Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

The publication of English Baptist William Carey’s Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792) and his role in founding the English Baptist Missionary Society were turning points not only in Baptist missions but in the history of Christian missions generally. Carey was hardly the first to call for foreign missions—Christianity was a missionary religion from its beginnings—and many Baptists had wittingly and unwittingly been working as missionaries for centuries. (Think of the Separate Baptists’ movement into the South in the 1750s, for example, or former slave David George’s ventures in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone after the American Revolution.) Nevertheless, Carey’s work, and his voyage to India in 1793, signaled a new seriousness about missions among Baptists and other evangelicals.