OLD SCHOOL BAPTISTS IN THE WEST,

FOREWORD

There are histories that are forgotten because they were insignificant. And there are histories that are forgotten because the people who lived them did not build the institutions that later wrote the histories.

This book is about the second kind.he story of the Old School Baptists in the American West is not merely the story of a few stubborn preachers who resisted change. It is not simply an appendix to Kehukee, Black Rock, or the better-known controversies of the eastern states. It is the story of men and women who crossed mountains, rivers, prairies, and eventually an entire continent carrying with them a conviction that was more precious to them than institutional success: Christ had already given His church everything necessary to be His church.

They carried that conviction west.

They carried it into Kentucky and Tennessee.

They carried it across the Ohio and Mississippi.

They carried it into Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Texas.

And eventually they carried it in wagons across the plains and mountains to Oregon.

Some of them left behind farms they had cleared with their own hands. Some buried husbands, wives, children, and friends along the way. Some preached after working all week as farmers, carpenters, cabinetmakers, merchants, or laborers. Their meetinghouses were often small. Their congregations could be smaller still. Their names rarely found their way into the histories of great American religious institutions.

Yet they went.

And wherever they went, churches appeared.

That fact alone forces us to reconsider one of the oldest caricatures of the Old School Baptists.

They were not opposed to the gospel traveling.

They traveled with it.

They were not opposed to preaching in distant places.

Their ministers rode and walked extraordinary distances to preach.

They were not opposed to constituting churches.

They constituted churches across an expanding frontier.

They were not opposed to cooperation.

Their churches corresponded, sent messengers, organized associations, received visiting elders, assisted ministers, and maintained fellowship across enormous distances.

What they opposed was something much more specific and much more profound.

They questioned whether the church of Jesus Christ needed another organization standing beside it—or eventually above it—to accomplish the work Christ had entrusted to His people.

That question is the heartbeat of this book.

The western evidence makes it impossible to dismiss the Old School resistance as merely an eastern reaction that began at Kehukee in 1827 or Black Rock in 1832. In Illinois, Baptist opposition to missionary-board patronage had already become an associational issue by 1824. Daniel Parker had published his attack upon the Baptist missionary-board system in 1820, twelve years before Black Rock. The western controversy was therefore already developing while the eastern struggle was still taking shape.
That changes the story.

The Old School movement did not arise at one meeting, from one address, under one preacher, or in one region. The evidence in this volume points instead toward something broader: Baptists in widely separated places were confronting the same transformation and asking remarkably similar questions.

Who had the right to direct the work of the gospel?

Who should call and recognize ministers?

Who should support them?

Who should determine where they labored?

Could a society composed of contributing individuals perform work Scripture had committed to churches?

Could an educational institution gradually become the gatekeeper of the ministry?

Could efficiency establish authority?

Could necessity justify an institution for which these Baptists believed they could find no apostolic warrant?

Those were not trivial questions to them.

They touched the very identity of the church.

And there were sincere Christians on the other side.

That must be said.

John Mason Peck looked upon the vast western frontier and saw settlements without churches, churches without pastors, children without schools, and enormous opportunities for evangelization. His answer was organization—missionary societies, Sunday schools, educational institutions, denominational cooperation, publications, and eventually national home-mission machinery.

The Old School Baptists often looked upon the same frontier and reached almost the opposite conclusion.

If Christ had established His churches, called His ministers, given His ordinances, and commanded the preaching of His gospel, they asked, why should another permanent religious corporation be necessary to accomplish His work?

The disagreement was not between people who wanted the gospel preached and people who did not.

Both sides preached. Both sides traveled. Both sides planted churches.

The question was what stood behind that work.

The manuscript repeatedly demonstrates that rejecting the missionary system did not mean rejecting itinerant preaching or church planting. David Badgley, for example, had actually participated in organized missionary work, received society support, and traveled as an appointed missionary before rejecting that arrangement—and then continued helping constitute churches afterward.

That is one of the reasons this history matters.

It allows the Old School Baptists to speak from within their own world rather than forcing them into categories created by their opponents.

Their story becomes even more remarkable as it moves westward.

In Texas, Daniel Parker's people did something almost unimaginable today. They did not wait for a missionary society to identify Texas as a field and send an agent there.

An organized church moved.

Families, members, minister, faith, order, and congregational identity crossed the frontier together.

The church itself became missionary in the oldest sense of the word—not through a separate missionary corporation, but through the movement of the body and the subsequent constitution of other churches.

The pattern appears repeatedly in this history:

believers move,

ministers move,

families gather,

the gospel is preached,

churches are constituted,

associations follow.

The church came first.

The machinery did not.

And then the story reaches Oregon.

There is something deeply moving about Isom Cranfill crossing the Oregon Trail in 1847. He had been a cabinetmaker. He had made coffins during a terrible period of disease in Illinois. Then he placed his family among thousands of emigrants moving toward an uncertain western future. His surviving diary records the journey, and after reaching Oregon he worked with his hands while traveling through the Willamette and Umpqua valleys preaching among scattered believers.

He did not arrive backed by a national denominational apparatus.

He carried his faith with him.

So did John Stipp.

So did other Regular Predestinarian Baptists.

And while they were building churches in Oregon, something else was happening farther south.

Osgood Church Wheeler arrived in California as a commissioned missionary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. In 1849—the very year the Siloam Association of Regular Predestinarian Baptists was taking shape in Oregon—Wheeler was beginning institutional Missionary Baptist work in California and organizing what became the First Baptist Church of San Francisco.

There, on the Pacific Coast, thousands of miles from the controversies of North Carolina and Maryland, the two Baptist visions stood beside one another again.

One came through a national society.

The other came through migrating churches, elders, and families.

One saw organization as a necessary instrument for meeting the demands of a growing nation.

The other feared that every new religious institution transferred a little more of the church's work into hands Christ had never appointed.

That is the tragedy—and the grandeur—of this story.

These people were brethren before they became parties.

They shared Bibles.

They shared Baptist ancestry.

They shared ordinances.

They shared much of the same theology.

They often shared the same meetinghouses, associations, families, and memories.

Then came the societies.

Then came the theological disputes over gospel means.

Then came questions of ministerial education.

Then boards, agents, salaries, schools, conventions, publications, and competing definitions of Baptist cooperation.

Churches divided.

Associations divided.

Ministers who had once sat together ceased corresponding.

Congregations that had once broken bread together declared one another out of order.

And from those divisions emerged two Baptist worlds.

This book does not need to pretend that every Old School Baptist was correct about everything. They were not united among themselves. Parker's Two-Seed doctrine created serious controversy. Later disputes over predestination, gospel means, church discipline, and other matters produced painful divisions even within the Old School ranks. The manuscript itself acknowledges these internal differences rather than manufacturing an imaginary golden age.

Nor does this book require us to question the sincerity of every Missionary Baptist.

The issue is not sincerity.

The issue is history.

And history demands that we hear the forgotten side.

The institutions built by the Missionary Baptists survived, expanded, accumulated resources, trained ministers, established colleges, published histories, and became enormously influential. Inevitably, much of Baptist history came to be narrated through the institutional descendants of the victors.

The Old School Baptists left something different.

Minutes.

Church books.

Circular letters.

Associational correspondence.

Personal diaries.

Old newspapers.

Graveyards.

Fading meetinghouses.

Names buried in county histories.

And sometimes nothing more than a sentence recording that an elder rode into a settlement, preached the gospel, baptized believers, and helped constitute another church.

Those fragments matter.

Behind every faded name was a human life.

Behind every associational minute was a congregation of people who had buried their dead, raised their children, worked the soil, crossed rivers, survived disease, endured loneliness, and gathered again on another Lord's Day because they believed that Christ would preserve His church.

Their story deserves to be told.

And perhaps the most powerful conclusion of this entire work is that the western Old School Baptist movement was not merely an eastern protest transplanted to the frontier. It was also a western response born from western experience. Illinois Baptists had encountered missionary organization and reacted against it before Kehukee and Black Rock. Parker resisted the board system in the West. Missouri divided. Iowa inherited the Regular Baptist network. Parker's congregation physically moved into Texas. Cranfill and Stipp carried Predestinarian Baptist life across the Oregon Trail. Meanwhile Peck, the Home Mission Society, Wheeler, and others carried west another Baptist future built upon organized societies, education, and denominational coordination.

Thus two Baptist migrations crossed America at the same time.

One effectively said:

Send the gospel west through organized institutions.

The other answered:

Let the churches go. Let the ministers go. Let the families go. And wherever God gathers His people, let churches arise according to the order Christ has already given.

The manuscript reaches this very conclusion: two Baptist westward expansions were occurring simultaneously, one through organized institutions and the other through churches, ministers, and believing families reproducing churches according to what they understood as apostolic order.

That is why this history should not be read merely as a denominational curiosity.

It asks a question that has never gone away.

Is the church sufficient for the work Christ gave the church?

Every generation answers that question, whether it realizes it or not.

The old meetinghouses may be gone.

The wagon roads have disappeared beneath highways.

The frontier graves are weathered.

Many of the associations recorded in these pages have vanished.

The voices of their elders have been silent for more than a century.

But the question they carried across the mountains still lives.

And before we dismiss their answer as backward, primitive, or obsolete, we owe them the dignity of listening.

That is the purpose of this book.

To recover their names.

To reopen their records.

To follow their footsteps west.

And, for a little while, to hear again the voices of those forgotten Baptists who crossed a continent believing that they did not need to reinvent the church in order to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth.

Guillermo Santmaria