This Month in Our History: August 2009

Some ministers are record keepers.  They have a journal or a notebook or a computer file in which are recorded the numbers:  marriages, baptisms, funerals and whatever else seems to be of record keeping significance.  Some record all of their sermons:  titles, texts, subjects. 

John Leland, the famous 18th-century Baptist minister, was a record keeper.  In 1820 he summarized:  “Since I began to preach in 1774 I have traveled distances, which together, would form a girdle nearly sufficient to go round the globe three times.  The number of sermons which I have preached is not far from 8,000.  The number of persons that I have baptized is 1,278.  The number of Baptist ministers whom I have personally known is 962.  Those of them whom I have heard preach, in number, make 303.  The number that have visited me at my house is 207.  The pamphlets which I have written… are about 30.”

In 1827, at age 72, he noted that his baptismal total had inched upwards to 1,362 and he observed:  “It is not probable that I ever shall baptize many (if any) more.”  He reached 80 years of age in the spring of 1834 and, lo and behold, baptized five more candidates.  In August 1834, he brought the total up-to-date for the last time and it revealed that 1,524 had been plunged beneath the waters by this one minister of the gospel.

“I have been preaching sixty years,” Leland wrote in January 1835, “to convince men that human powers were too degenerate to effect a change of heart by self-exertion.  But now a host of preachers and people have risen up who ground salvation on the foundation that I have sought to demolish.  The world is gone after them…  How much error there has been in the doctrine and measures that I have advocated, I cannot say; no doubt some, for I claim not infallible inspiration.  But I have not yet been convinced of any mistake so radical as to justify a renunciation of what I have believed, and adopt the new measures.  I am waiting to see what the event will be, praying for light, open to conviction, willing to retract, and ready to confess when convicted.”

In his August tally so long ago, Leland must have reflected upon not numbers but individuals – persons who came into a new life through Christ Jesus.  He must have remembered names and faces, incidents surrounding conversion.  Maybe he remembered the “gentle woman” in James City County whom he baptized against the will of her husband; and the man had let it be known that he would whip his wife if she were baptized and kill the man who had dared to perform the deed.  Leland arranged a baptism under the cover of darkness; and he was sensible enough to move along himself at daybreak.  Maybe he remembered the Native Americans with whom he shared the gospel in Eastern Virginia.  Maybe he thought of one of the many converts from his long preaching journeys across Virginia and beyond.

August is always a time for long thoughts.  In the South, we call them “dog days,” miserably hot and humid and given to terrible thunderstorms.  Maybe back in his native Massachusetts, in the western mountains he thought back on that August to days of preaching and record keeping in Old Virginia.

Early in January 1841, he preached his last sermon; and a week later, he died.  Just before he breathed his last, someone asked him about his views of the future.  He extended both hands upward and with a smile said:  “My prospects for heaven are clear.”  He had finished his record keeping.

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