Tag Archives: Bristol Baptist College England

who were educating their ministers and the presence of a few well-trained men in American Baptist pulpits also helped to silence the opposers. The best minds in the denomination generally realized that if the Baptists were to keep pace with other religious groups they must have a trained leadership for their rapidly growing church and organizations.

Since any education program adequate for the needs was too vast for one or a few churches to undertake, the Baptists had turned to the formation of voluntary societies as a means of consolidating their resources. The first, the Baptist Education Society of the Middle States, was founded in 1812 under the auspices of the Philadelphia Association. Its young men were sent to study with William Staughton, the active and popular pastor of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia. An Englishman educated at the Baptist college at Bristol, he had trained students in his home and pulpit as early as 1807. Instruction on an “apprenticeship” basis had long been employed in the ministry as well as in medicine and law.

To send funds and men to Staughton’s “school,” an auxiliary organization was formed in New York City in 1813. Prominent among the members was the Reverend John Stanford, also an Englishman who for several years had taught divinity students at his home and in his private “academy.” In 1817 the New York group was incorporated as the New York Baptist Theological Seminary and the next year established a school of their own.

These educational endeavors in Philadelphia and New York were known to the founders of the institution which eventually became Colgate University, but their chief inspiration seems to have come from New England. Particularly important was the Corresponding Letter of the Boston Association for 1816. This was an annual communication among associations and Jeremiah Chaplin, Baptist pastor of Danvers, Massachusetts, used it for presenting a persuasive plea for improved facilities for educating young men for the ministry. He, like Staughton and Stanford, had trained some in his own home and was well aware of the need for “raising up” more preachers and urged associations, churches and ministers to exert themselves to this end. Refuting the old arguments against an educated clergy he built up a strong case for including secular subjects, such as history, geography, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, philosophy and astronomy, as a part of theological training as well as divinity and the “sacred languages,”