OBJETIVOS GENERALES DE LA PROPUESTA DE INTERVENCIÓN

By 1862 the term Baptist was far from being a byword in Tasmania. That year, William Gibson Senior and his wife, Mary Ann, opened their community church in Perth. Through Mary Ann‘s enthusiastic following of the London preacher, the Rev Charles H Spurgeon, the necessity of finding a preacher who would minister to their Perth people, was met. Encouraged by reports that Spurgeon was sending out his graduates to far flung places such as India, America and Australia, their son, William Gibson Junior, met Spurgeon in London and requested that one of his College graduates migrate to Tasmania and minister at the chapel. The arrival of the Rev Alfred William Grant in 1869 began the influx of Spurgeon‘s College men to the colony. This was a reversal of the early trend of the churches of the British Baptists. The earlier calls of the Tasmanian Baptists to their mother churches to fulfil their missionary responsibilities by sending suitable men to the colony were unheeded as the possible candidates were largely taken up with other work, either being employed in ministries to the Christian masses of England or sent to the new stations in India, Africa and elsewhere. Up to this time Australian Baptists had a low priority in the missionary strategy of British Baptist churches.

By the time of Grant‘s arrival, the churches belonging to the first Baptists in the colony, the Strict and Particular Baptists, remained isolated from the culture in which they operated with few people being won over to their tenets. This school of Baptist life and thought at the time of the death of their first minister, the Rev Henry Dowling, in 1869, was still preaching a High- Calvinism which taught that salvation is restricted to the elect. Furthermore, they were excluding from their communion tables non-members. In fact time was against them. By the end of the nineteenth century, their harsh interpretation of Calvinism had lost its appeal. The Particulars in Tasmania

had never had an interest in denominational progress and a number of their brothers and sisters in the south had spent their years squabbling among themselves, much to their detriment.

Mary Ann‘s religious devotion and commitment to what Spurgeon stood for was the drive that refocused the interest and wealth of her grazier husband to such an extent that the Gibson family become the prime financial benefactor to this Baptist new beginning. According to JD Bollen, dependence on a large donor, the wealthy patron, was a good old English tradition1 and it was the likes of Gibson Senior and Congregationalists Henry Hopkins and his wife Sarah who proved their earnestness and fervour for the Christian message in this way. Spurgeon‘s men came not to fill vacant pastorates, but to create pastorates, with the Gibsons‘ help. For once in Australia, funds, interest and personnel were equal to the demands of the situation. Thus there came about the continuance of the Baptist presence in Tasmania in the late nineteenth century.

Spurgeon‘s College sought to produce effective pastors and powerful evangelistic preachers from men of moderate talent and humble social backgrounds who were already enthusiastic lay preachers at the time of their entry into the College which commenced in 1856. By the end of 1892, the year Spurgeon died, 863 men had been trained there. The students were initially accepted into training on the condition that they would undertake any Christian ministry allotted to them during their studies and that ministry chosen could be either at home or overseas. In Tasmania, their evangelical emphasis and desire for denominational building triumphed over the Calvinism and the closed communion of the Particulars. The presence of Spurgeon‘s men in the colony, including that of Spurgeon‘s son, the Rev Thomas Spurgeon, meant for Tasmanian Baptists, in time, a renewed

1

JD Bollen, Religion in Australian Society (The Leigh College Open Lectures, Winter Series, 1973, Series II), p. 29.

theology, a rediscovery of mission and the creation of an organisation for the fulfilment of that mission.

Apart from Spurgeon‘s satisfaction in fulfilling Gibson‘s request for pastors for his chapels and churches, a number of those who responded to his request did so as they were suffering from tuberculosis and had been advised to travel to warmer climates in the hope of recovery. Again the timing was right. During their years of arrival, Tasmania was seen as a Sanatorium. Since colonial service was not high on the agenda of many of Spurgeon‘s men, tuberculosis thus played its part in forcing a number of them to the Australian colonies. But this again suggests that Australia was still the recipient of the left-overs of the English missionary movement. Overcoming tuberculosis was not the only problem that awaited them in their new land. Difficulties in finding suitable meeting places and housing, of attending to the arduous task of maintaining church structures, of facing the possibility of pastoral failure and of encountering theological conflict hampered their ministries.

Spurgeon‘s men made baptism by immersion fundamental to being a Baptist in Tasmania. Inevitably there was reaction from other Nonconformist and Anglican clergy who did not carry out the rite of total immersion on confession of faith. The objectors naturally felt obliged to defend their own churches' practices. Spurgeon‘s men were charged with importing unnecessary disharmony into the colony that needed to hear the Gospel and were denying a ‗birth-privilege‘ to the children in their care. Spurgeon‘s men's great offence was that of limiting baptism to believers only. Even so, in time they were accepted by the likes of the Primitive Methodists, the Wesleyans and the Congregationalists as they all banded together in the colony‘s evangelistic effort.

The later nineteenth century was a vibrant period for Tasmanians generally. By the late 1870s Tasmania was emerging from the economic depression that had characterized the 1860s and early 1870s and the migration to the

mainland had been arrested.2 Bollen in History of Religion in Australia also says:

This was an age of building. Roads, railways, court-houses, post-offices, schools and police stations; to this day (most easily in the country town) we see about us the monuments of the second half of the nineteenth century. Christians were sharing in the great work of national development, providing the material pre-requisites of social life.3

The years 1850 to 1914 are considered by Stuart Piggin to be the high-noon of Nonconformity when the ‗compatibility of freedom of thought and sound scholarship with the verities of evangelical scholarship was widely assumed.‘4

By the 1870s the churches were becoming respectable. Indeed in Victoria, in the two decades beginning in 1870, Protestantism doubled in size, in membership, church buildings, Sunday school pupils and clergy.5 This was also true in 1870s and 1880s for Nonconformist churches in the colony of Tasmania as the churches were coming into their own. In the 1880s the Sunday-school movement was strong, the Salvation Army began work in Launceston, the Tasmanian Baptists were putting down new roots and the Methodist and Congregational churches were at their peak. In short, Spurgeon‘s men arrived at a time when figures for church attendance were most impressive. The churches were respectable and the children of members were growing up within the church.6 In this period of stability in the history of religion of Australia the erection of a church or chapel assured a congregation.

Data provided by Hans Mol in Religion in Australia, A Sociological Investigation confirms that churches‘ attendance figures were at a peak. Mol gives the figures for Victoria during this third quarter of the nineteenth century

2 _{Darrell Paproth, ‗Henry Varley Down Under Part 1‘, Lucas 30, 2001, p. 51.}

3

Bollen, Religion in Australian Society, p. 59.

4 _{Stuart Piggin, ‗The Role of Baptists in the History of Australian Evangelicism‘, Lucas, 1992,}

p. 5.

5

Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to be Rich: a History of the Colony of Victoria, 1883-1889, (Carlton, Victoria; Melbourne University Press, 1971), p. 127.

6 _{Maurice Schild, ‗Christian Beginnings in Australia‘,}

Lutheran Theological Journal, 1981, pp.74ff.