RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Home Missions
dominated by godly Moravians from Germany and Presbyterians from the Highlands of Scotland. Thus, for continuous years, a soil was being prepared into which in due time the seed of organized home and foreign missions should fall and spring up again to make glad the City of God.
Yet it was not until 1798, nearly 200 years after the Pilgrim landing, that American home
missions began to assume this organic Organiza- ized form. Previous to that date tion of missionary efforts had been mostly Congrega- sporadic. Before the war of the Revotional lution individual churches of the Con- Effort, gregational order in Connecticut were 1 798-1 807. sending out their pastors on missionary
errands to what were then known as the New Settlements (Vermont, New York, and Ohio). For this service they were paid four and one-half dollars a week, and were allowed four dollars more for the supply of their pulpits during their absence, which usually covered about four months at a time. These missionary pastors followed the new settlers to their forest or prairie homes, preaching the Word, administering the ordinances, setting up the Church and the Sunday-school, and carrying the greeting of old friends and neighbors to their distant kindred on the frontier. Yet it was something more than mere kinship and friendship that prompted these missionary journeys. There was also a great fear of barbarism, a profound dread of new States gathering strength and coming into the Union without churches or schools, without the Christian sabbath or the Christian home. Such fears seemed to haunt the churches of Connecticut and Massachusetts, which at that time were predominantly Congregational, until, in 1798, organization against an evil so threatening became a necessity. In June of that year the Missionary Society of Connecticut was organized, and one year later the Massachusetts Missionary Society came into being. These two organizations, with slight changes of name, are in existence to-day. Both of them were Congregational in origin, and, for more than a hundred years, they have been the twin springs from which an everbroadening stream of home missionary interest and effort has flowed. It is important to remember that both these mother societies, while bearing the names of the States where they originated, and supported by the States whose names they bear, were not primarily for the benefit of Connecticut and Massachusetts. The object of the Connecticut society, as defined in its charter, was " to Christianize the heathen (Indians) of North America, and to support and promote Christian knowledge in the new settlements of the United States." The charter of the Massachusetts Society describes its object as being " to diffuse the Gospel among the heathen (Indians) as well as other people in the remote parts of our country." Both societies, therefore, while local in their origin and support, were truly national in spirit and aim. Other New England States followed the lead of Connecticut and Massachusetts; New Hampshire in 1801, Rhode Island in 1803, Maine and Vermont in 1807. Thus, within ten years of the first movement, the Congregational churches of the six New England States
were organized for home missions. The four States last named were animated by the same broad spirit as Connecticut and Massachusetts. If they attempted less for the new settlements to the westward than their elder neighbors, it was only because they were themselves new settlements, needing more help than they were able at that stage to bestow.
To the same fruitful decade belongs the origin of
Baptist home missions in New England. Its genesis
is singularly like that of the Congrega-
5. Other tionalists. The Massachusetts Do- Early mestic Society, the first organization
Denomina- of its kind among American Baptists, tional dates from 1802. Its object, as de- Organiza- fined by its constitution, was " to furtions. nish occasional preaching and to promote the knowledge of evangelistic truth in the new settlements of the United States, or further, if circumstances should render it proper." This organized movement was preceded, as in the case of Connecticut and Massachusetts, by intermittent effort on the part of individual churches. Indeed, the significant feature of all these early organizations is that they were the natural outgrowth of an evangelistic spirit within the churches, and in no single instance were they forced upon the churches by outside influence. Baptist home missionary effort, like Congregational, looked beyond the place of birth, sending its missionaries into Maine, lower Canada, western New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. To the same year, 1802, belongs the first systematic effort of the Presbyterians of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, acting under the same broad charter with the movement of Congregationalists and Baptists in New England, namely, " to send forth missionaries well qualified to be employed in mission work on the frontiers, for the purpose of organizing churches, administering ordinances, ordaining elders, collecting information concerning the state of religion in those parts, and preparing the best means of establishing a Gospel ministry among the people." Meanwhile the Reformed Church of America had not been idle. Sporadic missionary work began with them as early as 1786, culminating in 1882 in the organizing of the Missionary Society of the Reformed Dutch Church, differing nothing in spirit from its forerunners, but with wider scope, as it included home and foreign missions under a single organization. Methodist and Episcopalian missions, as well as Lutheran and those of the Disciples of Christ, belonged necessarily to a later period.
At the opening of the nineteenth century the new settlements, so called, were found mainly in northern New England, eastern and cen-
6. Work tral New York, and in northern and in the southern Ohio, and these were natural- North- ly the first points of home missionary
west attack. The opening of the Northwest Territory. Territory (including the present States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) and the passage by Congress of the ordinance of 1787 attracted a stream of immigration from the East, mingled with a considerable element from Great Britain, Holland, Scandinavia, Germany
tome Missions