The Forgotten Hour of How the South Was Won

A Term of Derision, A Term of Identity: Our Anabaptist Ancestry in Georgia

It may be surprising to more than a few Georgia Baptists to know that the first term designated to us upon our formation was “Anabaptist,” an opprobrious term that finds its origins in the 4^th century.¹ The term, which simply means “to rebaptize,” was vituperatively applied to sects throughout the history of Christianity that denied the validity of infant baptism and demanded a believer’s baptism which conformed to New Testament standards. The latter baptism was considered valid only if the candidate had publicly and intelligibly professed personal faith in Christ and volitionally desired to walk in that victorious regeneration given to us as we passed from death to life (John 10:10; 2 Cor. 5:17).

Thus, when Baptists entered the colonial scene of the Anglican South, they were characterized as Anabaptists of old bringing that ancient heresy to the New World. For example, when Shubal Stearns, the father of the Separate Baptist movement and brother-in-law to Georgia Baptist pioneer Daniel Marshall, planted churches throughout North Carolina, Anglican clergymen, angered and alarmed that there members were being swept away by the rising tide of the Baptists, made concerted efforts to “curb (if possible) an Enthusiastic sect which call themselves Anabaptists which is numerous.”² The strength of this self-proclaimed Anabaptist movement was so influential that Episcopal preachers began to immerse adults even as they were complaining of Baptist influence.³

Other paedobaptist bodies such as the Presbyterians also echoed the frustrated sentiments of the Anglicans, as one account explained, “And by their address and assiduity (the Anabaptists) have wormed the Presbyterians out of all their strongholds and drove them away…Wherefore a Presbyterian would sooner marry ten of his children to members of the Church of England than one to a Baptist.”⁴ Perhaps the angst Protestant preachers exclaimed against the Baptists was best described by one of the foremost evangelists of the First Great Awakening, George Whitefield, who sarcastically stated, “My chickens have turned to ducks.”⁵

Painted with that background, Georgia Baptists can easily see why the first Baptist church to be officially incorporated in Kiokee called itself, according to their charter, “the Anabaptist church on the Kioka.” The charter, submitted in 1789, uses the term Anabaptist four times within its brief incorporation, stating the following:

The Act of incorporating the Anabaptist church on the Kioka, in the county of Richmond.

 

WHEREAS, a religious society has, for many years, been established on the Kioka, in the county of Richmond, called and known by the name of "The Anabaptist church of Kioka";

 

Be it enacted, That Abraham Marshall, William Willingham, Edmund Cartledge, John Landers, James Simms, Joseph Ray and Lewis Gardener be, and they are hereby, declared to be a body corporate, by the name and style of "The Trustees of the Anabaptist church of Kioka."

 

And be it further enacted, That the Trustees (the same names are here given) of the said Anabaptist church, shall hold their office for the term of three years; and, on the third Saturday of November, in every third year, after the passing of this Act, the supporters of the Gospel in said church shall convene at the meeting house of the said church, and there, between the hours of ten and four, elect from among the supporters of the Gospel in said church seven discreet persons as Trustees, &c.⁶

 

The charter above was formed in fashioned in large part by the church’s first pastor, Daniel Marshall, whose life personifies the very word he chose to be connected to - Anabaptist. Through a brief yet personal analysis of his life, we Georgia Baptists will clearly see that the spiritual kinship between formative Georgia Baptists and the formative Anabaptists of the Reformation is undeniable.⁷ We are eternally bound together by key principles including the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, an intensely personal faith in Jesus Christ, religious liberty, and an evangelistic fervor to reach the nations for Christ. In sum, we are pilgrims passing through a land God has allowed us to tread and called us to serve.

This paper will serve to discuss three essential principles between Anabaptists and Georgia Baptists: 1) religious liberty, 2) the Great Commission, and 3) the New Testament church.

 

The Anabaptist Principle of Religious Liberty: A Free Church in a Free World

Let both [wheat and tares] grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.

Matthew 13:30

 

The history of the Anabaptists of the Reformation is one of imprisonment, torture, and death. Books such as The Martyrs Mirror, written in 1660 by Dutchman Thieleman van Braught,document the brutality brought upon Anabaptists like Michael Sattler (AD 1491-1527), who was viciously tortured and subsequently burned at the stake for rejecting Catholic tenets and accepting “rebaptism.”⁸ Yet, in the midst of persecution, Anabaptists such as Balthasar Hubmaier (AD 1480-1528), a German pastor who baptized more than 6000 people in his church over a fourteen month period, advocated complete religious liberty was a biblical principle that should be given to all men and women across the world.⁹ Like Sattler, this Anabaptist paid the highest price for his beliefs, being burned at the stake four years after completing that work. Anabaptists were the only major religious group during the Reformation to advocate religious freedom; Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists all maintained that the magistrates must control the souls of their people. These Anabaptists were centuries ahead of their time, unwelcome in a day of religious persecution. In fact, the American experiment is, in many ways, the grand culmination of their life’s work and pilgrimage. As such, men such as Daniel Marshall, tagged as an Anabaptist, are debtors of those who have paved the way before them with their own blood.

Daniel Marshall’s pilgrimage began in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1706, born to devout Congregational parents. In 1726, at the age of twenty, Marshall experienced the new birth and within a few years, his piety was so renowned that he was asked to serve as a deacon of the Congregational church in Windsor, a position he held for twenty years.¹⁰ But another dramatic experience was forthcoming: Marshall was about to be swept into the passionate tide of the Great Awakening, a movement that would change his life’s journey forever. Abraham Marshall, Daniel’s son and second pastor of the Kiokee church, described the influence the Awakening had on his father:

Our worthy parent was one of the thousands…who heard that son of thunder, the Rev. George Whitfield, and caught his seraphic fire. Firmly believing in the near approach of the latter-day glory, when the [J]ews, with the fullness of the gentiles, shall hail their REDEEMER,…an number of worthy characters ran to and fro, through the eastern states, warmly exhorting to the prompt adoption of every measure tending to hasten this blissful period. Others sold, gave away, or left their possessions, as the powerful impulse of the moment determined, and, without scrip, or purse rushed up to the head of the Susquehanna, to convert the heathens…One…of these pious missionaries was my venerable father.¹¹

 

Driven by a biblical zeal to reach a lost New World, Marshall first reached out to the American Indians in upstate New York.

At the same time, Marshall became convinced that the true church was not to be found in the State Church and he, thus, began identifying himself as a Separatist. Marshall firmly held to his newfound beliefs, lost any support from the Puritans, and survived on rations as an independent missionary. Abraham described his father’s great sacrifice, stating “[Marshall] exchanged his commodious buildings, for a miserable hut; his fruitful fields and loaded orchards, for barren deserts; the luxuries of a well-furnished table, for a coarse and scanty fare; and numerous civil friends, for rude savages!”¹²

Shortly thereafter, Marshall and his family relocated to Virginia, in part due to the French and Indian War (1754-1763), and, convinced of Baptist principles, submitted to baptism by the Mill Creek Baptist Church.¹³ It was here, in Virginia, that Marshall reunited with his brother-in-law, Shubal Stearns, who himself was a former Congregationalist who submitted to believer’s baptism three years earlier, and they joined efforts to preach the Gospel in that Western frontier.¹⁴ However, due to some Calvinistic Baptists (later known as Regular Baptists) who grew uncomfortable with the emotionalism of their services and the “suggested Arminianism”¹⁵ in their preaching, Stearns and Marshall grew restless with Virginia and found greater opportunities in North Carolina.

In 1755, Stearns, Marshall, and others formed the Sandy Creek Church, a congregation that birthed a movement which provided a third stream in Baptist life, distinct from Regular Baptists (who were strict Calvinists) and General Baptists (who were strict Arminians). Over the next 17 years, Sandy Creek Church grew by nearly 600 members and, as contemporary chronicler Morgan Edwards related of its legacy, “It, in 17 years, has spread branches westward as far as the great river Mississippi; southward as far as Georgia; eastward to the sea and Chesapeake bay; and northward to the waters of Potomac.”¹⁶

Of this vast expansion, it was Marshall who entered the nominal Anglican colony of Georgia and risked his liberties in order to plant Baptist churches in the countryside of the colony. Success came so quickly in Georgia that the lieutenant governor ordered an Anglican minister in Augusta to “put a stop to the progress of those Baptist vagrants, who continually endeavor to Subvert all order, and make the Minds of the people Giddy, with that which neither they nor their teachers understand.”¹⁷ Marshall was arrested in haste, and consequently convicted and commanded to cease preaching in Georgia. Through the witness of Marshall and his wife Martha, who herself quoted Scripture incessantly, the arresting constable along with the magistrate were cut to the quick and soon converted and were baptized. Another young man by the name of Cartledge, listening to their defense of Baptist beliefs, accepted the call to become a minister.¹⁸

The firm apologetic stance of Elder Marshall and his buoyant wife opened the door to religious freedom in Georgia and the next year the Kiokee church was born. The more than two million Baptists in Georgia today stand on the shoulders of these two giants whose unwavering faith and sacrificial lives opened the door to opportunities not possible without them counting the cost.

The Anabaptist Principle of the Great Commission: Preaching Christ to the Whole World

Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Matthew 28:19-20

 

Evangelism is, in essence, a disorderly activity that causes the Christian to be removed from his comforts and to be placed in situations not for the faint of heart. Evangelism, in a word, is dirty, especially for those who enjoy the security of the known and the serenity of home. Spontaneity, the outgrowth of the informality and supposed disorderliness of evangelism, was a key principle that propelled the Anabaptist movement forward without the fetters of a government-run church awaiting permission from magistrates for ecclesial activities.¹⁹ Anabaptists met in cemeteries and farm fields, preached the simple message of the Gospel for all people rich and poor, and demanded an immediate answer to the question of repentance and faith in Christ. Disparaging nicknames tell the tale of these Anabaptists, who were called Schwarmer (Ger., “Swarmers” like that of a beehive) due to their evangelistic zeal, Winklerpredigten (Ger., “Out-of-the-way preachers”) due to their tendencies to preach in the remotest of locations, and Leufer (Ger., “Walkers”) due to their migratory inclinations.²⁰

These three nicknames could also be said of Daniel Marshall and the entire Sandy Creek movement who surged forward with gumption and zeal while the more Calvinistic wing of Baptists, the Regular Baptists, lagged behind, fettered by philosophical presuppositions and doctrinal formalism. Like their influential counterpart and mentor George Whitefield, the formalism and rigidity of a Reformed systematic theology was not primary in their preaching. In fact, Whitefield, who may be classified in some sense as a Calvinist, maintained that he had “never read anything that Calvin wrote.”²¹ As one author explained, “The doctrine of predestination and election never bothered [Whitefield] in his eloquent efforts at soul saving.”²² No wonder John Leland, the famed Baptist pastor in Virginia and champion of religious liberty, witnessed the phenomenal movement of Sandy Creek and described it as follows: “The preaching that has been most blessed by God, and most profitable to men, is the doctrine of sovereign grace in the salvation of souls, mixed with a little of what is called Arminianism.”²³ Like the Anabaptists of old, these modern day Anabaptists in North Carolina and Georgia were given all sorts of titles including Methodists, strollers, and strolling preachers.

Freedom in evangelism and liberty in worship was the logical (and biblical) outcropping of their conviction. According to William Lumpkin, Marshall, who “found it more difficult to benefit scribes and Pharisees [sic] than Publicans and sinners,” called for open invitations and demanded “young converts witness immediately.”²⁴ Marshall and his brother-in-law Stearns preached in the backwoods of the South, at places including a rally, a sale, a wedding, or a barn-raising. Marshall’s delight was in preaching to the poorest of the poor, who when gathered in groves “experienced fear and trembling, shouting and acclamation, weeping and rejoicing.”²⁵ And the climax of the service was unquestionably the invitation given to the audience in hopes that all would respond. One account details the happenings:

At the close of the sermon, the minister would come down from the pulpit and while singing a suitable hymn would go around among the brethren shaking hands. The hymn being sung, he would then extend an invitation to such persons as felt themselves poor guilty sinners, and were anxiously inquiring the way of salvation, to come forward and kneel near the stand.²⁶

 

Long before the Second Great Awakening, which some scholars mistakenly assert was the beginning of the altar call / invitation²⁷, Sandy Creekers passionately called out the lost and demanded a public answer to the invitation given.

How ironic, then, that there resides within twenty-first century Baptists a divide over the appropriateness of an altar call. Mark Coppenger, a professor at Southern Seminary, argues that invitations are harmful since it gives the appearance that the invitation is “the saving event “ or that pastors and members judge the merits of a worship service on the number who come forward.²⁸ The popular IX Marks, a ministry led by Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C., proudly refuses to give an “altar call” and actually goes out of its way to write an entire article to “discourage other churches from doing so as well.” The article lists nine reasons why, including:

1. This confusion [of an altar call] deceives people about their spiritual state.

2. This confusion brings false converts with false assurance into the church’s membership.

3. The altar call makes conversion look like a work of man, when in fact it is a work of God.

4. The altar call distracts Christians from the main point of the service.²⁹

Poor historical work and reactionary exegesis based on one’s one theological framework caused division between Regular Baptists and Separate Baptists 250 years ago and will do so again today unless this type of ignorant argument is cast aside and thrown down the Abyss from whence it came. Our heritage as Georgia Baptists, and a proper understanding of Scripture and its Anabaptist descendents, requires us to discard any theological framework that diminishes the call to salvation and removes the urgency of such an appeal. Our survival and future literally depends on holding fast to the foundation which was laid in Scripture and followed by our Georgia pioneers.

 

The Anabaptist Principle of a New Testament Church: A Confessing Church in a Wayward World

And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.

Matthew 16:18

 

Of all of the marks of the Anabaptist movement during the Reformation, what set these Radicals apart was ecclesiology, in particular a believer’s church. Other doctrines - including religious liberty, believer’s baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the atonement – were all based upon the key principle that the church is to be made up of regenerated members who confess their faith publicly, live according to biblical standards, and walk in the victory Christ has given them. The local body of believers was integral to one’s walk with Christ, as formative Anabaptist theologian Balthasar Hubmaier stated:

[The Christian church is built] on the oral confession of faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. This outward confession is what makes the church, and not faith alone; for the church that has the power to bind and to loose is outward and corporeal, not theoretical, and faith is inward. And although faith alone makes righteous, it does not alone give salvation, for it must be accompanied by public confession.³⁰

 

This quote is found within Hubmaier’s confession of faith he authored, entitled A Christian Catechism, and was required of those who wished to join the Anabaptist fellowship he led in Mikulov, Czech Republic. This confession was a minimal confession that nicely summarized the beliefs of the fellowship. It was not bogged down with an inordinate amount of theological detail but stated simply the essential beliefs of these Anabaptists.

In like manner, Separate Baptists chose their confessions carefully and avoided any perception of rigid Reformed dogmatism. Thus, even though Marshall was baptized within a Regular Baptist church that adopted the strict Calvinist Philadelphia Confession of Faith, he chose not to adopt that confession and the churches he planted did not join any Regular Baptist association. When Calvinist preachers attempted to persuade Stearns and Marshall in uniting with Regular Baptists, they were turned away, in part due to theological differences. Many historians believe Marshall and the Sandy Creek leaders were anti-confessional, but this writer believes they were carefully confessional, not allowing themselves to be boxed into a philosophical agenda. Thus, at times Sandy Creek confessions would adopt some words from more Reformed doctrines – words such as “effectual calling” and “particular redemption”³¹ – but would leave these terms undefined. This would explain why both General Baptists and Dunkards joined Separate Baptist churches and, at the same time, Particular Baptists were free to unite with Separates as well.³²

As the movement quickly matured, Sandy Creek churches, distinguishing themselves from Regular Baptists, adopted language from other Baptists. Abbots Creek’s confession of faith (1783), passed before the incorporation of Kiokee Church, adopted a very simple confession of faith which was based on the “old General Baptists”³³ which reads:

Believing the Old and New Testament to be the perfect rule of life and practice and [Secondly] Repentance from dead works and [Thirdly] Faith toward God and [Fourthly] The doctrine of baptism and [Fifthly] laying on of hands and [Sixthly] the perseverance of saints, [Seventhly] the resurrection of the dead, and 81y Eternal judgment (63).³⁴

 

As pastor and historian John Sparks explains, this confession affirmed “the authority of Scripture and complemented by merely one Calvinistic article: that of the perseverance of the saints.”³⁵ Complimenting this portrayal, the witness of Yadkin Baptist Association in North Carolina, which adopted a confession of faith in 1793, illustrates how the Sandy Creek movement rejected much of Reformed doctrine. The document handed to messengers to accept originally stated, “We believe in the doctrine of particular election by grace.” After much banter, the word particular was removed, and the document , still preserved at the American Baptist Historical Society in Rochester, New York, still bears witness to the controversy as the word was erased yet still noticeable to the naked eye.³⁶

To Daniel Marshall, Reformed doctrine was anything but essential to the churches. Each church had the right to adopt a confession and it was decided by him and other leaders that no corporate confession would be adopted by the entire movement. While eternal security proved important to most in North Carolina and Georgia, other doctrines were undefined and usually ignored. Jesse Mercer (AD 1769-1841) declared of Daniel Marshall’s son and second preacher of Kiokee, “[Abraham Marshall was] never considered a predestinarian.”³⁷ Abraham stated of his own character, “[I am] short legged and could not wade in such deep water [of predestination].”³⁸ In 1845, as the Southern Baptist Convention is being formed in our backyard, Separate Baptists pass the Declaration of Faith which advocates openly through Article Six, “the Freeness of Salvation” that “nothing prevents the salvation of the greatest sinner on earth, except his own voluntary refusal to submit to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

 

The Conclusion: What’s In a Name?

The issue was resolved that the Sandy Creek movement would be neither Arminian, since as they accepted perseverance of the saints, or Calvinist, since they rejected the doctrines of limited atonement and irresistible grace. They chose to define themselves distinctively according to what was most important to them – a believer’s church. Following the primitive pattern of the New Testament, Marshall, Stearns, and others traveled the South preaching the simple Gospel that one needs to repent of their sins and place their faith in Jesus Christ and His finished work on the cross. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than at the Kiokee where the doors of the church were opened at the pool, just prior to the baptismal service, for membership, and many were received and baptized on the spot, after a relation of their Christian experience.”³⁹ Members were called upon to love one another and live a consistent Christian life. If a member was proven recalcitrant, the church “maintained a very sane attitude in regard to the steps and procedure in matters of discipline.”⁴⁰ The purity of the fellowship was guarded properly while the people were loved consistently. In short, church was defined not as a set of rules in regulations, but as a relationship between God and man, and between each other.

William Lumpkin concluded of Marshall, Stearns, and the Sandy Creek movement, “The Regular Baptists, in a word, could never have won the South. They lacked the enthusiasm, the vision, and the leadership required for so formidable an undertaking.”⁴¹ In essence, he is absolutely correct. Religious formalism can kill a church; ritual will retain its death while going through the religious motions. One can say with some certainty that Baptists would have existed without Kiokee, without Marshall. But one can also say with even more certainty that Baptists would never have thrived without Kiokee, without Marshall. The breadth of our legacy and the future of our denomination, from a human understanding, may be determined on whether we retain the Baptist distinctives given to us by men willing to give it all so that we can follow their pattern, and the pattern set forth by the New Testament.

 

 

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