A Baptist Page Mission
Brief
John Mason Peck
As
George Washington was serving his first term as president, John
Mason Peck was born on October 21, 1789, in Litchfield, Connecticut.
As he entered adulthood, Peck tried his hand at teaching but realized
he was quite deficient in grammar and needed further education. In 1809
Peck married Sally Paine and soon they had their first child. God uses
many things in our lives and in the Peck's He used the birth of this
child to change the course of their life. While considering having their
newborn baptized, John and his wife studied the Scriptures carefully.
Like Ann and Adoniram Judson, they came to the conclusion that baptism
was for believers, not infants.
After moving to New Durham, New York the Peck family joined the local Baptist church and were baptized in September of 1811. Because the church's pastor could only be present one Sunday a month, Peck soon found himself in demand by the members to preach on the other Sundays. Soon he was licensed to preach and later assumed a pastorate.
In God's providence, Peck met Luther Rice. Rice had just returned from India to mobilized mission efforts in America. After traveling with Rice across the northeast for several months, John Peck felt led volunteer for missions in the American West. Through the encouragement of Luther Rice and the commissioning of the first Triennial Convention, Peck left for St. Louis, Missouri in 1817. At this point in his life Peck wrote in his journal, "I have now put my hand to the plow. O Lord, may I never turn back--never regret this step. It is my duty to live, to labor, to die as a kind of pioneer in advancing the Gospel." Soon, the Pecks and their three children made the thousand mile journey in their one-horse wagon to the Missouri Territory.
Unlike in the East, Baptists were hardly a welcomed sight in St. Louis. In fact, Christianity of any sort wasn't much thought of by many. If it wasn't Catholic opposition it was the opposition of robbers, pirates and Indians that faced the first "Home missionaries". 1820 was a particularly hard year for John Mason Peck. That year his oldest son died and the Triennial Convention cut off his support. Through it all Peck persevered, for he was intent on following the plow to the end of the furrow. He faced down anti-missionary forces, founded churches, and help birth what later became Shurtleff College in Illinois. He established a Christian periodical and organized circuit-riding Baptist preachers.
Like Luther Rice, Peck was the need to educate the people about missions. One method he devised was the formation of Bible societies to distribute Bibles. Many of these still exist today. In 1831, while visiting from Massachusetts, Jonathan Going bonded with Peck to establish the American Baptist Home Mission Society, with Going as secretary. Peck also encouraged efforts to preserve Baptist history. In 1840 he became the first secretary of the Western Baptist Historical Society, and in 1853 he helped create the American Baptist Historical Society.
Though he never got the theological education he desired, Peck was awarded an honorary doctorate by Harvard in 1852. When Sally Peck died in 1856, John went to be with his children in Iowa. The pain of his loss and the toll on his on his physical body was too much. Thus on March 14, 1856 America's first great Home missionary went to be with Christ. His last words to his children as he left this world were, "Only Christ is my Savior, my whole dependence." If William Carey stand as the father of foreign missions then Luther Rice and John Mason Peck together stand as the fathers of home missions!
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