TJN is adding to the richness of the BGC

Yesterday, I listened to Pastor Bob Evans’ sermon called “Our Mission” (found on his Blog). I was inspired by both his passion for the future of Temple Baptist and encouraged that The Journey North is part of the same rich history as our 124 year old sister church here in Brainerd.

I am asked about The Journey North all the time. It always seems to surprise people when they find out we are a Baptist church. But listen, I am so excited to be part of the Baptist General Conference (BGC). Below are some excerpts from our history. The Conference has continued to grow and diversify in the past few decades. Here are a few highlights and a little bit of our history:

1960s

* Bethel College and Seminary relocated to Arden Hills, Minn., from the BGC participated with 34 other Baptist groups in the Crusade of the Americas, providing evangelism training, seminars and events downtown St. Paul, and enrollment doubled to nearly 1300
* the BGC participated with 34 other Baptist groups in the Crusade of the Americas, providing evangelism training, seminars and events
* 270 young men and women served with God’s Invasion Army for a year without pay, resulting in 5400 decisions for salvation
* BGC and all other foreign missionaries were expelled from northeast India in 1967
* the BGC joined the National Association of Evangelicals and explored merging with the North American Baptist General Conference

1970s

* revival began at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, crossing denominational and national borders
* Bethel Seminary celebrated its centennial year (1971) and opened a campus in San Diego, Calif. (1977)
* missionaries declined from 124 in 1970 to 103 in 1979 (41 were appointed during this decade)
* the Hispanic Bible School opened in Chicago (1973)
* the BGC began mission work in Cameroon (1978) and Ivory Coast (1977)
* church membership grew from 103,000 in 677 churches to 132,000 in 780 churches

1980s

* the Conference grew to nearly 135,000 members in 820 churches
* in 1985, 72 churches left the BGC to form the Baptist General Conference of Canada
* 50 career missionaries joined the BGC between 1986-88, raising the total to 145
* from 1986 to 1990, 126 churches joined the BGC, a 42 percent increase over the prior five years
* the BGC reorganized in 1987 under a single board of overseers and elected the denomination’s first president, Robert S. Ricker
* the BGC provided on-site famine relief in Ethiopia and hurricane relief in the Virgin Islands
* the BGC began mission work in the Middle East (1987) and France (1989)

1990s

* the BGC targeted 25 unreached people groups for church planting
* historic indebtedness of $1.8 million was eliminated
* the number of Conference churches reached approximately 900
* Bethel College and Seminary combined enrollment exceeded 3,300
* the BGC began mission work in Bulgaria (1994), Central Asia (1995) Slovakia (1992), Thailand (1990), Uruguay (1991) and Vietnam (1995)

Our story really began almost 100 year early when Pioneer leader F. O. Nilsson successfully weathered persecution for his beliefs in Sweden, including exile from his homeland for the cause of Christ.

Nilsson’s aggressive witnessing soon brought both converts and persecution. After trials and amid much publicity, Nilsson was banished from Sweden in 1850. Following a period of exile in Denmark, he sailed for America in 1853 as the spiritual shepherd of a small group of believers.
Nilsson had, meanwhile, begun a witness that led to the conversion to the Baptist faith of Anders Wiberg, a devout and scholarly Lutheran clergyman. Wiberg responded to his friendly contacts with Nilsson and other Baptists by determining to write a book refuting the Baptist position on immersion. The result of his study was a volume that became a classic defense of the view he had set out to refute. Wiberg continued a heavy schedule of writing and preaching through which he had a profound stabilizing influence upon a fellowship of churches that had neither a literature nor a theological seminary. He went on to become perhaps the most influential person in the early development of Swedish Baptists on both continents.

One word that captures the essence of the faith the early Conference Baptists intended to hold and share is “biblical-.” The läsare were first “readers” of the Word. They came to the Bible out of a spiritual hunger that gave reality to their claim that it was their sole authority. On it they intended to base all of their lives and teaching. They were indeed people of the Book, and the central message they found and shared was the simple one of man’s deep need and God’s gracious salvation. Theirs was a theology of “redeeming grace” that clearly gave central place to the cross of Christ. As was said of Eric Sandell, pastor and teacher at Bethel Seminary for many years, God’s Word held the supreme place, and the message of the Crucified One was his theme.

Reaction against the patterns of the established churches led Swedish Baptists and other evangelicals to demand a regenerate clergy and a regenerate church membership. Believer’s baptism provided the best assurance of that kind of membership, and the scriptural mode of baptism was for them clearly immersion.
That generation so thoroughly and joyously believed in baptism that they immersed new believers in river, lake or ocean, wherever they found water. The Mississippi River was the scene for the first recorded baptism among Swedish Baptists in America (1852). Later scenes included not only the beauty of such a setting in spring and summer, but the biting cold of winter when Minnesota pioneers cut through thick ice to follow their Lord’s command. And even when baptisteries became available in churches, new converts sometimes walked or drove home in wet clothing, even in the dead of winter.
Such was the faith of the pioneers who survived the difficult early decades in a new land. Scattered, few in number and living in poverty that was often extreme, these devout people of the Word were committed to radical life-change and aggressive witnessing. These characteristics enabled them to grow slowly but steadily in number so that by 1871 that first tiny group of believers in Rock Island had become 1500 persons in seven states. Small as that number now seems, it represented healthy growth considering the handicaps under which the pioneers labored.

During the third and fourth decades of Swedish Baptist existence- in America, several developments combined to initiate rapid expansion. Within little more than 30 years the infant denomination had multiplied nearly fifteen-fold. One enabling factor was a huge increase in Swedish immigration during the last quarter of the century. Because of the rapid growth of the Baptist movement in Sweden, not a few of the late-nineteenth century immigrants actively sought that kind of church home in their new land. Church records across the Conference during that period reveal large accessions by letter, many of them from Sweden.

The new immigration also provided boundless opportunities for evangelism, opportunities the growing churches eagerly grasped as they sought to win their unconverted countrymen to the Lord. Olaus Okerson, who had been converted not long before in a great revival in Sweden, held services in his new neighborhood the very day he arrived in St. Paul in 1864. He continued to aggressively seek out his fellow Swedes as a long-term missionary in Minnesota and the Pacific Northwest.

The first half-century of Conference existence saw remarkable growth, fed by large-scale immigration and enabled by aggressive evangelism, devout faith and repeated revivals. The second half-century was marked by consolidation and institutional advance.
This is not to say that evangelism, revivals and growth ceased. Indeed, the 22,000 members of 1902 were to mount to nearly 34,000 by the Diamond Jubilee Celebration of 1927 and to 40,224 in 1945. Numerical growth, while gradually slowing during the new century, did continue. Patterns of evangelism were shifting, however. The spontaneous personal witnessing of the early years was increasingly supplanted by pulpit evangelism and by the preaching of professional revivalists. By the late nineteenth century, Swedish evangelists like the blind A. J. Freeman were more and more supplementing the evangelistic preaching of district missionaries and local pastors. And with the gradual transition from the Swedish language, professional English-speaking evangelists came to have prominence in the witnessing of the churches. No doubt these changes played a part in the declining growth rate, particularly as they reflected decreasing lay evangelism.
Equally important in that lack of membership growth was the end of the era of Swedish immigration by the time of World War I, and the hesitation and missteps that marked the inevitable period of transition to a predominantly English-language constituency. The super-patriotism of the war era accelerated a development brought about largely by the increasing proportion of second- and third-generation immigrant children in the churches. A few churches had completed the change as early as 1920, but for most congregations the critical period was the decade and a half following the war.

By the early 1930s the transition had been substantially accomplished in the churches as well as in the Seminary. In 1940 the Svenska Standaret combined with the young Conference-owned English-language paper, The Baptist Evangel, to become The Standard, which for 14 years included an optional four-page Swedish supplement. Five years after the merger, the last formal tie disappeared, as the Swedish Baptist General Conference of America dropped the word Swedish from its name.

Johanna Anderson was the first foreign missionary from a Conference church. Born in Sweden in 1856, she had immigrated to the United States at an early age with her parents. After training at St. Cloud (Minn.) Teachers’ College, she taught school in several Minnesota communities. She was always an active church member, but her mother had even more in mind for Johanna. She had dedicated her daughter to foreign missionary work. God called Johanna and she was obedient to the call.
Appointed for service in Burma by the Women’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, Johanna Anderson sailed in 1888. During her first term she taught at the mission school in Toungoo. Her furlough in 1897 had to be extended due to ill health. In 1903 the doctor finally gave consent for the frail missionary to return. But her days back in Burma were numbered. She died in 1904.
As we have seen, world missions was not a new interest for the Conference. The same concern for the unconverted that so motivated pioneer preachers and laity on this continent prompted volunteers for evangelism abroad very early in Swedish Baptist history. Johanna Anderson, who began her work in Burma in 1888, was the first of at least 16 to sail before the turn of the century, including such well-known missionaries as Ola Hanson, O. L. Swanson and Eric Lund. Their evangelistic, literary and educational labors were representative of what a growing body of workers accomplished. Hanson and Lund, for example, each translated all or parts of the Bible into several tongues and established industrial and other schools. So stirred were Swedish Baptists by needs in other lands that by 1945 upwards of 100 persons had entered world missions service under American Baptist boards.

[Excerpts from BGCworld.org]