Triennial Convention

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (October 2007)

The Triennial Baptist Convention, also simply known as the Triennial Convention, the first national Baptist denomination in the United States of America, was established in 1814 (Wikipedia). The Convention was the merger of the Philadelphia Baptist Association (org. 1707) and most other regional American Baptist denominations, both General and Particular, Regular and United, conservative evangelical and liberal, for American Baptist unity (Oxford 62-3, Wikipedia). The Convention was called "Triennial" because the national convention met every three years. Members of the denomination were called American Baptists. Opponents of the Convention and their Board of Foreign Missions included anti-missionary, Free Will, Separate, and independent Baptists (Wikipedia).

Like other Baptist churches, the Convention had no formal creed, but believed in "the authority of the Bible, the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the independence of local congregations, the necessity of a conversion experience and a believer’s baptism by immersion, and evangelism and missionary outreach" (Oxford 62). The Convention accepted the 1833 New Hampshire Baptist Confession of Faith. The Confession was drafted by Rev. John Newton Brown, D.D. (June 29, 1803 – May 14, 1868), of New Hampshire and other American Baptist ministers, and adopted by the New Hampshire (American) Baptist Convention. The Confession was conservative, but less Calvinistic than the 1742 Philadelphia Baptist Confession of Faith (Wikipedia).

The Second Great Awakening (an American Christian revival from 1800 to 1840) grew the Triennial Baptist Convention and made it more Arminian and evangelical (Wikipedia). Baptists were in every State and territory by 1840. By that time, they had established over twenty schools as well as missions in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe (Oxford 62-3).

In 1838, African, Danish, German, Norwegian, and Swedish Americans began organizing their own Baptist denominations because of persecution by English Americans, nationalism, and racism. The Convention remained predominately English American (Oxford 62-3).

In 1843, northern Baptist churches organized a separate mission society in opposition to slavery (Oxford 62-3). In May 1845, in Augusta, Georgia, most of the southern churches in the Triennial Baptist Convention, the American Baptist Home Mission Society (org. 1832), and in the American Baptist Publication Society (org. 1841) merged, in support of slavery, to form the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). William Bullein Johnson (1782-1862), Triennial Baptist Convention President in 1841, was elected the first SBC president. The northern Baptists took over the Triennial Baptist Convention and the Convention became concentrated in the northern United States (Wikipedia). The Convention came to generally support the antebellum reform movements of Abolitionism, Federalism, Temperance, and Women's Rights, and thus the Whig (org. 1834) and Republican (org. 1854) parties (Oxford 827, Wikipedia).

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Convention generally supported Progressivism and the Social Gospel (the Christian responsibility to help the poor), but not the more radical ideas of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) and other Christian Socialists (Oxford 652).

On May 17, 1907 in Washington, D.C., the Triennial Baptist Convention, the American Baptist Education Society (org. 1888), the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the American Baptist Publication Society merged, for American Baptist unity, to form the Northern Baptist Convention. Governor of New York, Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948) was elected the first Northern Baptist Convention president, but he continued his job as Governor. The Northern Baptist Convention was renamed the American Baptist Convention in 1950, and the American Baptist Churches, USA in 1972 (Wikipedia).