Jared Jenkins is Senior Pastor and Elder at Risen Life Church, Salt Lake City, UT and Adjunct Professor at Gateway Seminary.
Ryan Rindels is Teaching Pastor at Bell Road Baptist Church, Auburn, CA and Adjunct Professor at Gateway Seminary.
In 1835, the Connecticut Congregationalist pastor Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), patriarch of one of the most illustrious families in American history wrote in A Plea for the West that “… the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the west.”[1] Beecher predicted that the vast western territory would produce wealth, precipitate population growth and in time, increase political power. Conscious of Roman Catholic presence and influence in the region since the 16th century, Beecher framed his proposal in terms of striking contrasts.
It is equally clear, that the conflict which is to decide the destiny of the West, will be a conflict of institutions for the education of her sons, for purposes of superstition, or evangelical light; of despotism or liberty.[2]
Strangely enough, in the nearly two centuries since he wrote his Plea, all Beecher’s hopes and fears have come true. Unforeseen development would certainly puzzle the author. For example, Catholicism is the largest denomination in United States and has been since the mid-nineteenth century, yet few would seriously question American Catholics’ loyalty to the Republic.[3] Concerning the presence of “evangelical light” in California, the picture is a bit more complicated. If his hope was of Yankee Congregationalist hegemony in western garb, these dreams have not proven true. Beecher explained that “civil and religious prosperity” required “universal education, and moral culture, and institutions commensurate to that result-the-all-pervading influence of schools, and colleges, of seminaries, and pastors and churches.”[4] An ambitious project by any rubric, the meager footprint of Congregationalism in the West suggests failure. A more generous assessment is possible, however, when we consider Beecher the evangelical Congregationalist. Whatever Beecher would think of churches that employ the adjective “evangelical” were he alive today, the West does not lack evangelical light. California is unique in its own right, yet the West as a whole has experienced sudden movements of growth. In addition to the Golden State, Southern Baptist churches in Utah have produced—and are presently pursuing—the coveted ideal in which theological institutions serve the church and visa versa, where churches provide colleges and seminaries with students that maintain doctrinal fidelity and serve as ministers in the regions where they were trained.
California: Surprises in the Far West
California’s Gold Rush, which began in 1849, made famous the phrase “boom or bust.” The state’s history has, in fact, been punctuated by sudden and unanticipated change. Like the startling bipolarity of its precipitation patterns–a single wet winter can eradicate a multi-year drought–the Golden State is a place where surprise of the serendipitous sort defies expectations.
The history of evangelical Christianity in California begins with Methodist missionaries, whose presence in the state began in the 1840’s. In Catholic hands from the earliest days of colonization—Franciscan Junipero Sera remains the state’s most iconic missionary—Protestant settlers and evangelists were making their influence felt by mid-century. In 1845, a young Irish priest, Eugene McNamara, appealed to the president of Mexico to allow two thousand Irish Catholics to settle in California as a means to combat “Methodist wolves.”[5] Whether the Methodists were ravenous predators or not—a theological rather than historical judgment—Anglo-Protestants from the east were coming to California to stay, and bringing their religion with them. What kind of Christians could draw the ire of a man like McNamara?
With his characteristic insight into Christianity’s influence in local communities, John Steinbeck described the impact of evangelical sects on the ethos of Salinas Valley. Their hardy preachers, he wrote,
. . . fought the devil, no holds barred, boots and eye-gouging permitted. You might get the idea that they howled truth and beauty the way a seal bites out the National Anthem on a row of circus horns. But some of the truth and beauty remained, and the anthem was recognizable.[6]
Methodist churches, many built in the characteristic New England style, dot the Bay Area.[7] In Sonoma, the original structure of the building that was the first Protestant church North of San Francisco, still stands.[8] The original pastor of the Methodist congregation is buried in Sonoma’s Valley Cemetery, his name faintly visible on a modest, weather-beaten gravestone.
Further south, the Reverend Timothy Dwight Hunt—a name of auspicious evangelical connotations—pastor of the First Congregationalist Church of San Francisco, claimed on December 22, 1852, that, “No higher ambition could urge us to noble deeds than, on the basis of the colony of Plymouth, to make California the Massachusetts of the Pacific.”[9] Though incoming residents to California possessed ambition, many lacked the piety requisite for the “noble deeds” of a William Bradford or Edward Winslow. Reverend Hunt, along with other clergymen such as Henry Durant, certainly hoped to shape their generation and beyond.[10] California, however, did not have the social and religious cohesion of a 17th century New England community. It is in San Francisco, where Elam Harnish, Jack London’s prospector-turned-investor, boasted, “I’m Burning Daylight . . . Ain’t afraid of God, devil, death, nor destruction.”[11]
From its earliest days, the city earned the reputation as a haunt for infidels and libertines. Pious easterners, if they understood the missionary directive of the New Testament, and even raised financial support to send church planters westward, often did so with trepidation. On November 1, 1848, Osgood Wheeler, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Jersey City, New Jersey was solicited by the American Baptist Home Mission Society to serve as pioneer missionary to California. S. H. Cone, pastor of the First Baptist Church of New York City, who after voting in support of sending Wheeler, queried:
But do you know where you are going, my brother? I would rather go as a missionary to China or Cochin China than to San Francisco. Don’t you stir a step, my brother, unless you are prepared to go to the darkest spot on earth.”[12]
Cone’s forebodings, notwithstanding, Wheeler headed west and arrived in San Francisco on February 28, 1849. First Baptist Church’s inaugural Sunday School, in which six adults and one child were present, met on May 27. Four weeks later, the class grew to forty persons.[13] Despite promising beginnings, Baptist growth in California did not match the meteoric population increase. J. Lewis Shuck (1812–1863), the first missionary commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention, lamented that California was filled “with feeble Baptist Churches, most of them without pastors.”[14]
Despite the fracture over slavery that, in 1845, split Northern and Southern Baptists, Harvey Gilbert, a Baptist layman and native of Winchester, New York was asked to be the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Oakland in 1859. Gilbert proposed establishing a seminary in Marin County, which was founded as “The San Rafael Institute and Boarding School” on March 23, 1861.[15] In a fateful turn of events, Confederates fired the first shots on Fort Sumter less than three weeks later. Shuck soon departed for South Carolina. Harvey Gilbert lost not only a mentor, but a crucial benefactor. Though he remained in San Rafael, the Institute folded prior to the War’s ending. Southern Baptist investment in California would not recommence until the 1920’s.
Harold Graves, who served as Golden Gate Seminary’s third president, traces the earliest Southern Baptist presence in California during the 20th century to 1925, when Marvin Mouser and his family settled in Shafter.[16] Some members of the Mouser family joined the Northern Baptist church in Shafter but objected to the church’s practice of open communion and alien immersion (admitting to membership those who had not been baptized by immersion as believers). The Mousers began holding worship services in their homes and on May 10th, 1936, a Baptist church was organized that met in the Seventh-Day Adventist building.[17] In coming decades, hundreds of Southern Baptist churches would be planted, though the conditions that made such growth possible—mass migration from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas–stemmed from calamity, notably the Great Depression and Dust Bowl.
The Dust Bowl
In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck imprinted on national consciousness, the Okie as an American stereotype. The author’s disillusioned ex-revivalist preacher, Jim Casy, who accompanies the Joad family to California attests to his spiritual exhaustion.
I ain’t preachin’ no more much. The spirit ain’t in the people much no more; and worse’n that, the spirit ain’t in me no more. Course now’ again the spirit gets movin’ an’ I rip out a meetin’, or when folks sets out food I give em’ grace, but my heart ain’t in it.[18]
Unable, in his own words, to “take the good ol’ gospel that was just layin’ there to my hand,” Casy, to use a modern idiom “deconstructs.” Haunted by an entrenched pastoral pathos, he laments, “Here I got the sperit sometimes an’ nothin’ to preach about. I got the call to lead the people, an’ no place to lead ‘em.”[19]Reverend Casy, whose evangelical zeal is rekindled, a socialist evangel as its new object, is bludgeoned to death, a martyr for the workingman’s cause. If Jim Casy’s western migration paralleled a move to secularity, this was not the pattern for the majority of southerners, most of which brough their earnest revivalistic religion with them.
A year after the publication of Steinbeck’s iconic novel, fourteen churches met to form the Southern Baptist General Convention of California. These congregations tallied a membership of 1,038 with 142 recorded baptisms. In 1941, when California had a population of just over 7 million people, R. W. Lackey estimated that 75,000 to 100,000 of those residents were Southern Baptists concentrated in the central valley.[20] One year later, the number of churches had grown to 40, with total membership topping 2,647. Even with the dearth of men, many of which were mobilized for World War II, the convention listed 56 churches with 4,449 members in 1943.[21] Elmer Gray noted that in 1943, new SBC churches were being planted at a staggering rate of one every two or three weeks. That same year, B. N. Lummus, general missionary of the state convention, wrote in The California Southern Baptist “No Southern Baptist state convention has made so marvelous a growth in so short a time as has the Southern Baptist General Convention of California.”[22] Drawing from available data, Robert D. Hughes noted that Southern Baptist presence in California kept pace with growth so that by 1977, they constituted 1.5 percent of the total population.[23] As of 2023, 392,119 members in 1,738 Southern Baptist churches constitute 1.005 percent of California’s 39 million residents.[24] While the ratio has diminished, total SBC membership in California places it among the largest in the national convention.
Isam B. Hodges, a native of Harisburg, Arkansas, who came to California in 1935, served as Golden Gate Seminary’s first president. Reflecting on the conditions that led to the institution’s founding in 1944, Hodges understood that without the devastating drought that brought droves to California, the seminary would likely not exist. Calamity proved providential.
We never know all there is behind a movement. God may have caused this dust bowl in order to scatter these people over the western country and evangelize it for Him. This country is the greatest mission in all our nation. These become leaders for God in every community where they reside. God may be getting ready for the great revival that he knows ought to sweep this western country.[25]
In addition to Golden Gate, Southern Baptists founded California Baptist College in 1950, following the familiar pattern of establishing institutions of higher learning in wake of renewal movements. By the late 1960’s, the nation’s cultural mood had dramatically shifted. Baby Boomers across the nation were heading to the West Coast by thousands, many on quests that, if they could be broadly classified as “spiritual,” were markedly un-evangelical. Yet even at world’s western periphery, the gospel would prove persuasive to unlikely converts, proclaimed as it was by preachers and evangelists who judged that new wine would not fit in old wineskins.
The Jesus People Movement
In 1968, Harvard sociologist Peter Berger claimed that, “[by] the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.”[26] Drawing from Max Weber’s secularization thesis—that nations become less religious as they become wealthier and technologically advanced—Berger could make such prognostications with some confidence, assuming that patterns in the U.S. would follow those of Western Europe. The same year, Time magazine featured its iconic Is God Dead? cover. With the Vietnam War at its height, a string of political assassinations, an emerging drug culture and sexual revolution, religion’s outlook certainly appeared “bleak.”
By June of 1971, after which nearly a quarter of a million young people had been converted, scores of them baptized in Pirate’s Cove, Time published “The New Rebel Cry, Jesus is Coming!” A magenta-colored sketch of Christ superimposed on a backdrop of red and yellow—a suggestive subversion of Communist insignia. An Awakening had begun, one whose impact was centered around young hippies, many of whom were converted while living in the Bay Area.[27]
Like most revivals in history, fluidity complicates attempts to measure results, yet as Larry Eskridge’s detailed study has persuasively shown, the “resurgence of evangelicalism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” is indebted to the Jesus People Movement (JPM).[28] Though overshadowed by Chuck Smith, Lonnie Frisbee, and the beginnings of Calvary Chapel as a new evangelical denomination, Eskridge’s decades-long project traces this revival’s beginning to the nondescript First Baptist Church of Mill Valley in 1967. Ted Wise was converted after reading the Bible, and after a harrowing acid trip in which he believed God commanded him to attend the preaching of John MacDonald, Wise joined the church.[29]
Baptist support for the earliest “Jesus Freaks” —complex as the relations were at times between middle-aged established ministers and young, often irregular hippie converts—makes for an unconventional, albeit fascinating narrative. Arthur Blessitt, a Southern Baptist from Mississippi came to California to study at Golden Gate Seminary in 1965. Disappointed at his experience, he dropped out and eventually made his way to Los Angeles.[30] In 1967 Blessitt did street evangelism on the Sunset Strip, handing out tracts and helping drug addicts and runaways. After gathering financial support from pastors and businessmen, Blessitt rented a storefront on Sunset Boulevard that became known as “His Place.” Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, His Place featured live music, provided ex-addict counselors and had evangelistic preaching.[31] In Turned on to Jesus (1971), Blessitt, who claimed that upward of ten-thousand people were converted in a three-year period, gained notoriety for carrying a 90-pound wooden cross across the U.S. and around the world, tallying tens of thousands of miles.[32]
Kent Philpott’s Memoirs of a Jesus Freak, a first-person account of the JPM, provides insight into Southern Baptist involvement, specifically in the Bay Area. Philpott also traces its origins to San Francisco in 1967 and its ending to 1972.[33] He describes the movement’s theology as “either Pentecostal in nature or Dispensational and anti-Pentecostal, but in either case, it was thoroughly fundamentalistic, literalistic, and certain that Jesus was coming soon.”[34] JPM’s leadership was predominantly young; most had little or no formal theological training. These strengths proved to be liabilities at times, but the impact of this revival in the subsequent decades was substantive, albeit in subtle ways.
Apart from Calvary and the Vineyard Movement, a charismatic offshoot of Calvary led by John Wimber and Frisbee, Eskridge identifies four additional contributions to evangelical Christianity in America, namely, the Contemporary Christian Music Industry, Praise Music, Youth Culture and Willow Creek and the “Seeker Sensitive” Movement.[35] Evangelical churches today take some, if not all, of these dimensions for granted. Worship music that in form and content, is amenable to contemporary ears, intentional strategies for welcoming visitors unaccustomed to church, what were once innovations are now first principles. In 2017, fifty years after the beginning of the JPM, Greg Laurie led his 15,000-member congregation, Harvest, to join the Southern Baptist Convention. Citing his admiration for the SBC’s “focus on evangelism . . . outreach in the missions and relief ministries,” Laurie’s cooperation with the SBC, rather than an older pastor’s reactionary move to an establishment institution, demonstrates the latent evangelical affinity.[36] Southern Baptists, present in the earliest days of the Jesus People Movement played critical roles in its development and growth. The reverse is also true. SBC churches are indebted to the JPM for its positive contributions not just in California, but across the county, a case of evangelical cross-pollination.
Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milocsz, speaking in an ironic vein in 1969 wrote that, “…it is truly a privilege to live in California and every day to drink the elixir of perfect alienation.”[37] Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas stated bluntly, “I don’t believe in California.” Whatever California’s essence may be—the object of Hauerwas’ contempt—the state is not a place devoid of evangelical belief and believers. In addition to events noted above, California is home to the Azusa Street Revival, to Billy Graham’s inaugural Los Angeles Crusade to Youth With A Mission. Jews for Jesus was started by Martin (Moshe) Rosen, himself converted during the Jesus Movement. Whatever merit the critiques leveled at megachurches have, 14 percent of them are in California.[38] 500,000 college students are enrolled at Christian colleges in the state.[39] Among the eleven largest accredited seminaries in the United States, three—Fuller, Talbot, and Gateway—are in California.[40]
In a study from 2020, sociologist Ryan Burge compared church attendance numbers in 2020 to 2008, California decreased only 2.5%, which, with the exception of Nebraska, was the smallest drop among states west of the Mississippi.[41] Any diminution is concerning, but the statistics provide necessary perspective. Southern Baptist growth is a far cry from the 1943 pace of a new church every two or three weeks, but the conditions which precipitated this meteoric rise were unforeseen and could not be replicated. In his defense of Christ’s resurrection, Wolfhart Pannenberg argued that every historical event is unique in the sense of being non-repeatable. Applying Pannenberg’s insight to the present subject should guard us against expecting that the church will experience a future that directly mirrors the past. The Dust Bowl and the Jesus Movement were not the outcome of a complex and intentional strategy but were the result of an incalculable convergence of personal and impersonal conditions. That the unfolding was providential we must affirm, but that conclusion became clearer as the present receded into the past. Positively, as the future holds unknown possibilities, the church may be vivified in ways that are presently unimaginable. G. K. Chesterton had something akin in mind when he wrote:
Again and again, before our time, men have grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original wine.[42]
Winning the West through Education: Southern Baptists in the State of Utah
In the milieu that is the American West, Utah is an outlier in discussion on the religious and political destiny of the United States, particularly in its attempts at religious education and acculturation. What the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) has done to train and acculturate its people in this desert “island” of a state is certainly the envy of any institution, perhaps even of Lyman Beecher himself, despite its errant theology. Mormon settlers arrived in 1847, and Utah’s 177-year history provides a snapshot of what diligent systems of education and discipleship can do to maintain a particular culture despite various attempts to tear it down from the outside. As an orthodox Calvinist, Beecher would be disappointed at the LDS stronghold that has, to the present period, kept evangelical Christianity from taking a large hold in the state.
A First Touch
The first substantiated record of westerners to Utah, Christianity included, comes during the Domínguez-Escalante expedition through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico in 1776. The explorers, Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante were inventorying new land for the Spanish Crown, trying to find a new route from Santa Fe, NM to Monterey, CA. These early explorers kept about them the “Franciscan aim of Christianization” that viewed indigenous cultures with an eye towards proselytization.[43] The team entered eastern Utah on Sept 11th, 1776. The party spent a month traveling West to modern-day Provo, UT and then South along the Wasatch Range to the Southwestern corner of the state near modern-day St. George. The team left the state on October 15th and continued on their return journey to Santa Fe.[44] While the Catholic Church was making its presence known in the desert Southwest and California very little would be done in Utah for years to come until 1871 with the dedication of the first Catholic Church in Salt Lake City.
It would be another 71 years after the Domínguez-Escalante expedition until Mormon Pioneers, led by Brigham Young, would arrive in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24th, 1847, to set up what they believed to be the New Jerusalem, fleeing the persecution they had faced in the Midwest.
Mormon Education
From Mormonism’s very beginnings, Latter Day Saints worked at education for the purposes of increasing intelligence and theological indoctrination. In Kirtland, Ohio the fledgling Mormon Church worked to establish theological schools with instruction for converts, ministers, and missionaries. In 1833 the “the school of the prophets” was launched in Kirtland. As the church was forced to move, they consistently worked to established schools starting in Ohio, then Missouri, and in Nauvoo, Illinois.[45] With the theocratic LDS government issuance of the Nauvoo Charter, education was again established with the proposed University of the City of Nauvoo. In 1845 the Nauvoo dream was shattered with the killing of Joseph Smith and the need to flee further Westward. Even during the trek to Utah, Mormons under Brigham Young’s instruction were exhorted to establish schools, and did so, even in their camps.[46]
From the time the Mormons settled in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, they began to set up common schools housed within the various ward houses.[47] The curriculum in the LDS schools included the Mormon Scriptures and the Bible. Other church leaders like Orson Pratt advocated for additional books such as the History of Joseph Smith the Prophet as a reading primer for students.[48] As Mormons had fled from the east, hoping to establish an autonomous state, the State of Deseret, they wanted no influence from the US federal government. Mormons believed all governments to be inadequate because they were not led by Mormon men. The LDS church and Brigham Young were especially opposed to any governmental control of the education of Mormon children. As the US government shrewdly brought this rogue state under its control, education became a battle ground. The battle was over Mormon goals of indoctrination via schooling and the wider goals of governmental policy to assimilate students into American culture, thereby preparing them to serve in the nation’s workforce.[49] Mormons wanted to further their theocracy using the education of their children as the principal means.
Like the unfulfilled dream that was the University of the City in Nauvoo, the general assembly of Utah passed an act on February 28, 1850, that created the University of Deseret.[50] This dream became a reality. The institution was the first state university west of the Missouri River, renamed the University of Utah in 1892.[51] Twenty years later in 1870 the Timpanogos Branch of the University was opened, later reorganized as Brigham Young Academy in 1875. Brigham Young Academy would go on to become Brigham Young University in 1903 and is now the largest church-sponsored university in America. The founding purpose of these schools was to raise up Mormon teachers who could impart theological ideals to students in the LDS schools across the territory of Utah.[52]
During the latter half of the 19th century antipathy between Mormons and non-Mormons increased. As the population of the state grew—in part because the trans-continental railroad brought more non-Mormon workers to the state—so did the need for education independent of LDS hands. During this early season of population increase, Mormons were segregated non-Mormons from themselves.[53] The earliest non-Mormon denominational work in Utah came among those who settled in the fledgling state because of employment. Naturally, their denominational affiliation followed them, and many of the mainline traditions set up private mission schools that served the non-Mormon population. The first protestant church that was founded in Salt Lake City was the First Congregational Church that began in 1865. Soon after Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church organized on November 15, 1870. Then, First Presbyterian Church of Salt Lake City was founded in 1871. First Presbyterian Church started the most notable of denominational schools in Utah. In 1875 the Collegiate Institute was started in the basement of the church, which would later become Westminster University which is still in operation today.[54] By 1890 there were thirty-six Presbyterian mission schools and four academies in Utah.[55] These denominational schools provided a missional way to educate Mormons in Christian doctrine.[56]Since these early efforts at Christian education by denominations, there have been various attempts to start “Christian schools,” particularly for grades K-12. Intermountain Christian School, established in 1982 and still in operation, is a notable example.
In 1890 The Collett Bill and similar legislation in 1892 made public education of children in the territory of Utah compulsory, provided such education was adequately funded and district boundaries were not the same as LDS ward boundaries. As these requirements were met, construction of public schools began. The strong push for Americanization by the US government is evident in the way the early schools were named for American statesmen, soldiers, educators, and other personalities.[57] By 1883, eighty-four percent of children six to eighteen were enrolled in Utah public schools, a rate higher than many progressive states. By comparison, before 1883, only thirty-one percent of school-aged children in LDS schools were educated in the wards.[58] A curriculum more familiar to the American public education system was put in place. In 1896, when Utah was admitted to the Union as a state, the Mormon Church’s hold on education ceased on account of separation of church and state.[59]
By 1911, the number of students that were enrolled in Utah public schools outnumbered those in LDS academies. Though it was government pressure that toppled Mormon-dominated education system, in 1912, a new face of Mormon education appeared alongside public education with its express goal to further inculcate LDS youth in doctrine and culture. Joseph Merrill, inspired by a seminary he had seen in Chicago, proposed the idea of a separate LDS seminary structure near a public school where students could get LDS religious education alongside secular instruction. Students would learn about the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon, and Mormon church history. Taught by a qualified LDS teacher, high school students would receive credit upon completion. The first LDS seminary, built by the LDS church near Granite High School in Salt Lake City in 1912, began a revolution in LDS theological instruction. The second seminary was opened in 1915, and by 1920 there were 20 in operation. Similarly, in 1926 the LDS church began to undertake a similar program that aimed at universities, launching its first LDS Institute of Religion near the Campus of the University of Idaho in Moscow. The University of Utah Institute of Religion started in 1935.[60]
As of 2012, the LDS seminary had “375,389 students in 146 countries while the institute program enrolled 375,380 students in 144 countries” for a total of 727,830 students worldwide involved in LDS theological education as part of their high school and college education.[61] This system did see a significant decline in enrolment from 2012 to 2022, but the last few years have witnessed a resurgence. Drive by any major high school in modern-day Utah and you will see students walking across the street to the LDS seminary for instruction and inculturation. The same holds true on college and university campuses in the state as students attend the LDS Institute of Religion.
SBC Work in Utah
Baptists first arrived in Utah in the 1880s. The Northern Baptist Convention (now American Baptist) organized First Baptist Church of Ogden in 1881, and then First Baptist Church of Salt Lake City in 1883. First Baptist Church of Salt Lake City began in the home of an Ohio Baptist mining superintendent because the LDS church opposed the use of any facilities for a meeting of non-LDS people. In 1884 FBC Salt Lake City would receive gifts from John D. Rockefeller to build a new facility including a worship center and a school. The Northern Baptist convention had a heart for the West and reported in 1900 that 799 of its 1,180 missionaries were in the West. The convention used progressive missionary methods such as fitting seven railroad cars as chapels to park in towns without a church. The railcars included “living quarters for an evangelist, a chapel seating one hundred people on oak pews, an organ, pulpit, and blackboard.”[62]
Because of fallout from the Civil War, the SBC would not establish a presence in Utah until 1944. On July 2,1944, Harold Opal and Robert and Cora Johnson along with eight charter members organized the Roosevelt Baptist Church in Roosevelt Utah, again an area that was seeing an influx of transplants from across the US for the booming oil industry.[63] The second SBC church in Utah would be First Baptist Church of Vernal Utah on November 22, 1946. Others would follow. First Baptist Provo, organized on August 23, 1948,[64] Rose Park Baptist Church in Salt Lake City on November 12, 1950,[65] and First Baptist Church of Clearfield Utah was organized on April 1st, 1951.[66] In the fifties and sixties the SBC would hear the call to missions in the West and begin to emphasize evangelism and church planting. Many of its original churches were started during these golden years. Risen Life Church (originally Holladay Baptist Church) was organized in April of 1962, having begun as a mission on May 19, 1957.[67] Utah churches have continued to grow in number from these humble beginnings. In 2013 the Utah Idaho Southern Baptist Convention numbered 149 churches of which 73 were in Utah. That year the UISBC started a new vision for church planting, called Vision 2020. By 2020 the UISBC had 188 churches. At the most recent count, there are 102 SBC churches in UT. Almost 30% of the SBC churches in Utah have been planted in the last ten years.[68]
As the numbers attest, the primary work of Southern Baptists in Utah and the intermountain West was on evangelism and church planting. Beyond the discipleship that came through Sunday School and Vacation Bible Schools little, if any, effort was devoted towards systems or institutions of Christian education. Granted, SBC seminaries, particularly Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (Now Gateway), helped to train pastors sent to Utah. Professors would regularly speak at conventions, events, and revivals, but to date, there has not been extensive effort to Christianize Utah through systems or institutions of theological education.
Theological Training Efforts in Utah
Ken Mulholland, a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary, after looking around Utah’s church landscape saw the need for pastors to be theologically educated.[69] Opened in 1984 as the Utah Institute of Biblical Studies—and then later renamed the Salt Lake Theological Seminary—this institution boasts of some 2,500 students around the world who have studied there. Salt Lake Theological Seminary was the only theological school of its kind between Denver and California.[70] The institution attempted to align itself with other seminaries outside Utah including Fuller and Denver Seminary, but in 2009, due to financial constraints, lack of accreditation, and theological drift, the school was forced to close its doors after 25 years in ministry.[71] In 2010 the school regrouped to become the Vine Institute, which now functions as a “diversified, decentralized, educational network” that serves to develop existing leaders in churches, but especially church leaders in the immigrant and refugee communities.[72] They currently offer a program in Christian Leadership.
A more recent attempt came at the hands of Dan Walker and the Salt Lake Baptist Association in partnership with Gateway Seminary to increase the theological education of laymen and pastors in the Salt Lake Valley through the Seminary’s Contextualized Leadership Development program (Now called Advance). A non-accredited certificate program for men and women without a bachelor’s degree or qualifications to attend seminary, Advance offered the core curriculum of a seminary education. Many pastors in the Salt Lake Baptist Association were trained from 2006 to 2015 in what totaled six graduating classes.
In 2021, three churches in Salt Lake City partnered together to bring accredited seminary training to Utah. In the last twenty years the Christian population in Utah has grown tremendously, yet still has not increased statistical because of overall population growth in the state, and hovers around three percent of the total population. The last ten plus years has seen many churches planted in Utah. The need for qualified leadership is greater than ever. Pastor Dr. Matt Emadi of Crossroads Church, Dr. Jared Jenkins, of Risen Life Church, and Dr. Lukus Counterman of Gospel Grace Church, began to dream of bringing accredited seminary level training to Utah.
Drawing lessons learned from previous unsuccessful attempts at theological training, these pastors met with representatives of the six SBC seminaries as well as non-SBC seminaries in an attempt to bring accredited seminary training to Utah, thereby raising up more indigenous leaders. Many of the seminaries offered classes taught by churches that then could be transferred in for credit to the seminaries. It was Gateway Seminary that was able to deliver the best possible solution. Gateway allowed a teaching site to be formed as part of its Rocky Mountain Campus. Gateway was able to adjunct these three pastors to teach in person classes and meet the accreditation standards and fill the gaps with online education through Gateway’s extensive network. The Salt Lake School of Theology, a teaching site of Gateway Seminary, was able to bring accredited seminary classes to Utah for the first time. After three years of operation the school has about twenty students pursing a Masters of Theological Essentials. The fruit for the leadership of churches in Utah is already being felt. The school is strengthening existing church staff with educational opportunities and assisting in raising up new church leadership for the future.
The battle for the future of Utah by the Baptist has faced one large foe, the LDS church, and her strong institutions for education. LDS institutions have shaped the history of Utah and have insulated the dominate Mormon culture from changing too quickly, and in the fight for the West we must consider this institution’s success. The educational systems put in place by the Mormon church are commendable in many ways, but imitation may be out of reach, and maybe ill-advised for Baptists. In circumspect, Baptists must wrestle with their core values of freedom of conscience, local autonomy, and occasional partnership that may prohibit a rigid system of discipleship that is applied across their churches broadly. Furthermore, Baptists have traditionally had an evangelistic zeal that has often eclipsed a catechistic drive in ongoing discipleship beyond initial conversion and the organization of new churches. Finally, the churches of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been shaped by the seeker-sensitive movement and business marketing that encourages differentiation between churches instead of a commonality of core teaching.
Despite different approaches to education, the churches of Utah are growing and flourishing, and it is precisely their freedom that is often attractive to those coming out of the systems of Mormonism, not to mention the teaching of Gospel truth. It also must be remembered that evangelicalism as a whole and the Baptist church in Utah are still in their infancy—as are their institutions. Though appearing weak when faced with a mighty foe, recent moves toward deeper theological education through cooperative efforts between churches promise an ever-brightening future. Education is and continues to be a core tenant of the Baptist Faith and Message for advancing the Gospel in the world, and we would do well as Southern Baptist to revisit and recommit ourselves to this ideal. To continue to win the West, Baptists must make concerted and creative efforts to deliver not only the Gospel but theological training and education to its people and those that God is saving.
Conclusion
Nearly two centuries have passed since Lyman Beecher’s Plea for the West and it is difficult to determine if one could tally more fulfillments or disappointments. As noted, the West is not an occidental version of early 19th century Connecticut, but then again, theologically-speaking, neither is Connecticut. The states of California and Utah were not in the purview of Beecher’s essay. The former was admitted to the union 15 years after Plea and the latter, over sixty years after its publication, but the developments, growth, and culture of the United States have been as the author claimed, in the West. The populations of the western states, particularly California, are large, and there are evangelical Christians, especially Southern Baptists—most of which have a lineage younger than a century. And the institutions of theological learning have followed and continue to follow the churches. Is the West’s evangelical future bright? Beecher had higher hopes than anyone. He cited Jonathan Edwards’ well-known eschatological prognostication that the millennium would commence in America. Beecher admitted that when he first heard the opinion, “thought it chimerical; but all providential developments since, and all the existing signs of the times, lend corroboration to it.”[73] A patent dismissal of such optimism is tempting, but perhaps we are simply too close, temporally, or otherwise, to recognize what is before us. Southern Baptists in California and Utah accomplished much in a relatively short period of time and have thus far resisted the theological disjunction between the believing faithful in the pews and the unbelieving lecturers in the classroom. As few theological institutions remain faithful to their founders and their respective churches, perhaps we can embrace the status of pleasantly surprised outliers.
Read more from the inaugural issue by downloading the full pdf or accessing the articles below.
[1] A Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman & Smith, 1835), 11.
[2] A Plea, 12.
[3] Vatican II (1962–1965) judged Catholicism to be compatible with democracy and religious liberty, a striking contrast to the previous encyclicals that strongly opposed democratic governance.
[4] A Plea, 13.
[5] Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 62.
[6] John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Penguin, 1952), 216.
[7] The same year, Wesleyans founded University of the Pacific in San Jose. Methodists also founded the University of Southern California in 1880.
[8] Presently First Baptist Church, the structure was built in 1852 with redwood beams from the mill owned by the general and statesman Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–1890).
[9] Kevin Starr, California, 109.
[10] Durant founded Contra Costa Academy in 1853, which in 1855 became the College of California. He intended the nondenominational institution—presently that University of California at Berkeley—to “furnish the means of a thorough and comprehensive education of the pervading spirit and influence of the Christian religion.” Cited in Jason Sexton, “Can Theology Engage with California’s Culture,” in Theology and California: Theological Refractions on California’s Culture Jason Sexton and Fred Sanders, eds. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 41. Sexton notes that Berkeley faculty taught natural theology courses as late as 1871 and moral philosophy until 1879.
[11] Jack London, Burning Daylight (Los Angeles: Aegypan Press), 114. The novel, written in 1910, was the most popular of London’s writings during his lifetime.
[12] See Harold K. Graves, Into the Wind: Personal Reflections on the Early Years of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (Nashville: Broadman, 1983), 15–16; Chris Chun and John Shouse, Golden Gate to Gateway: A History (Nashville: B&H, 2019), 5–6. See O. C, Wheeler and California Baptist Historical Society. The Story of Early Baptist History in California: Prepared at the Request of California Baptist Historical Society, 1888, and Read Before the Society at Sacramento, April 13, 1889. California: publisher not identified, 1889. In Visions From San Francisco Bay trans., Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1982), the Polish poet Czeslaw Milocsz, reflecting 120-years after Cone penned the following: “Call it a delusion, but a demonic presence can be felt on this continent whose apparent concern is that Christian man see his own nature revealed and that he unleash all his brutality,” 40.
[13] Chun and Shouse, Golden Gate to Gateway, 7. On Shuck’s life, see Thelma Wolfe Hall, I Give Myself: The Story of J. Lewis Shuck and His Mission to the Chinese (Richmond, Va.: Thelma Wolfe Hall, 1983).
[14] Quoted in Sam Harvey, “The Southern Baptist Contribution to Baptist Cause in California Prior to 1890” (ThM Thesis, GGBTS, 1958), 24. Cited in Golden Gate to Gateway, 9. Shuck, who served as a missionary to China prior to coming to California helped found a black Baptist church in Sacramento in 1857. On Shuck’s life see Margaret Morgan Thomas, “Strangers in the House: J. Lewis Shuck and Issachar Roberts, First American Baptist Missionaries to China.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1972. On Shuck’s wife, Henrietta, see Thomas Sanford Dunway, Pioneering for Jesus: The Story of Henrietta Hall Shuck. Nashville.: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1930.
[15] Chun and Shouse, Golden Gate to Gateway, 11–12.
[16] Marvin’s brother Virgil came in 1927. Marvin and Virgil’s father, George, a Baptist preacher, migrated in 1928.
[17] Into the Wind: Reflections on the Early Years of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1983), 30–31.
[18] Grapes of Wrath, 20.
[19] Grapes of Wrath, 20.
[20] Hughes provided a ratio of Southern Baptist churches in proportion to population growth.
[21] Elmer L. Gray, Heirs of Promise: A Chronicle of California Southern Baptists, 1940–1978 (Fresno, CA: California Baptist Press, 1978), 29.
[22] The California Southern Baptist, June 1943.
[23] Robert D. Hughes’ 1975 study provides the following ratios of Baptist churches to population growth. In 1950, 34,061 Southern Baptists in a population of 10.5 million yielded .3 percent, 201,905 members out of 18.5 million in 1965 reached 1.1 percent. By 1975, 299,610 California Southern Baptist constituted 1.5 percent of the state’s 21,250,00 residents. Cited in Gray, Heirs of Promise, 168.
[24] “2023 SBC Statistic by State Convention” http://media2.sbhla.org.s3.amazonaws.com/annuals/SBC_Annual_2023.pdf
[25] Isam Hodges, private papers. Cited in Harold Graves, Into the Wind, 41.
[26] Peter Berger, “A Bleak Outlook is Seen for Religion” New York Times, April 25, 1968, 3.
[27] June 21, 1971, pp. 56–63. https://time.com/vault/issue/1971-06-21/page/1/
[28] God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[29] See God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 10–28. McDonald’s account of these events was published as House of Acts in 1970.
[30] Blessitt claimed that fellow students and professors were “cold in spirit” and “arch liberals.” Cited in God’s Forever Family, 56.
[31] Eskridge, God’s Forever Family, 56–57.
[32] See Baptist Press, July 9, 1976.
[33] Memoirs of a Jesus Freak, 63. Philpott estimates that there were “probably 500 conversions just in the central area [of Marin County].” p. 68. He recounts interaction with an array of cults and cult teachers including Jim Jones (The People’s Temple), David Berg (The Children of God), and Victor Paul Wierwille (The Way International). An article in the California Southern Baptist, Vol. 30 No. 26, July 8, 1971 captures the theological tension present at the time. In response to criticism of his “afterglow” services and Pentecostal label, Chuck Smith countered, “Calvary is not Pentecostal…we’re totally opposed to Pentecostalism…and believe the greatest manifestation of the Holy Spirit is love. See California Southern Baptist, Vol. 30 No. 26, July 8, 1971, 12.
[34] Memoirs of a Jesus Freak, 112.
[35] Eskridge, God’s Forever Family, 266–283.
[36] Diana Chandler, “Greg Laurie’s Cooperation with SBC Mutually Beneficial” Baptist Press, June 14, 2017. https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/greg-lauries-cooperation-with-sbc-mutually-beneficial/ (accessed August 30th, 2023).
[37]Visions from San Francisco Bay trans., Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1982), 40.
[38] http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/database.html
[39] http://hirr.hartsem.edu/cgi-bin/mega/db.pl?db=default&uid=default&view_records=1&ID=*&sb=4&State=CA
[40] https://www.ats.edu/files/galleries/2022-2023_Annual_Data_Tables.pdf
[41] https://mobile.twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1625924542819336212 (accessed on June 14, 2023). In a recent survey on weekly church attendance, California notched 22%, 3% below the national average, but equal to five states (Alaska, Arizona, Montana, New York, and Wisconsin) and better than 11 others. https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1696892545219899855 (accessed on September 1, 2023).
[42] The Everlasting Man, 165.
[43] Ted J. Warner ed., Fray Angelico Chavez trans., The Domínguez-Escalante Journal: Their Expedition Through Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico in 1776 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995), pages viii.
[44] Warner, The Domínguez-Escalante Journal, 50–97.
[45] John Clifton Moffitt, The History of Public Education in Utah (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1946), 1–2.
[46] Moffitt, The History of Public Education in Utah, 7, 9.
[47] John Gary Maxwell, Robert Newton Baskin and the Making of Modern Utah (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 202. A Mormon ward is the local “church building” that the average member of the LDS church attends weekly for services. Members of the church are assigned to the ward they are to attend, and even the time, based on their geographic location in the city. Five to twelve wards are organized into a stake. The geographic breakups for wards and public schools have always been very similar creating an insulating factor in the culture. The people you live with you go to church with, and the people you go to church with you go to school with.
[48] Moffitt. The History of Public Education in Utah, 16.
[49] Maxwell, Robert Newton Baskin and the Making of Modern Utah, 201–203.
[50] Moffitt, The History of Public Education in Utah, 13.
[51] https://about.utah.edu, (accessed 3/28/2024).
[52] Moffitt, The History of Public Education in Utah, 13-14.
[53] Moffitt, The History of Public Education in Utah, 15.
[54] Unfortunately Westminster University severed its Presbyterian affiliation in 1974 and all religious ties in 1983.
[55] https://www.fpcslc.org/history (accessed 7/18/24).
[56] Maxwell, Robert Newton Baskin and the Making of Modern Utah, 201.
[57] Maxwell, Robert Newton Baskin and the Making of Modern Utah, 209.
[58] Maxwell, Robert Newton Baskin and the Making of Modern Utah, 202, 210.
[59] Moffitt, The History of Public Education in Utah, 17. Separation of religious and public education is enshrined in Utah’s Constitution, Article X. sec. 12–13.
[60] Casey Paul Griffiths, “A Century of Seminary,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/si/history/a-century-of-seminary?lang=eng (accessed 3/30/24).
[61] Griffiths, “A Century of Seminary.”
[62] E. W. Hunke Jr., Southern Baptists in The Intermountain West (1940-1989): A Fifty-Year History of Utah, Idaho, and Nevada Southern Baptist, (Franklin, TN: Providence House Publishers, 1998), 34–36.
[63] Hunke Jr., Southern Baptists in The Intermountain West (1940-1989), 50.
[64] Hunke Jr., Southern Baptists in The Intermountain West (1940-1989), 68.
[65] Hunke Jr., Southern Baptists in The Intermountain West (1940-1989), 77.
[66] Hunke Jr., Southern Baptists in The Intermountain West (1940-1989), 79.
[67] Hunke Jr., Southern Baptists in The Intermountain West (1940-1989), 153. I, Jared, am currently the pastor of Risen Life Church.
[68] These numbers were supplied by Rob Lee the current Executive Director of the Utah Idaho Southern Baptist Convention.
[69] Becky Hobbs, “UIBS: Strengthening the Saints in Utah,” Reformed Quarterly 8.4 (Winter 1989). https://rts.edu/resources/uibs-strengthening-the-saints-in-utah/.
[70] Carrie A. Moore, “Salt Lake seminary to graduate final class?,” Deseret News, May 16th, 2009. https://www.deseret.com/2009/5/16/20317911/salt-lake-seminary-to-graduate-final-class, (accessed 1/23/2024).
[71] Carole Mikita “Economic woes force seminary to shut its doors,” KSL News, Oct 30th, 2008. https://www.ksl.com/article/4661572/economic-woes-force-seminary-to-shut-its-doors, (accessed 1/23/2024).
[72] https://vine-institute.org/about/#mission (accessed 3/25/2024).
[73] A Plea, 10.