The first Baptist association in America will mark its 300th anniversary in September, and Southern Baptists will join in the celebration at a special associational missions rally June 10 prior to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in San Antonio. The rally, which will promote the continuing need for associational work, will be held at San Antonio’s First Baptist Church.
Pennepack Baptist Church, one of the five congregations that formed the first Baptist association in America – the Philadelphia Baptist Association, which marks its 300th anniversary this year – now meets in an 1805 stone church erected atop the foundation of its first two buildings.Founded in 1707, the Philadelphia Baptist Association – now affiliated with the American Baptist Churches (USA) – has assisted countless churches in starting, developing, growing and extending the gospel through a unified message and effort. Today, however, the constituency that the Philadelphia association reaches is vastly different. They are no longer mostly white and scattered across the countryside as they were in the Colonial era.
James McJunkin Jr., executive minister for the association, said the churches that make up this American Baptist region are ethnically and economically diverse. “The mix is continuing to increase,” McJunkin said. “We have congregations in the inner city and some in more wealthy areas. The congregations speak 13 different languages as the demographics shift in America and people come from around the world. The makeup of the association today reflects that – from the Haitian churches, to the Russian, Lithuanian, Chinese, Latino, Liberian and African-American.”
The Philadelphia Baptist Association today represents 128 churches in its region, but in its line of descendants are more than 1,200 Southern Baptist associations representing more than 43,000 churches with 16.5 million members around the country.
And Southern Baptists have learned a great deal from the history of its progenitor, especially in the area of cooperative missions and church planting. The first association in America proved, at a time when being Baptist was not popular, that “churches can do far more by working together than any size church can do working alone,” said Tom Biles, president of the Southern Baptist Conference of Associational Directors of Missions and director of the Tampa Bay Baptist Association in Florida.
“Associations are missionary to the core,” Biles said “They are a channel for missions service, education, fellowship, information and strategy. God has used associations to serve as a vital tool in planting new churches, raising up new leaders and giving further support of his work in the churches locally and globally.”
Southern Baptists also have a Greater Philadelphia Baptist Association, which functions as part of the Baptist Convention of Pennsylvania-South Jersey.
Humble beginnings
When Elias Keach formed the Pennepack Baptist Church near Philadelphia in 1687, his church members were scattered across the countryside. Members of the rural community met only irregularly as farm work and harvests allowed. But Keach – who was converted under his own preaching – carried the ministry of the church into the woodlands, holding quarterly meetings with other Baptists in the area. To some, who were only able to gather for fellowship in an area once a year, these meetings became known as “annual meetings.”
Baptists had been in Pennsylvania since 1684, finding in William Penn’s Quaker colony a tolerant home for dissenters. Penn’s “holy experiment” allowed small congregations to flourish, free from the watchful eye of the religious authorities in Massachusetts. The colony’s charter provided for religious liberty, a provision quite different from many sister colonies.
“Persecution, prejudice and difficult living marked the time leading up to the founding of the Philadelphia Association,” said Thomas White, vice president for student services and a professor of Baptist and free church studies at Southwestern Baptist Seminary.
“Persecution can be seen in the fact that Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts for his views on separation of church and state. John Clarke and Obadiah Holmes were imprisoned and whipped for preaching against infant baptism. Prejudice demonstrated itself in other ways like the first president of Harvard College, Henry Dunster, being forced to resign for accepting Baptist views and refusing to remain silent about his beliefs,” White said.
The American colonies’ independence from Great Britain was still two generations away when five small congregations formed the Philadelphia Baptist Association. From its first year, the association focused on the unity of Baptist congregations for a greater purpose, but without surrendering the autonomy of the local church. In time, the association grew to include churches from Connecticut to Virginia, and later the Philadelphia Association birthed other associations in Maryland, New York, Delaware and New Jersey.
In 1742, the Philadelphia Association adopted its own confession of faith, a restatement of the 1689 confession of English Particular Baptists in London with two new articles on hymn singing and the laying on of hands. Churches indicated their agreement with the Calvinistic document, and by 1762 the Philadelphia Association had grown to 29 churches with some 4,000 members. With the growing number of churches and church members, leaders of the Philadelphia Association thought cooperation all the more essential.
Moderator Samuel Jones wrote to James Manning in Rhode Island in 1767 that an association was essential because a “collection and union of churches into one associational body may easily be conceived capable of answering those still greater purposes which any particular Church could not be equal to.” Jones also encouraged the loose union of associations, arguing that the cooperation of associations would “still increase the body in weight and strength, and make it good that a threefold cord is not easily broken.”
Baptists, however, were either prevented from or did not desire to create a larger structure during the period. In 1776, a call for a “Continental Association” was sidetracked by the Revolutionary War. A second call for a larger body at the turn of the century also failed, with Baptists fearing that any national association might adversely affect the autonomy of each local congregation.
Fears of a larger church structure were nonetheless set aside when it came to the cooperative practical work of associations. Churches collectively provided for the education of new ministers at Rhode Island College, later named Brown University. And they participated in social issues such as a national temperance movement.
The Philadelphia Association was best known for missions in the American colonies. In 1751, a minister named Oliver Hart transplanted the work of the Philadelphia Association to the American South, forming the Charleston Association in South Carolina with four churches. Forty years later, Baptist work had taken root in the South. The Baptist churches grew, became involved in foreign missions and in 1845 saw the birth of a new Baptist body – the Southern Baptist Convention.
“It would not be an overstatement to say that the forming of the Philadelphia Association led to the formation of all following Baptist associations and conventions,” White said. “With Baptists experiencing the benefits of an advisory body for doctrinal issues, fellowship, and cooperation for missions, the Triennial Convention and all modern conventions including the Southern Baptist Convention owe a debt of gratitude to the founders of the Philadelphia Association.
“The largest contribution of the association was the Philadelphia Confession with which most Baptist churches of the time agreed. With the possible exception of the New Hampshire Confession in 1833, the Philadelphia Confession had more influence on Baptists than any other during the 19th century.”
21st century service
Larger missions-sending agencies and state and national denominations eclipsed associations in importance in the modern era. But while they primarily no longer serve as a framework for sending missionaries, Southern Baptist scholars say associations can still play a vital role in keeping churches healthy and in encouraging evangelism. Associations also continue to play a key role in educating Southern Baptists on the need for cooperation and for promoting unity.
That means that associations should play an active role in the lives of churches, said Greg Wills, professor of church history at Southern Baptist Seminary. Associations can preserve churches if they exercise “their responsibility as stewards of doctrine and church practice in their membership, since membership in the association is an endorsement of the acceptability of the doctrine and practice of all the member churches,” he said.
Wills said the Philadelphia Association modeled unity based on a shared commitment to the same views of biblical doctrine, biblical morality and biblical ecclesiology. The formation of the association in 1707 represented “their shared commitment to zealous action and effort in missions, evangelism, and theological education. The Philadelphia Association sent out gospel preachers as missionaries to other colonies as early as the 1750s. The association was the expression of scriptural fidelity in doctrine and church practice and it was the agency of cooperative missions and theological education.”
That is why the efforts of the Philadelphia Association – formed to protect and expand the local church – should be modeled again today, White said.
“Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the Philadelphia Association is the dedication to cooperation for the fulfillment of the Great Commission,” White said. “If Baptists can continue to demonstrate the same passion and cooperative spirit as early Baptists did, then our future will be as bright as our past.”