Shubal stearns biography examples
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As new churches were constituted, the association grew larger. Although he continued to preach in New England for two years or more, he had a compelling inward conviction that he was called to a work outside that region.
After hearing George Whitefield in 1740, or possibly in 1746 when Stearns was ordained as a Separate Congregational minister, he and his family experienced what many then called the New Birth, and he formed a Separate Congregational Church in Tolland.
(New Birth Protestants believed that the Holy Spirit works through individuals so that they can exhibit their spiritual gifts; that they should denounce lust and greed and other sinful desires while revering scripture and performing good works; and that the way one exhibits the Holy Spirit that dwells within them is more important than an intellectual adherence to a religious creed or a statement of faith.)
Influenced further by Separate Baptist pastor Waitstill Palmer (who was also inspired by Whitefield’s preaching), Stearns was baptized by immersion and then ordained a Separate Baptist minister in 1751.
Frustrated with Stearns’s ambivalence and lack of administrative skills, the Association split in 1769. With the defeat of the Regulators in 1771, many Separate Baptists left for the less politicized lands of Tennessee and Kentucky, where they established churches and spread Separate Baptist tenets in the Appalachian Mountains.
On November 20, 1771, Stearns died in Randolph County, North Carolina, the home of his Sandy Creek Separate Baptist Church. But his legacy survived. As mentioned, many Separate Baptists moved to the mountains, and evidence indicates that Stearns may have influenced North Carolina Presbyterian evangelist James McGready, who later led the Cane Ridge Revival in Kentucky in 1801.
From the Sandy Creek area there ensued an exodus that drastically depleted the membership of the Sandy Creek Baptist Church. Seeing the growing numbers of dissenters, discerning the dire need for ministers, and looking for a strategic center from which to minister, Stearns began built up a congregation. Daniel Marshall, Joseph Breed, and other ministers accompanied Stearns as he traveled across the Piedmont.
The relationship of many Sandy Creek Baptists with the Regulator Movement was more problematic, however. The major issue was infant baptism.
Shubal Stearns (1706 – 1771)
Shubal Stearns (correctly spelled Shubael) settled in the Piedmont region of North Carolina between present-day Liberty and Asheboro in 1755.
Here his brother-in-law, Daniel Marshall, who had married Shubal's gifted sister, Martha, joined them and soon the group moved to Sandy Creek, North Carolina.
There, in 1755, they organized a Baptist church, Stearns being chosen pastor, a position he retained during the rest of his life. His ministry emphasized adult baptism by immersion (as opposed to sprinkling), communion, laying on of hands for healing and repentance, foot washing, love feasts (revival-style services), anointing the sick (for healing), embracing and shaking the hands of members, the kiss of charity, and the offering of the right hand of fellowship to new converts.
Shortly after their arrival at Sandy Creek in November 1755, the Separate Baptists established Sandy Creek Baptist Church. On 20 May 1751 he was ordained to the Baptist ministry. His father was one of the town proprietors of Tolland in 1716, the "proprietor clark" in 1722 and 1724, and a selectman in 1724.
Much more is known of young Stearns and his activities after 1745.
When it became apparent that the opportunities for Separate Baptist evangelism were too limited in the sparsely settled Virginia hinterland, the combined parties of Stearns and Marshall moved two hundred miles south to Sandy Creek in what was then Guilford County, N.C. There, Stearns had heard, were people eager to hear preaching.
In May of that year Governor William Tryon crushed the North Carolina Regulators, many of whom seem to have been Baptists.
Accordingly, with several married couples from the community, including some relatives, he went southward to Virginia, sojourning first at Opequon Creek and then at Cacapon. In his youth he moved with his parents to Connecticut and joined the Congregational church at Tolland.
For six years this church grew steadily under Stearns's leadership, but the Connecticut Separates and their leader encountered some serious obstacles: Stearns became deeply involved in a crusade to secure the Connecticut General Assembly's recognition of the Separate churches' right to exist, but petitions of 1746 and 1748 were "resolved in the negative" in both houses.
The petition did, however, assert for every Christian an "unalienable Right, in matters of ye worship of God, to Judge for himself as his Conciance Receives the Rule from God." All they wanted, claimed the petitioners, was the religious toleration guaranteed them in the Toleration Act, which Parliament had passed in the reign of William and Mary.
As if trouble with the provincial legislature were not enough, the Separates began to quarrel among themselves in 1751.