A Passion to Win the Lost

The story of the Modern Missions Movement has been well told, and deserves retelling, but behind the inspiring missions of William Carey, Hudson Taylor, Amy Carmichael and so many others there are stories more obscure, many of which will never be known. These are the stories of the churches who sent the missionaries. 

Foreign missions don’t happen in a vacuum. Like today, the great missionaries of the past were products of the congregations who educated and discipled them. The stories of these congregations and denominations is the story of the mission as well. The pastors, elders, and deacons, the doctrines and controversies of church life all play a role in shaping the missionary who steps onto the field. This remains the role of the church today. 

How 17th Century Baptist Churches Became Sending Churches

An excellent case-study for displaying seventeenth-century Puritanism and its missionary passion is the largest community of Baptists of this era, the Particular or Calvinistic Baptists.Originating within the Puritan movement in London in the decade of the 1630s, by 1644 there were seven Calvinistic churches. That year these churches issued a statement of faith, The First London Confession of Faith, that demonstrated their fundamental solidarity with the Calvinist communities throughout British Isles and continental Europe. This Confession became the doctrinal standard for the first period of Calvinistic Baptist advance, which ended in 1660 with the restoration of Charles II. During these sixteen years, these Calvinistic Baptists planted over 120 churches throughout England, Wales, and Ireland, a few of which survive to this very day, an example of church growth that should be the envy of Evangelicals today. 

After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, these Baptists—along with other Puritan groups like the English Presbyterians and Congregationalists—found themselves heavily persecuted by the state church, which longed to create a culture marked by religious uniformity. Yet, in the midst of this persecution, which lasted till 1688, these Baptists continued to grow and evangelize.

Key to this growth were pastors and evangelists who were passionate about the salvation of the lost. The most significant Baptist theologian of the late seventeenth century was undoubtedly Benjamin Keach (1640–1704). His pulpit ministry was characterized by vigorous evangelism and regular calls to the unconverted to respond to Christ in faith.  

According to C.H. Spurgeon (1834–1892)—the famous nineteenth-century Calvinistic Baptist preacher pastored the congregation that descended from Keach’s congregation—in speaking to the lost, Keach was “intensely direct, solemn, and impressive, not flinching to declare the terrors of the Lord, nor veiling the freeness of divine grace.”To illustrate, Spurgeon cited a typical evangelistic appeal by Keach to the unconverted:

Come, venture, your souls on Christ’s righteousness; Christ is able to save you though you are ever so great sinners. Come to him, throw yourselves at the feet of Jesus. Look to Jesus, who came to seek and save them that were lost … You may have the water of life freely. Do not say, “I want qualifications or a meekness to come to Christ.” Sinner, dost thou thirst? Dost thou see a want of righteousness? ’Tis not a righteousness; but ’tis a sense of the want of righteousness, which is rather the qualification thou shouldst look at. Christ hath righteousness sufficient to clothe you, bread of life to feed you, grace to adorn you. Whatever you want, it is to be had in him. We tell you there is help in him, salvation in him. “Through the propitiation in his blood” you must be justified, and that by faith alone.

But, it might be argued, all of these examples simply illustrate that Keach had a concern for the salvation of the English and those who sat under the sound of his preaching—what of the rest of the world? Well, consider Keach’s poem War with the Devil, one of his most popular works during his lifetime. This text is a clear indication that even though Puritans like Keach were unable to go to the places and peoples at “the ends of the earth,” his concern for gospel expansion was a global one.

Let France, dark Spain, and Italy,
Thy Light and Glory, Lord, behold:
To each adjacent Countrey
Do thou the Gospel plain unfold:
O let thy Face upon them shine,
That all these Nations may be thine.

Let Christendom new Christ’ned be,
And unto thee O let them turn,
And be Baptiz’d, O Christ, by thee
With th’ Spirit of thy Holy One:
O let thy Face upon it shine,
That Christendom may all be thine.

And carry on thy glorious Work
Victoriously in every Land,
Let Tartars and the mighty Turk
Subject themselves to thy Command:
O let thy Face upon them Shine,
That those blind People may be thine.

And let thy brightness also go,
To Asia and to Africa,
Let Egypt and Assyria too
Submit unto thy blessed Law:
O let thy Face upon them shine,
That those dark Regions may be thine.

Nay, precious God, let Light extend
To China and East-India;
To thee let all the People Bend,
Who live in wild America:
O let thy blessed Gospel shine,
That the blind Heathens may be thine.

Send forth thy Light like to the Morn
Most swiftly, Lord, O let it fly
From Cancer unto Capricorn:
That all dark Nations may espy
Thy glorious Face on them to shine,
And they in Christ for to be thine.

This may not be the best poetry, but the careful delineation of the peoples and places of the world bespeaks a deep concern for the global expansion of the Gospel.

The Seeds of a Great Commission Theology

If one turns from the fairly well-known figure of Keach to much-lesser known men among the Particular Baptists the passion for the advance of the gospel is no different. This is evident in the funeral sermons given by the London Baptist John Piggott (d.1713) in the first decade of the seventeenth century. 

On the occasion of the death of Thomas Harrison (d.1702), Piggott closed his funeral sermon for Thomas Harrison with a long and emotional appeal to those who had been the regular hearers of his dead friend’s preaching, yet who remained unconverted:

To you that were the constant auditors of the deceas’d minister. Consider how indulgent and favourable God has been to several of you, even in this dark dispensation. He has removed one that was ripe for heaven; but how dismal has been your state, if he had called you that are unprepared! If you drop into the grave while you are unprovided for eternity, you sink beyond the reserves of mercy. O adore the patience and long-suffering of God, that you are yet alive, and have one call more from this pulpit, and another very awful one from the grave of that person who used to fill it. His death calls upon you to repent, and turn to close with Christ, and make sure of heaven. Surely you cannot but feel some emotions in your breasts, when you think you shall never see nor hear your painful [hard working] minister more. And methinks the rocks within you should flow, when you think that he preached himself to death, and you have not yet entertained that Jesus whom he preached. ’Tis true, God gave him several seals of his ministry, which was the joy of his heart, and will be his crown in the Day of the Lord.

In his funeral sermon for Hercules Collins (d.1702), who died on October 4, less than two months after Harrison, Piggott also commented upon the evangelistic zeal of Collins by saying that “no Man could preach with a more affectionate regard to the salvation of souls.” Later in this sermon Piggott called on the regular hearers in Collins’ church who remained unsaved to be witnesses to the gospel fervor of the dead preacher: “You are witnesses with what zeal and fervor, with what constancy and seriousness he used to warn and persuade you.” At this point Piggott himself could not hold back from crying out, “Tho you have been deaf to his former preaching, yet listen to the voice of this providence, lest you continue in your slumber till you sleep the sleep of death.”  

Finally, in the funeral sermon that he preached for William Collins (d.1702)—Piggott was called upon to preach this but three weeks after the one he gave for Hercules Collins—Piggott asserted that the main burden of William Collins’ preaching had to do with a free gospel proclamation rooted in his love for sinners :

The subjects he ordinarily insisted on in the course of his ministry, were the great and important truths of the Gospel, which he handled with great judgment and clearness. How would he open the miseries of the fall! And in how moving a manner would he discourse of the excellency of Christ, and the virtues of his blood, and his willingness to save poor awakened burdened sinners!

When Piggott himself died in 1713, his funeral sermon was preached by Joseph Stennett I (1663–1713), a leading London Seventh-day Baptist divine. Stennett is usually remembered today for a number of his hymns that the so-called father of English hymnody, Isaac Watts (1674–1748), found inspirational. Among his lesser-known hymns is a baptismal hymn in which Stennett makes explicit reference to Matthew 28:19–20, the Great Commission, in three of the stanzas. Immediately before these stanzas, though, he sums up Christ’s missionary command to his apostles as an “Order to convert the World.” Again, it would be easy to see the texts cited above about Stennett’s contemporaries as simply revealing a concern for local evangelism. But this line from Stennett indicates that there was a consciousness to take the gospel beyond their British horizon. 

Matthew 28:19–20 was usually cited by seventeenth-century Baptists in their defense of believer’s baptism. For instance, William Kiffen (1616–1701), Hanserd Knollys (1599–1691), and Benjamin Coxe (fl.1640–1660), stated:

The only written commission to baptize (which is in Matth. 28:19.) directeth us to baptize disciples only, Go ye and disciple all nations, baptizing them; that is, the disciples: for this is the only construction and interpretation that the Greek word can there bear; and infants cannot be made disciples, because they cannot learn…Then only is baptism administered according to the rule of the Word, when a disciple is baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, etc. Matth. 28:19, that is, into the profession of faith in the Father, Son, and holy Spirit;…this necessarily excludes infants, who can make no such profession.

 Only those who are disciples, that is, those who have heard the gospel, learned of Christ, and responded to it in faith and repentance, should be baptized.

As noted, this is the most common way that seventeenth-century Particular Baptists employed this passage. There is a sermon on this text from Matthew 28, however, that was preached in 1700 by a certain John Williams after a public debate in Portsmouth between himself along with some other Baptists and some Paedobaptists. Williams emphasized that the command to teach and baptize disciples concerned “all nations” and that the command was not restricted to the Apostles who saw the Risen Christ. The only restriction that Williams allowed was the working of providence: the gospel is to go “to all nations, as providence should direct them [that is, the preachers], and open a door to them.”

Of course, it would be this text that would be central to the deservingly-famous missionary tract of William Carey (1761–1834), An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792). There is no evidence that Carey knew of John Williams’ sermon on the Matthean text, but the latter is yet another small indication that Carey’s thinking about missions is not as foreign to the Puritan mindset as has hitherto been thought.