King's Grant Baptist Church is Living the Legacy... honoring our past and looking toward the future. Over 400 people joined in to celebrate...

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Video Presentation by Bill Kramer

It was a special time of remembrance and thanksgiving as we celebrated the 40th anniversary of King's Grant Baptist Church... wonderful fellowship, outstanding music, inspiring messages, reconnection with many old friends. Our desire is to live our legacy... "May all who come behind us find us faithful." 

Skip's Scripture passage for the morning... "May the LORD our God be with us as he was with our fathers; may he never leave us nor forsake us. May he turn our hearts to him, to walk in all his ways and to keep the commands, decrees and regulations he gave our fathers. And may these words of mine, which I have prayed before the LORD, be near to the LORD our God day and night, that he may uphold the cause of his servant and the cause of his people Israel according to each day's need, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the LORD is God and that there is no other. But your hearts must be fully committed to the LORD our God, to live by his decrees and obey his commands, as at this time." -- 1 Kings 8:57-61

This is our year-long emphasis for 2009, celebrating our 40th year as a church in Virginia Beach as well as 400 years of Baptist witness around the world. Those who first stood up for Baptist principles met in Amsterdam in 1609, and King's Grant Baptist Church was constituted in October of 1969. Below are several articles that help us understand what Baptists have done around the world and through the ages.

World-Wide Baptists | Baptists in America | Separate Baptists

Baptist Contribution to Religious Freedom | Baptists Move Westward 

Baptist Support of the Missionary Movement

Spreading the Gospel Among Native Americans

Preaching the Gospel, a Baptist Tradition

Baptist Denominational and Moral Leadership

Hispanic Baptists Beginnings and Development

We planned five very special Sundays throughout the year:

In 2009, Baptists around the world are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of the first Baptist church. English Christians living in Amsterdam, Holland, began meeting for worship in a bakehouse, and sometime in early 1609, the group held its first baptismal service. While planning that service, the group encountered a serious problem. No one in the group had experienced baptism as a believer. They all had been baptized as infants in the Church of England. The leader of the group, John Smyth, suggested that he baptize himself first and then baptize the other believers. Each person baptized was an adult who had confessed belief in Jesus Christ.

This small group was committed to the belief that church membership should be based on a personal confession of faith followed by believer's baptism. Their radical decision countered the religious expectations of their homeland of England, where in the seventeenth century, all citizens were required to be members of the Church of England. Refusing to adhere to this requirement meant being subjected to fines, whippings, and imprisonments.

A desire for religious freedom and the study of the New Testament led this small band of Christians to reject infant baptism and found a new church. Thus, in 1609, led by Smyth and Thomas Helwys, these religious dissenters became the first Baptists.

In 1612, Helwys and about ten other members sailed home to England, settled near London at Spitalfield, and planted the first Baptist church on English soil. Shortly after his arrival in England, Helwys published A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, the first document written in English that called for complete religious freedom. Helwys asserted that the king of England had no power to control religious beliefs or practices, but instead each person, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, must have complete spiritual freedom. Helwys also challenged the king to allow individuals the right to read and interpret scripture. Failing to allow such freedom, Helwys noted, would result in the people being kept in "woeful spiritual bondage."

For the past four hundred years, Baptists at their best have continued to affirm and defend the freedoms embraced by our earliest Baptist leaders.

-- Written by Pamela R. Durso, associate executive director-treasurer of the Baptist History and Heritage Society.

America's democratic and pluralistic roots were first introduced in the New World in the 1630s. Peeling back the layers of history, one person emerges as central in the formulation of America's foundations: Roger Williams. Little recognized, the story of Baptists in America is the story of American beginnings, with Williams at the center of both.

A former lawyer-turned-clergyman, Williams fled the Old World for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631, where as a contrarian Separatist within the Church of England, he became increasingly critical of the merger of church and state. For five years, he modeled a radical faith focused upon liberty of conscience, acceptance and respect of persons of other faith, and opposition to state-supported religion. Finally, in 1636, the nettlesome Williams was labeled as a heretic and banished from Massachusetts.

Williams's travails paved the way for his establishment of a new colony, Rhode Island. Modeled on the principles that, some 140 years later, would become the basis for a new nation, the new colony espoused democracy, pluralism, religious freedom, and separation of church and state. For Williams, these principles embodied the fledgling Baptist faith of which he had known of in England, and in 1639, embracing believer's baptism, he established the first Baptist church in the New World. Existing yet today, the First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island, is the beginning point for Baptists in America.

While Williams later left the church, colonial Baptists, despite long and intense persecution, carried forward his principles. These Baptists, as was true of Baptists in England, were ridiculed for rejecting infant baptism and heralding religious liberty, but because they were far from the center of Anglican power, they had more opportunities to assert their principles.

Generations of persecution passed and eventually that which Williams planted upon the shores of the New World matured into the foundations of the American nation. Today, his legacy also permeates Baptist life, embedded in our central practices of believer's baptism and liberty of conscience and in our core beliefs of religious liberty and church-state separation.

The First Great Awakening, a revival movement that began in the 1720s, was a turning point for Baptists in America. Prior to 1720, Baptists had established only 32 churches with 1,699 members. Initially ignoring or opposing the awakening, most Baptists eventually warmed to and then later completely embraced the revival spirit. As a result, by 1790, Baptists had 978 churches with 67,320 members.

Among those who embraced revivalism were the Separate Baptists. Unlike the Particular Baptists (strong Calvinists), Separate Baptists (more moderate Calvinists) emphasized evangelistic preaching, boisterous worship services, and emotional conversion experiences. They were also known for a greater openness to women's leadership, and some Separate Baptist women served as deaconesses and eldresses. Others preached and prayed in public worship.

The best-known Separate Baptist woman is Martha Stearns Marshall. Along with her husband, Daniel, Martha converted to Christianity during the First Great Awakening. The couple eventually migrated from New England to Virginia, where they were introduced to Baptist beliefs. Concluding that scripture taught believer's baptism, they were soon baptized and joined a Baptist church, and Daniel was licensed to preach. But both Marshalls were preachers, and Martha's zeal apparently equaled that of her husband.

In 1755, the Marshalls, along with Martha's brother Shubal Stearns and his small congregation in Virginia, moved to North Carolina. The group settled at Sandy Creek and established a Baptist church, which became the most influential Separate Baptist church in the South, and Martha often stood alongside Shubal to preach at church meetings. A few years later, the Marshalls moved to nearby Abbott's Creek and founded a new church, and in 1771, they moved to Columbia County, Georgia, where they established in Kiokee the first Baptist church in Georgia.

In all these churches, Martha provided excellent leadership, and in 1810, Virginia Baptist historian Robert Semple wrote: "Mr. Marshall had a rare felicity of finding in this lady a Priscilla, a helper in the gospel. In fact, it should not be concealed that his extraordinary success in the ministry is ascribable in no small degree to Mrs. Marshall's unwearied, and zealous co-operation. Without the shadow of a usurped authority over the other sex, Mrs. Marshall, being a lady of good sense, singular piety, and surprising elocution, has, in countless instances melted a whole concourse into tears by her prayers and exhortations!"

-- Written by Pamela R. Durso, associate executive director-treasurer of the Baptist History and Heritage Society.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press: or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." So reads the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791. Yet without the fierce advocacy of Baptists, the First Amendment might never have been enacted.

The story of how Baptists helped secure religious liberty and the separation of church and state in America begins in seventeenth-century England, when Baptist leader Thomas Helwys in 1612 penned A Short Declaration on the Mystery of Iniquity, advocating separation of church and state. This heretical declaration resulted in Helwys' imprisonment at the hands of King James I. In America, Roger Williams in the 1630s and 1640s, echoing Helwys' argument in print and in deed, founded Rhode Island upon the principles of religious liberty and church-state separation.

Meanwhile, theocratic governments persecuted Baptists in other colonies. Against the backdrop of ongoing persecutions, Isaac Backus of Massachusetts in 1773 published "An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty: Against the Oppressions of the Present Day." The treatise was printed in Boston the same year that Bostonians revolted against British incursions upon colonial freedoms in what came to be known as the Boston Tea Party. While Americans protested against England in defense of freedom, some Baptists, particularly in Massachusetts and Virginia, served jail time for their dissenting religious views and practices.

Moving from Massachusetts to Virginia in 1776, evangelist John Leland rose to prominence among Virginia Baptists, emerging as their leading advocate for religious liberty and separation of church and state. In 1776, Leland led Virginia Baptists in supporting Thomas Jefferson's effort to revoke assessment taxes to support religion. After that effort was defeated, Jefferson responded in 1779 with his "Act for Establishing Religious Freedom." Led by Leland, Baptists were the primary early supporters of this act, which became law in 1786. In 1787, when Virginia Baptists learned that the United States Constitution as submitted to the states did not guarantee religious freedom and church-state separation, they mounted protests. Through the now well-connected Leland, they successfully pressured lawmakers to include freedoms of liberty, speech, and press in the Constitution. Finally, in 1791, the long-cherished Baptist vision of a nation founded upon religious liberty and separation of church and state was realized.

-- Written by Bruce T. Gourley, interim director of the Center for Baptist Studies, Mercer University.

The migration of Baptists in America followed that of the nation as a whole. In 1755, at a time when few settlers yet lived in the Carolinas and further southward, the Sandy Creek Baptist Church was established at a conflux of trails in North Carolina. The church grew quickly, yet at the same time migratory pressures pulled Baptists farther westward. By the thousands in the decades following, they trekked into present-day Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi (the latter Mississippi Territory, at that time). By the end of the century, a handful of Baptists had also pushed into Illinois and Louisiana Territory.

Yet the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 turned the trickle of westward-bound Baptists into full-fledged migration. Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Michigan Territory, and Wisconsin Territory welcomed the Baptist faith in the early decades of the nineteenth century. True pioneers, the individuals who comprised these Baptist westward movements sacrificed much to blaze trails that millions of others would follow.

While men were typically looked upon as the leaders of Baptist expansion, the isolation of the westward frontier provided opportunity for women to assume leadership roles. Sarah Gardiner Hale was one such woman. In 1831, the Hale family moved from Tennessee to the area near Hot Springs, Arkansas, purchased property, and soon donated land for the construction of a church. For many years Sarah was a pivotal figure within the church, and her role included that of supply preacher, spiritual advisor, and business leader. "Even in her latter years," Pam and Keith Durso write in their Story of Baptists in the United States, "when Sarah could no longer attend church services, the deacons often went to see 'Grandma Hale' to consult with her about church matters" (79).

The West, of course, did not stop at Arkansas, and for every Sarah Hale who put Baptist roots down in the present-day Southwest, hundreds of others pushed onward. Leaving Missouri and traveling on the Oregon Trail in 1843, David and Louisa Lenox settled near present-day Portland and in 1844 helped establish the West Union Baptist Church. In 1849, American Baptist Home Missionary Society missionaries Osgood and Elizabeth Wheeler organized the First Baptist Church of San Francisco. And in 1864, ABHMS missionary L. P. Judson established the first Baptist church in Dakota Territory. Thus, in the course of a century, Baptists spread from Sandy Creek, North Carolina, to the coasts of California, transplanting their faith along the way.

-- Written by Bruce T. Gourley, interim director of the Center for Baptist Studies, Mercer University.

In the eighteenth century, American Baptists quickly moved west to the frontier areas, built new churches, and established associations, but they were slow in forming formal mission organizations. In the first 160 years of Baptist life in the United States, missionary work was haphazardly organized and carried out by associations and regional societies. Among those earliest societies formed was the Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes. Founded in 1800 by eight Baptist and six Congregational women, the society raised money for mission work on the frontier and later for British Baptist mission endeavors.

The leader of the society, Mary Webb (1779-1861), a faithful member of Boston's Second Baptist Church, helped found this new organization from the confines of her wheelchair. She then served for fifty years as its secretary/treasurer, writing thousands of letters in which she sought support for mission causes, generating numerous reports and financial statements, and leading the society's business conferences.

Twelve years after the Boston Society was founded, Baptists in 1812 formed their first national missions organization, the Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel in India and Other Foreign Parts. This new society came into being in order to support the work of Adoniram and Ann Judson and Luther Rice, who had traveled to India to serve as Congregational missionaries but had accepted Baptist teachings, been immersed, and now sought backing from the Baptists.

The Judsons soon moved to Burma and begin mission efforts there, and Rice returned to the United States, in order to stir up support from the Baptists. In 1814, as a result of the leadership of Rice, the General Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions was founded. Because this new organization held meetings only every three years, it became known as the Triennial Convention. From 1814 to the present, Baptists in America have been actively involved in official support of the mission movement.

-- Written by Pamela R. Durso, associate executive director-treasurer of the Baptist History and Heritage Society.

The story of Baptists and Native Americans is older than the story of the Baptist church in America. Before he founded the first Baptist congregation in the New World in 1639, Roger Williams befriended the native peoples of his new home. Through Williams' friendship, the natives of the upper colonies, including the Massasoit and Canonicus tribes, learned of a Christianity that respected and accepted them as human equals. The Christian fellowship extended to native peoples through Williams, however, proved fleeting, for in the decades and centuries following, white Americans invoking the name of Christ frequently maligned, mistreated, and took advantage of Indians.

Nevertheless, later Baptists in America came to view native peoples as a mission field. In 1801, the Elkhorn Association in Kentucky established a mission to the Indians of the Great Lakes, sending forth at least one missionary, John Young, for a brief period of time. This first organized mission effort by Kentucky Baptists among Indians preceded efforts by the Baptist Triennial Convention. In 1817, Isaac McCoy was appointed by the convention to do mission work among the Miami Indians in Indiana. From this starting point, McCoy in the 1820s established mission work among the Pottawatomies near present-day Niles, Michigan, and the Ottawas near present-day Grand Rapids.

In 1840, McCoy published History of Baptist Indian Missions. Early and mid-nineteenth-century Indian mission work found even more fertile root in present-day Oklahoma, at the time Indian Territory. Between 1832 and 1860, Baptist congregations were established among the Muskogee, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes. Slavery and the Civil War, however, hampered gospel work among native peoples. The same divisions present in America took place among Indians, and missionary funding for Indian work evaporated during the war. For example, while many Georgia Baptist congregations prior to the war supported Indian work in Oklahoma, by 1865 few maintained such support. In the decades following, the sectional conflict, Northern Baptists assumed the bulk of mission work among native peoples.

As the nation expanded westward, Northern Baptists (later American Baptists) remained at the forefront of Indian mission work into the twentieth century, while Southern Baptist involvement once again gathered steam by the 1940s. Today, Baptist work among native peoples is especially evident in western states such as Arizona, the Dakotas, Montana, and New Mexico.

-- Written by Bruce T. Gourley, interim director of the Center for Baptist Studies, Mercer University.

David George was among the eight founding members of Silver Bluff Baptist Church, the first African American Baptist congregation that was founded in 1774 on a plantation near Savannah, Georgia. In 1782, George and the two other preachers in the congregation went separate directions: George followed the British to Nova Scotia and founded another Baptist congregation, George Liele migrated to British-controlled Jamaica and started a church in Kingston, and Jesse Galphin moved the Savannah congregation to Augusta, Georgia.

More than eighty years would pass before African Americans gained freedom in the land of liberty, but during this time, black Baptist churches grew and prospered despite the shackles of slavery. While growing abolitionist sentiment in the North resulted in increasing congregational leadership opportunities for blacks, especially in Episcopal and Methodist churches, some of the most well-known black Baptists were southern slaves.

First Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia, surpassed other southern biracial congregations by allowing slave members to perform funeral sermons and lead Sunday prayers. Carey Lott, who in 1821 became the first African American missionary to Africa, honed his preaching and leadership skills in Baptist churches, as did John Jasper in the decade prior to the American Civil War. Preaching revivals throughout Virginia, Jasper became one of the most successful evangelists of his day, baptizing as many as 300 people in four hours.

Following emancipation and the end of the war, African Americans formed their own congregations. Jasper formed the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church (1867), became a leader in the community of Richmond, and in 1878 first preached his most famous sermon, “Sun Do Move,” in which he sought to prove that the sun revolves around the earth. Remembered as a pioneering black Baptist and a great orator of the nineteenth century, Jasper is memorialized in William Hatcher's 1909 volume, John Jasper, The Unmatched Negro Philosopher and Preacher. 

Today, some of the best known Baptist preachers in America are African Americans, including Gardner C. Taylor, born in 1918 and now known as the “dean of American preaching.” Prior to his retirement in 1990, Taylor pastored Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York for forty-two years. Taylor worked alongside the late Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most famous Baptist preacher in history, in the struggle for Civil Rights and in the founding of the Progressive National Baptist Convention.

-- Written by Bruce T. Gourley, interim director of the Center for Baptist Studies, Mercer University.

In recent years, Baptists have begun to discuss the need for all Baptists to work together, and some have addressed the racism that has long divided us. Thankfully, Baptists have a great role model in these areas: E. C. Morris.

Born a slave on May 7, 1855, Elias Camp Morris attended school occasionally during his childhood, but he was mostly self-educated. After completing an apprenticeship as a shoemaker, he supported himself by making shoes.

In 1874, Morris converted to Christianity and the next year was called to the ministry. He moved in 1876 to Helena, Arkansas, made shoes during the week, and preached on Sundays. Called to pastor Centennial Baptist Church in Helena in 1879, Morris served that church for forty-three years. Early in his tenure, he rose to prominence as a leader among Arkansas Baptists, helping organize three black Baptist associations and serving as secretary and then president for thirty-five years of the black Arkansas Baptist State Convention. He also supervised the development of a state denominational newspaper, the Arkansas Times (later the Baptist Vanguard).

As a denominational leader, Morris helped found an African American Baptist seminary in 1884. Originally known as the Minister’s Institute, the school took the name Arkansas Baptist College in 1886. Located in Little Rock, the college continues the mission envisioned by Morris.

In 1895, Morris transitioned from state denominational leader to national denominational leader when he was elected president of the newly-established National Baptist Convention, a position he held for twenty-seven years. Morris also worked with white Baptists, speaking at the white Baptist’s 1911 Arkansas state convention and serving on the predominantly white executive committees of the General Convention of Baptists of North America, the Baptist World Alliance, and the Congress of English Speaking Peoples of the World. He also served as a vice president of the interracial Federal Council of Churches of Christ.

From his pulpit and in convention halls, Morris denounced prejudice and racism, advocating for the civil liberties of African Americans. Baptists today need to be reminded of Morris’s great legacy: his long tenure as pastor, his participation in the founding and support of a Baptist college, his faithful leadership of state and national denominational organizations, his charismatic preaching, and his willingness to speak truth to people of all races on the important issues of his day.

-- Written by Pamela R. Durso, associate executive director-treasurer of the Baptist History and Heritage Society.

The organization of Baptist churches by ethnic groups exploded in the last few decades, especially among Hispanic Baptists. In 2009, about 1,200 congregations affiliate with the La Convencion Bautista Hispana de Texas (The Hispanic Baptist Convention of Texas).

The origins of Hispanic Baptists in the United States may be traced back to the late nineteenth century when Baptist churches were organized in Laredo, Texas. John O. Westrup instigated this work in 1880 as a Southern Baptist missionary to Mexico. Westrup frequently crossed into Texas to preach to Mexicans living in Laredo, but his ministry was cut short when he was murdered during a trip to Coahuila, Mexico. His work was continued by his brother, Thomas, who baptized the first convert in 1881. By 1910, over two dozen Hispanic congregations had been planted throughout Texas.

Donato Ruiz was one of the leaders who helped to nurture the development of Hispanic Baptist work in Texas. Born in Mexico in 1882, Ruiz began teaching school at the age of eighteen. His school was in a rural area, and on weekends, he traveled back to his hometown of Nieves. One weekend, while visiting in his sister’s home, Ruiz was introduced to a Baptist preacher. Ruiz responded to the preacher’s invitation to follow Christ, and that same day, the new convert and the preacher went to a nearby river, and Ruiz was baptized.

Ruiz joined a Baptist church and soon felt called to preach. He studied in the seminary in Saltillo and pastored several churches in Mexico, and then in 1910, during the Mexican Revolution, Ruiz was imprisoned. Upon his release, he moved first to Los Angeles and then in 1920 to Texas, where he pastored numerous churches, including a twenty-year pastorate in San Angelo. Ruiz also helped establish the West Texas Baptist Bible Institute, served as a Southern Baptist home missionary, and attended the first meeting in 1910 of the Mexican Baptist Convention of Texas, serving as its president in 1936.

In 1990, the Mexican Baptist Convention of Texas changed its name to the Hispanic Baptist Convencion. Because of the leadership of Baptists such as Ruiz, the convencion has initiated strong partnerships, organized education programs, and spread the gospel. Next year, in 2010, the convencion will observe its 100th anniversary by celebrating the past and casting a new vision for the future.

-- Written by Pamela R. Durso, associate executive director-treasurer of the Baptist History and Heritage Society.