by John Mason Peck, and approved by the General Convention which met at Winchester, Illinois, in 1832. To read this Circular, Click here .
John Mason Peck: The Leading Advocate of Modern Missions
The chief advocate of the new system of "foreign missions," in Illinois, was Rev. John Mason Peck, a Connecticut yankee, and a close cohort of Rev. Luther Rice. Peck's journals were published posthumously as his Memoirs, by Rufus Babcock, another contemporary. They reveal the nature of his activities among the Baptists in Illinois and Missouri. He was a hireling of the Board system, a child of missionary societies in New York and Massachusetts; and had authority to offer monetary support of those societies, to men who were willing to preach the "gospel" for hire. Peck came to the St. Louis, Mo./Alton, Ill., area in December 1817. Though naturally gifted, well educated and a polished speaker, he signally failed to convert the existing Baptist churches in the Illinois Association, or its correspondence, to his missionary views; and was therefore compelled to start a so-called Baptist work virtually "from scratch," building it on excluded members from orderly Illinois Baptist churches, and immigrants who had ties with the mission system in the east, and other places.