Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the United States
The Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the United States (BFMC), founded in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1880, supported black Baptist missionary endeavors in Africa. In the late 1870s, William W.Colley and Solomon Cosby, two black Baptists from Virginia, served in Africa under the joint auspices of the white Southern Baptist Convention and their own black Virginia Baptist State Convention. Both felt constricted by the racism of the white missionaries under whom they served, most notably William J.David, head of Southern Baptist Convention mission efforts in Africa, and by their dependence on funding from white organizations. In 1879 Colley returned to America to organize support for a black Baptist convention specifically devoted to foreign missions, an effort that came to fruition with the creation of the BFMC in 1880.
The convention gradually drew support from Baptists nationwide, though Virginians always dominated the organization’s leadership. In 1883–1884, the BFMC commissioned six missionaries to South Africa: Joseph H. and Hattie Presley, W.W.Colley and his wife, John J.Coles, and Henderson McKinney. In contrast to earlier generations of missionary emigrants such as Lott Carey, the six missionaries of the BFMC went as American Christians under a missionary board rather than as agents to prepare the way for a larger back-to-Africa movement. But like the earlier pioneers, the BFMC missionaries of the 1880s saw themselves as part of God’s plan to bring the light of Christian civilization to darkest Africa. In 1886 Coles published a small volume entitled Africa in Brief, which provided a view of the African world for the black Baptist constituency at home.
Health problems, funding shortfalls, and conflicts with individual missionaries plagued the effort of the BFMC. The missionaries sent in 1883–1884 soon encountered health problems. Hattie Presley died within seven months of her arrival in West Africa, and McKinney perished probably in 1887.
A founder of the BFMC, William W.Colley, was involved in the accidental shooting of a Liberian boy, and rumors of moral failings followed John J.Coles’s career. The BFMC pressed on despite these difficulties. In 1890 the BFMC’s executive board reported that since its founding the organization had employed eleven persons as African missionaries, supported three missionary stations, and expended $25,000 in its mission program. In 1893, however, it acknowledged that “tribal wars, disease, death, and furlough” hampered the black Baptist missionary enterprise. Without any missionaries to its name and after rejecting a variety of plans that called for cooperation with white organizations, BFMC leaders advocated forming a nationwide body to unify the diverse black Baptist entities that pursued separate forms of denominational work. In 1895 this advocacy came to fruition with the formation of the National Baptist Convention, whose Foreign Mission Board continued the work of the BFMC.
In its fifteen-year existence, the precedent set by the BFMC provided a staging ground for future generations to organize black mission endeavors in Africa.
FURTHER READINGS
Fitts, Leroy. A History of Black Baptists. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1985.
Jacobs, Sylvia, ed. Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982.
Martin, Sandy Dwayne. Black Baptists and African Missions, 1880–1915. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1989.
Roth, Donald. “Grace Not Race: Southern Negro Church Leaders, Black Identity, and Missions to West Africa, 1865–1919.” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1975.
Williams, Walter. Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, 1877–1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
Paul Harvey
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