An historical survey of Georgia Baptist missions

(Reprinted from Christian Index: Georgia Baptist bicentennial: An historical survey of Georgia Baptist missions - The Christian Index)

Posted Thursday, October 20, 2022 2:47 pm

With a history of trials, Georgia Baptists have been a missional people. Over six major eras, Georgia Baptists have made missions a priority.

At their earliest arrival into Georgia as a penal colony in 1733, men and women who identified themselves as Baptists sought to establish churches as starting points for evangelistic outreach. In The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness, Leon McBeth notes that Baptist missional efforts began in Georgia in 1773, and the first Baptist association was formed in 1784 with “plans to sponsor statewide mission work” (224). According to Robert Torbet in A History of the Baptists, in 1783 an emancipated slave named George Liele became the first ordained Baptist African American and the first Georgia missionary to carry the gospel to a foreign field. In his A History of the Georgia Baptist Convention 1822-1972, James Lester observes that “mission interests were strong in the area of the Georgia association prior to formal associational organization” (40). In fact, “there is ample justification for the statement that when early Georgia Baptists began to think collectively about mission work, white and black were thinking in terms, primarily, of a mission witness to the Indians at this point in history, prior to the beginning of the mission efforts evident by 1813” (Lester 44). However, believers in 1813 formed a “Baptist foreign mission society in Savannah [as the] first Georgia associational organization for missionary purposes.” (Lester 787).

From this point, other missionary societies began to develop on the national and state levels. In The Southern Baptist Convention and Its People 1607-1972, Robert Baker notes that “the national missionary body in 1814 [grew] out of the conversion of the Judsons and Rice” (131). Other local missionary societies arose in Georgia, and “it is likely that the missionary work among the Creeks and Cherokees beginning about 1819 was the outgrowth of this missionary spirit” (Baker 132). The primary method for missional outreach was the establishment of sabbath schools as teaching arms in church planting across the state within regional associations.

The second major era of missions growth began when Georgia Baptist associations formally organized in 1822 as the General Baptist Association of the State of Georgia by resolution of Adiel Sherwood. In 1827, the group was officially renamed as the Baptist Convention for the State of Georgia. Some of the missional highlights in these earliest days of the convention was proactive missions to the Creek and Cherokee Indians in the 1830s, the 1835 convention commitment “to raise $3000 of a $100,000 goal for missionary purposes set up by the United States Baptist Convention for Foreign Missions” (Lester 109), and an article in the Christian Index in 1840 calling for a “Southern society” to make sure that funds for the “Texian mission” would be sufficient (Baker 154). In Road to Augusta, author Joe Burton surmises that an “antimissions spirit had been preached up and down the hills and valleys” (52), but Georgia Baptists fought this demonic spirit with an evangelistic fervor. There seemed to be a growing consensus across the United States during these years to unite in missional outreach toward the frontiers of the west and for the most needy in the rural South.

The third historical era began on May 8, 1845, at First Baptist Church in Augusta, when 293 people convened in Georgia to establish a new national convention with two separate mission boards for home and foreign missions. W.W. Barnes notes in The Southern Baptist Convention 1845-1953 that 139 Georgia Baptists made up almost half of the delegates. McBeth notes that the year brought an end to unity among Baptists in America as the Southern Baptist Convention was born (391). But Georgia Baptists doubled down by supporting William Tryon, a Georgia Baptist pastor, to push Indian missions in Texas as well as to support missionaries to Africa and Burma.  In 1871, Georgia had adopted child-care ministry for orphan children as a missional effort. On July 7, 1873, the Foreign Mission Board appointed Charlotte D. “Lottie” Moon to China. Through a missions sermon in her home church in Cartersville, Georgia, Moon had clearly heard the Lord’s call to go. Over the next forty years, Lottie Moon’s missions involvement inspired more Southern Baptists to give and go to various mission fields. That was the same year that J.M. Wood formed a committee to call for a state board of missions. According to B.D. Ragsdale in Story of Georgia Baptists Vol 3, in 1876 J.G. Ryals made the formal recommendation and J.H. Campbell made the 1877 resolution to the state convention.

In order to curb the extravagant expense of raising money for national and international missions efforts and to ensure missions would continue to reach the neediest in the state, Georgia constituted the “Board of Missions of the Baptist Convention of Georgia” in 1877 with instructions to the home and foreign boards to work through this new entity to raise mission money in Georgia.  This brought in the fourth era. Even though theological and missiological controversies had permeated Baptist churches and threatened the foreign missions arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, Georgia Baptists wanted to reach more at home and abroad. The heavy influx of immigration into America by the end of the 19th century caused Georgia Baptists to place a missional emphasis on reaching the foreigners arriving at their doorsteps. Moreover, concerted efforts to reach indigenous people within the state grew to a top priority. With missions giving growing among Georgia Baptists, they were committed to missions work to thousands of freedmen who had left “white churches to form their own.” (McBeth 404). By this time Georgia had already partnered with other states to support missionaries to Mexico, Brazil, Japan and Italy. Even though informal ties remained on missional fronts between the North and the South with the American Baptist Publication Society and the American Baptist Home Mission Society, “the last organizational tie between Baptist churches North and South was thus severed” (McBeth 401) in 1897 with the dissolution of fellowship between the missions efforts of the two societies. In 1903, First Baptist Church of Macon financed the very first Southern Baptist mission hospital in China.

The Georgia Baptist Board of Missions remained in existence until 1919. That year, the beginning of a fifth era, the Georgia Baptist Convention voted to reconstitute its leadership as an executive committee to model the recent national change and to ensure efficiency in application of missions funds. By 1920 a pandemic infected one-third of the world’s population at the time and killed up to 100 million people. Accordingly, Georgia Baptists turned their missional interests toward offering medical aid to orphan homes in Georgia, and the survival rate among those children was remarkable.

Initially inspired by the attempted $75 million campaign to raise funds in a unified manner, the Cooperative Program was born in 1925 to diminish the inefficiency of societal giving and form a unified missions fund for Southern Baptists. This “one sacred effort” to pool missions giving continued to grow through the twentieth century. Because missions funding was secure, international missions efforts grew from 908 missionaries in 33 countries in 1953 to over 5,000 missionaries in almost 200 countries in 2001. This growth culminated with hundreds of Georgia Baptists deployed as full-time missionaries to various parts of the world to help reach the unreached and with thousands of Georgia Baptist volunteers traveling each year to join the work, not only in their giving but in their going. IMB president Paul Chitwood applauds Georgia Baptists as some of “IMB’s strongest partnering and most generous churches, [as] thousands of volunteers come to the mission field to serve alongside their IMB missionaries and millions of dollars flow from Georgia Baptist Convention churches to support those missionaries.” Currently, IMB has 294 current Field Personnel with ties to Georgia.

A new era began in 2015, and the Georgia Baptist executive committee approved a proposal to allow for the DBA designation of a new Georgia Baptist Mission Board with its renewed missional emphasis throughout the state. Under the leadership of current executive director W. Thomas Hammond, Jr., six geographic regions of the state were drawn in 2019 with opportunities for Georgia Baptist churches to engage locally, regionally, nationally and internationally through supported partnerships with Association Missions Strategists and SBC partners in most lost zip codes, other state conventions, and countries in Central and South America. The idea of missional partnerships as a means to strengthen churches complemented the stated priority of Georgia as a viable mission field.

Georgia has always had a presence of Baptists who care enough about the Lord’s Great Commission that it has weathered storms of philosophical controversies, endured physical and financial hardships, and remained committed to the command to make disciples at home and abroad. Georgia truly is our mission field, and yet it is still a launching pad for sending missionaries. Baptists in Georgia started with missions to this state, and missions continue through Georgia Baptist churches to reach the lost everywhere. May the Lord be praised for His calling His people to be on mission to and through this state for over 200 years.