The Father of Southern Baptist Missions

Rev. Luther Rice came to the Sandy Creek Baptist Association's annual meeting in 1816, and he was appointed to chair the committee that drew up the Confession of Faith in 1816. Among the memebers named was Elder Hezekiah Harmon who founded the church that I pastored from 1972-1983, the Gum Springs Batist Church of Moncure. Another member of the committee was identified by title, namely, the clerk of the Association, a young man named Basil Manly (later to be called Senior as he had a son who bore the same name. It is clear from the confession that the Association and its members and guest believed in Sovereign Grace. Interestingly enough, ths past week I received a copy of Rev. Rice's Memoirs published in 1840 and edited by James Taylor. Few people seem to realize that Sandy Creek was founded by Elders Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall who were Puritans in their soteriology. Both were converted under Ev. George Whitefield, and every indication available from the limited sources suggest that they and the association retained this theology into the 1800s. In 1787 in the Union of Separate and Regular Baptists the first exception was noted, namely, that it would be no barrier to communion to preach that Christ tasted death for every man. This clearly implies that the normal preaching of the atonement was for particular persons, i.e., those whom God had chosen or, in other words, particular redemption. Since the founders of Sandy Creek Assn. were converted in the First Great Awakening (circa 1740s) and the members of it experienced the Second Great Awakening (circa 1801), it follows that the theology of the Great Awakenings was Sovereign Grace or Calvinism. The same theology was involved in the origin of the Great Century of Missions (Dr. Latourette's term) as is clear from the Confession of 1816. Such theology might be likened to the paadoxical interventions of professional counselors (cf. Erickson, Frankl, et.al.). It seesevident that a paradox, an opposite, freely embraced, restores a measure of control to the individual by some mysterious process. If such be the case, then the opposition to so-called Calvinism is really a problem of human enmity to Divine Sovereignty rather a matter of justice being violated.