Baptist Convention of New York

History

The Baptist Convention of New York story began in the mid-1950s with a smattering of transplanted Southern Baptists who had resettled in the region. They arrived at a time when mainline denominations were experiencing growth and when their own houses of worship were crowded on Sunday mornings. They came in the midst of what Courts Redford, then president of the Home Mission Board, called a “real Holy Ghost revival” with scattered flames that threatened to become a “consuming spiritual fire.” To their enormous credit, leaders like Redford and his associates galvanized Southern Baptists to seize the opportunities the times afforded for mission expansion into new areas.

Today a starkly different mood hovers over the religious landscape in America. Fortunately, New York Baptists have negotiated the changing times over the last four decades with some measure of effectiveness. New models and strategies of mission are employed to confront the challenges posed for the church. Whereas in the 1950s church extension in the region served mostly to gather southern white transplants into congregations which capitalized upon the appeal of a southern religious ethos, today’s churches are more indigenous and reflective of the ethnic pluralism of the region.

Much has changed, to be sure, since the first church in the region was gathered in 1954, yet some things have remained constant. Devoted, self-sacrificing, mission-minded laypeople still establish and sustain the churches of the Baptist Convention of New York. Another constant has been the visionary leadership and tenacity that pastors and their spouses have demonstrated over the years. They often uprooted their families, taking children half a continent away from their grandparents, and left the security of comfortable pastorates to venture out where the possibilities for total failure were greater than even imagined.

Now in the new millennium, the Baptist Convention of New York continues to build on a rich missionary heritage towards an ever-stronger calling to ministry and missions.

Adapted from: Keith L. Cogburn, Like the Book of Acts: The Baptist Convention of New York Story, (Franklin, TN: Providence House Publishers, 1996).