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"...The church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."
I Timothy 3:15
Did You Know?:
Historical Facts About the Baptists
Richard B. Cook
From The Story of the Baptist,1887
The Early History of the Baptist in Norway
The early history of the Baptists in Norway is obscure, although we know that German colporteurs had traveled in that region five-and-twenty years before a church was organized, and our British brethren had done some missionary work among the Norwegians. These Baptists began to draw general attention in the Autumn of 1808, when four believers were baptized at Tromsöe, north of the Arctic Circle, the nearest church in Europe to the line of perpetual snow.
In 1860, a Swedish brother, a basket-maker by trade, visited the place, and was permitted to preach in the meeting-house. His preaching was blessed to the conversion of twenty-eight souls. These were baptized, and on the last day of the year a church was organized, consisting of fifty members. In January eleven more were baptized, and two in February. This Swedish peddler of baskets had silenced many heavy guns; for how often have we been told that we could not baptize in that cold climate. We cannot learn that any have been frozen to death by the baptismal waters. At any rate, about a hundred were reported as members of this church in 1871. In the year 1872 as many as sixty-two were baptized in Norway. In 1868 there were six Baptist churches in this cold region, numbering two hundred members. In 1872 there were three hundred and thirty Baptists in Norway.
The Story of Baptist Missions, 1884
The First Baptist Churches in Quebec
In the English dependencies Baptists are strongest in the Canadas. Soon after the capture of Quebec by the English, Baptist settlers from the New England colonies began to establish themselves in Nova Scotia, and from 1763 churches were organized. The first churches in the province of Quebec were formed by Baptists who crossed the line from Vermont. In Upper Canada or Ontario, settlers from New York planted the first churches. Later there were English and Scotch immigrants of Baptist stock, the latter being fruits of the Haldane work. From these small beginnings, Canadian Baptists have grown, in little more than a century, to over a thousand churches and nearly 100,000 members.
The Story of the Churches the Baptists,1902
By Henry A. Vedder
Quickening and Reformation has Produced Baptists
"Trace back the record of church history to the early centuries, and it will be invariably found that every time of quickening and reformation, has produced Baptists. Brought out of dead formality and actuated by living piety, men have naturally cast off the mere form of infant baptism, and have substituted for it the original rite of believer's baptism, by which the regenerate and loving heart expresses its loyalty to Christ. The Donatists, reformers of the fourth century, when infant baptism was a recent innovation not yet universally accepted, were Baptists.
The Albigenses, reformers of the seventh century, so far as history enables us to decide, were Baptists; and so were the Waldenses and Petrobrussians, reformers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, who kept the light of pure Christianity burning when everywhere else in the world it was quenched in the slough of Romish corruption. The Arnoldists and Hussites, reformers before Luther, and who prepared the way for him, were Baptists. Wickliffe of England whom historians have agreed to call 'the morning star of the Reformation,' was a Baptist.
The views, of these reformers were not always definitely stated, or perhaps definitely settled in their own minds; but they all held substantially the doctrines which are now the peculiar tenets of Baptists. The Great Reformation of the sixteenth century could never have occurred if it had not been heralded by Baptists. It was the same in the Great Awakening."
Baptists and the National Centenary, p. 13