0.11 3.1 sending the light: the organizing of texas baptist women  (Page 2/11)

Baptist activity during the colonial period consisted mainly of scattered preaching services, reportedly held as early as 1822 by Joseph Bays near the Sabine River and by Freeman Smalley near the Red River. A school teacher, Thomas J. Pilgrim, began a Sunday school in 1829 in Austin's colony at San Felipe, but it was suppressed after a few meetings. Tradition has it that in 1833 Massie Millard and other women in the Nacogdoches community met to pray for their safety against Indian raiders on what eventually became the site of a Baptist church. Daniel Parker was pastor of a small Illinois Baptist church that moved to Texas in 1834, reorganized, and met at several locations in East Texas for over thirty years. J. B. Link, Texas Historical and Biographical Magazine (Austin, Texas, 1891-92), II, 671-72. This small, mobile church was extremely influential and left its doctrinal and organizational mark on the Baptist churches of east Texas. The best reference on the history of the non-cooperating Baptist churches is J. S. Newman, A History of the Primitive Baptists of Texas, Oklahoma and Indian Territories (Tioga: Baptist Trumpet, 1906). This group, the "Pilgrim Church of Predestinarian Regular Baptists," was of the non-missionary, "hard-shell" persuasion and participated in no cooperative religious societies beyond the congregational level.

Texas independence and the formation of the republic in 1836 led to a removal of restrictions on Protestant affiliation and exercises, but the unsettled circumstances of daily life continued to restrain church growth. Tensions with Indians and boundary disputes with Mexico resulted in skirmishes for another decade. The fledgling government and economy were unstable, the population was scattered and mobile, and roads were poor to nonexistent. The foundation of Baptist state activities was laid, however, in early-settled Washington County, where the first missionary Baptist church was organized at Washington-on-the-Brazos in 1837. Z. N. Morrell, its minister, led the group in appealing to the American Baptist home and foreign mission boards for assistance. These requests, repeated to the Southern Baptist Convention after it formed in 1845, brought some funds and, more important, two seminary-trained missionaries, James A. Huckins and William M. Tryon, who eventually worked with churches in Galveston and Houston.

In his remembrances published in 1872, Morrell wrote vividly of a revival that occurred at the Washington church in 1841. Judge R. E. B. Baylor, holding court in Washington under the jurisdiction of the Republic, was the speaker and won forty-two converts. Almost nightly the congregation would proceed in the moonlight, "singing the songs of Zion," to the banks of the Brazos, where the baptisms were performed. Morrell reported that the "beauty and sublimity," of these scenes brought visitors from twenty-five miles away. Z. N. Morrell, Flowers and Fruits in the Wilderness, 3rd ed. (St. Louis: Commercial Printing Co., 1882), p. 149. Among the other oldest Baptist churches in Texas were those formed at Nacogdoches in 1838, Plum Grove (Bastrop) in 1839, and Independence in 1839.