The exchange below has been adapted from an interview with Welch College President Matt Pinson conducted by Jesse Owens for Helwys Society regarding Pinson’s new book The Free Will Baptists: A New History published by the University of Tennessee Press. Read the entire interview at HelwysSocietyForum.com/. The book can be purchased wherever books are sold.
OWENS: I’m excited about this book. I wanted to start broadly. I know you’re very interested in history. You’re a student of history. You’ve earned degrees in history. But, specifically, thinking about Free Will Baptist history, do you remember when you first became interested in or aware of Free Will Baptist history?
PINSON: Yes! I was ten years old. We had CTS lessons at our church, and my father taught the junior boys. The Junior Adventurer was written by Mae Fry, whose husband Malcolm Fry was the head of CTS. So, Mae Fry and my Dad introduced me to Paul Palmer, Joseph Parker, Benjamin Randall, and others in a series of lessons on Free Will Baptist history and doctrine. I was captivated. I found it very interesting.
So, I must give Mae Fry credit for caring enough about our tradition to introduce it to nine-, ten-, and 11-year-olds. I loved hearing Jack Williams and others lecture on Free Will Baptist history at Welch College when I was a student. Eventually, I completed a master’s in American history and wrote my thesis on the northern Freewill Baptists. The Historical Commission of the National Association awarded me a grant to do research in several archives.
I think my real desire to research this material on a deeper level came when I went to the historical collection at the University of Mount Olive in North Carolina. I had done much work in the Randall movement, but I really hadn’t done much in the southern movement, which was my own heritage. On that research tour I got an opportunity to meet Dr. Michael Pelt and Mr. Gary Fenton Barefoot at the Free Will Baptist Historical Collection at Mount Olive. They opened the world of southern Free Will Baptist history to me, and I fell in love with it.
OWENS: As a student at Welch College, I enjoyed having a Free Will Baptist history class with you, and that played a big role in my interest in Free Will Baptist and General Baptist history. In that class we read your Free Will Baptist Handbook, an introductory history of Free Will Baptists, along with some documents. But you also had us read William Davidson’s and Michael Pelt’s histories of the Free Will Baptists. Thinking about those surveys, how would you describe the differences between those volumes in this new book?
PINSON: Before Bill Davidson, we had two surveys of Free Will Baptist history in the twentieth century. One was by the great Arkansas judge and Free Will Baptist minister George Washington Million, and another was by my friend, the Georgia pastor Damon Dodd, who was originally from Missouri. Those books were fine and enjoyable to read, but they were kind of “spotty” because we didn’t have many archival resources then. It really took Bill Davidson to break into scholarly archival research and history of our movement that adhered to standard historiographical norms.
Davidson wrote his doctoral dissertation on the early Palmer movement in North Carolina, ushering us into a new era of Free Will Baptist historiography. Davidson interacted with the papers of George Stevenson, a Free Will Baptist layman and archivist for the state of North Carolina, who discovered much about origins in North Carolina. Davidson produced more original research and eventually produced a lengthy survey of Free Will Baptist history.
Then in the late 1990s, Michael Pelt wrote a fine history of the Original Free Will Baptists, the group that separated from the National Association in 1962, primarily over church govern-ment. (By the way, I go into detail on that split in the book.) When Dr. Pelt was still living, Gary Barefoot went and read that section to him in the assisted living home.
OWENS: Wow!
PINSON: Dr. Pelt and Mr. Barefoot both gave me two thumbs up on that. I also had Dr. Robert Picirilli and Dr. Darrell Holley read it, and they both gave me two thumbs up. That made me feel that maybe I fulfilled my goal of writing an objective history, when both sides would say, ‘Yeah, that’s what happened.’ At any rate, Dr. Pelt’s book is largely a history of the whole movement until 1962 when the schism occurs. It is written from the obvious vantage point of someone in that movement. It’s a very good book.
I think the major difference between my book and these previous books is I have the luxury of doing interpretation and intellectual history, which for us is largely theological history. I have the luxury of doing that because I’m not having to “prove” so many details. Many things from our tradition were repeated by lay historians over the centuries, but they were never proven. So, what Davidson especially, and Pelt to some degree, were doing was proving many things.
However, some persistent questions still hang in the air. I’m amazed by how many questions I hear, like, ‘Are Free Will Baptists really related to the English General Baptists?’ Sometimes, when teaching I joke and say, ‘Well, they had to have been English because there wasn’t an America.’ And there were only two kinds of Baptists (other than a few Seventh Day Baptists): General Baptists and Particular Baptists. So, if they weren’t five-point Calvinists, they were General Baptists, and they were English because in America in 1727, when Paul Palmer constituted the Chowan church in North Carolina, everybody was English.
Another example: many people still think Benjamin Randall was the founding father of the denomination. ‘Isn’t the main history of our denomination Benjamin Randall?’ And, of course, that’s a part of our heritage, but it’s a small part. Much still remains to be done and learned about our tradition other than Benjamin Randall, as important as he was to a portion of our denomination and to our whole story.
Many times, when I get comments like these, the first question that comes to my mind is, ‘Have you read Bill Davidson’s book?’ Dr. Davidson goes into detail proving, for example, what every historian affirms, Paul Palmer was an English General Baptist, that North Carolinians were using the 1660 Standard Confession from London, that they were writing to their brethren in England, and so on.
I have the luxury of not proving these things point-by-point: that we don’t all just go back to Benjamin Randall in 1780 in New England, that we do go back to England and the 1812 Abstract, the most widely used confession in Southern Free Will Baptist history, which was a condensed version of the 1660 Standard Confession of the English General Baptists. Davidson did this for us already.
Pelt provided many of these proofs as well. For example, Dr. Pelt says the Staffordshire General Baptists was the group contacted by the Perquimans Precinct congregation Benjamin Laker left behind him in 1702. The Staffordshire General Baptists was one of the very creedal groups that came out of the General Assembly. (That will be in the book you and I are writing on the English General Baptists scheduled to come out next year with B&H Academic.)
So, I have the luxury of doing interpretation, setting Free Will Baptists more in the broader context of American religious history. I also have the luxury of doing more intellectual history. I deal with the theology of these people, both in the North with the Randall movement and the Palmer movement in the South. That’s one of the new things about this book: the theological history of our movement we haven’t really had in published form.
Dr. Picirilli must be acknowledged here. He has tended to write what historians call micro-history, to go deep and look at small historical portraits that give shape to the larger story. We owe so much to Dr. Picirilli in addition to Davidson and Pelt.
I dedicated this book to William F. Davidson, Michael R. Pelt, and Robert E. Picirilli. I said I stand on their shoulders because I really do. They’ve provided me with the luxury to do this interpretive, intellectual kind of history.
OWENS: I’m wondering, since your history is new and has been written within the last few years, were there things you uncovered that hadn’t been uncovered in previous histories?
PINSON: One of the biggest problems in Free Will Baptist history is proving where most of the southern movement originated. Many people assume these groups in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and the like just sprang up spontaneously because we know many of these people came from United Baptist and Separate Baptist and even a few Regular Baptist (five-point Calvinist) backgrounds. These are the ancestors of what we know today as Southern Baptists.
Some people have assumed all these groups in different parts of the South from other Baptist backgrounds sprang up because people were reading their Bibles and saw Arminianism. Our published historians always said these groups surely were influenced by people from the Palmer movement from the Carolinas. But we just haven’t proven it.
Online digital repositories such as Ancestry.com proved helpful because I was able to examine documents related to where these people came from, and most of it traces back to the Carolinas. This is about frontier migration patterns. Among the huge numbers of North Carolinians and South Carolinians who moved to places like Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee between 1800 and the Civil War were Free Will Baptists. The spontaneous origins theory just didn’t make sense to me. Where did they go? I used to joke with my classes, ‘Were they eaten up by bears when they crossed the Smokies?’
That’s a big part of this book. Some, of course, is circumstantial evidence. For example, consider a layman named Matthew Spivey, whose father Caleb was a Free Will Baptist pastor in the 1830s in North Carolina. Matthew Spivey moved to Southeast Georgia, and it just so happens, within ten years, an association arises there, many former United Baptists. And they just so happen to use the 1812 Abstract from the Carolinas as their confession of faith. So, yeah, that’s circumstantial, but I bet they came from old Brother Spivey.
OWENS: Seems like a good chance of that. You deal a lot with the Palmer movement, and that’s particularly helpful for Free Will Baptist history, especially in the South, and thinking about your own origins and your family as well. During college, I remember hearing Jack Williams share on the northern Freewill Baptist movement and the Randall movement. His presentation described the day we lost 600 churches, how the Randall movement merged with the Northern Baptist Convention in the early twentieth century. You discuss that a little bit. Can you talk more about the Randall movement, how all but a tiny minority of those churches ended up merging with the Northern Baptist Convention and only a tiny minority remained Freewill Baptist?
PINSON: Some people think we don’t need to study the Randall movement because it represents such a small portion of the heritage of present-day Free Will Baptists, which is largely from the southern, or Palmer, movement. But I’m thinking, ‘Not so fast. We need to understand that movement.’ It had an impact on the modern movement through churches in southern Ohio and Missouri, and even some in West Virginia and Kentucky with a Randall heritage.
In addition to that, the 1911 merger had a profound impact on the psyche of the Free Will Baptist denomination in the early twentieth century. The Southern Ohio movement, for example, linked up with the Palmer movement in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and was originally part of the General Conference, largely consisting of churches in the Southeast in the 1920s and 1930s. The 1911 merger with Northern Baptists was fresh on the minds of everyone in the General Conference.
I don’t think we need to ignore the Randall movement. It’s true, many people give too much emphasis to the Randall movement, almost as if it alone is the Free Will Baptist movement. Well, it’s not. It’s a small portion of Free Will Baptist history. There’s been too much of a tendency to ignore the history of the southern movement. So, I’m kind of in the middle here, saying to the people who want to ignore the Randall movement, ‘No, not so fast. We don’t need to ignore that movement. We need to pay attention to it.’
On the other hand, I’m telling the people over here we need to stop putting all the emphasis on the Randall movement, most of which went out of existence in 1911, and start looking more at the broader picture. It’s a both/and thing.
People are going to find one thing very original, fascinating, and surprising — how liberal the Randall movement became in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Free Will Baptists in Missouri and Ohio and Texas who stayed out of the merger fall on the Fundamentalist side in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy.
We can learn many lessons from the Randall movement. They became fascinated with other groups, enamored with “keeping up with the Joneses” and being cool with, you know, the Methodists and the Congregationalists and the Baptists and the big churches downtown. They were very concerned about that.
I think they allowed respectability and concern for keeping up with “the big boys” from other denominations to lessen their concern about their own theology and what made them Free Will Baptists. They went for several years not preaching things in their Treatise — even if they still believed them — because they wanted to get members from other denominations. Pretty soon, nobody in their churches knew they were Free Will Baptist. Their reasons for being a separate denomination just faded away.
I think that’s a morality tale for us. I think we need to think about that in our movement today. Do we want our movement to survive? Do we think we have something to offer the church of Jesus Christ and the world? If we cover it up and obscure it, i.e. our Arminianism, our distinctives regarding the doctrine of the church, I think the same thing that happened to the Randall movement will happen to us.
