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Article: Baptist work among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest.
- Article from:
- Baptist History and Heritage
- Article date:
- March 22, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Baptist History and Heritage Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Baptists have attempted to Christianize Native Americans since Roger Williams. Leon McBeth related how a pre-Baptist Williams purposed to learn Indian languages, and by 1632, was conducting missionary work among the tribes of New England. (1)
Apparently, the first identifiable Indian convert was Japheth, a Connecticut man immersed into the Seventh Day Baptist Church at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1674. Progress, however, was always slow and fitful at best. By the end of the eighteenth century, Robert G. Gardner estimated only .34 percent of the Indian population east of the Mississippi was Baptist--one in three hundred. Due largely to the efforts of the Triennial ...