First Baptist Church in America
Roger Williams
The story of this church begins with Roger Williams, one of the thousands of Puritans who departed from England in the 1630's to escape religious and political repression at the hands of the King and the Church of England. Many Puritans sailed to America to establish the colony of Massachusetts Bay. Williams, a graduate of Cambridge and an ordained minister, was not among the first wave of Puritans who arrived in the summer of 1630 to establish the new colony. Instead, he came in February 1631 and immediately revealed his idea of the colony differed from the views of most others. They wanted a purified Church of England; Williams wanted to separate entirely from the Anglican Church.
When offered an appointment to be the minister of the Boston church, Williams refused unless it completely cut its ties to the Church of England. Then he went to Salem where the local church members thought to offer him a position as assistant minister. However, the Boston authorities warned them about Williams' ideas, and he traveled on to Plymouth colony. The Old Colony, founded by the Pilgrims in 1620, had a church that was separated from the Church of England. Consequently, Williams lived in Plymouth for nearly two years and earned his living by farming and trading with the Native Americans in Plymouth and the Narragansett Bay area.
In late 1633 Williams returned to Salem and became the assistant to the elderly minister of the church. When the old man died, the church called Williams to be its new pastor. He began to preach his concept of "soul liberty" which rejected the idea that the civil authorities could intervene in matters of religion and conscience. He demanded complete separation of church and state as he declared that "forced worship stinks in the nostrils of God." He argued that the church and state were founded on completely different principles: the church was based on the love of God, while the state was based on the sword. He wrote, "The civil sword may make a nation of hypocrites and anti-Christians, but not one Christian." In addition, Williams declared that it was a "solemn public lie" to say that the King of England had the right to grant land to the settlers that had not first been purchased from the native peoples. His ideas threatened the religious, political, and economic bases of the colony.
By 1635, the magistrates had had enough of Williams' radical ideas, and he was tried and convicted of sedition, heresy, and refusing to swear an oath of allegiance in God's name. Williams regarded it as blasphemy to use God's name in a civil proceeding. Under order of banishment to England, Williams fled in February 1636, walking through the snow from Salem to Narragansett Bay where he spent the rest of the winter with the Wampanoags. Learning that spring that he was still within the land grant of Plymouth and fearing extradition to Massachusetts. Williams and some companions from Salem crossed the Seekonk River into Narragansett territory. There, on land purchased from his friends Miantonomi and Canonicus, the chief sachems of the Narragansetts, Williams began a settlement. He called it "Providence" because he believed that God had cared for him. This colony was a "shelter for persons distressed of conscience." a place where everyone would have religious freedom. Providence had soul liberty and complete separation of church and state. These founding principles were so powerful that subsequent settlers in Rhode Island adopted them. When all other colonies had established churches and religious requirements or disabilities, Rhode Island had none.
Williams soon gathered the faithful in regular worship in his home, holding services several times a week. After about two years, this little congregation became the first Baptist church in the New World. Williams concluded that believer's baptism was the only valid concept of baptism. Since he and all his congregation had been baptized as infants, in late 1638 he had himself rebaptized and then he rebaptized his flock. However, Williams' spiritual journey did not end here. Within months he came to doubt that any existing institution could validly call itself the church. He concluded that the church had died when the Roman Emperor Theodisius had made Christianity the state religion of the Empire around 385 A.D. He believed that all of the rites and practices of the church had become invalid and corrupt. SO, in the summer of 1639 he resigned, but he cherished the belief to the end of his long life (1683) that the church that he planted was based on Scripture. He remained steadfast in his defense of religious freedom, and his influence caused Rhode Island to be a unique haven of religious liberty in the seventeenth century.