Guest Post by Jared Cornutt.

Sermons can have a powerful individual effect. It is under the hearing of these sermons that people are saved, instructed, and grow in their faith. People will leave the church building saying, “It’s like he was preaching to just me” or “ I needed to hear that today.” However, some sermons go beyond personal effect. Some have the power to move a denomination and, in turn, leave a lasting change in the world. 

This is precisely what happened to the Particular Baptist denomination of England when Andrew Fuller and William Carey delivered two powerful sermons to their local association in the early 1790s. God used these two sermons, and these two men, to change the course of history and usher in what we now call the modern-missions movement. 

High-Calvinism

At this time Fuller and Carey’s denomination, the Particular Baptists, overwhelmingly embraced the doctrine of High-Calvinism. High-Calvinists believed that in order for someone to come to saving faith, they had to be given a “warrant of faith” by God. Open invitations for hearers to repent and believe the gospel was thought to be doing a disservice to the sovereignty of God, and thus they were never practiced. This is the system that Fuller and Carey were brought up in. Fuller said concerning this doctrine, “I conceive there is scarcely a minister amongst us whose preaching has not been more or less influenced by the lethargic systems of the age.” The natural outcome of High-Calvinism spread among the Particular Baptists, and thus diminished their evangelistic zeal, and the denomination began to shrink in number and influence.     

Fuller and Carey both broke away from this belief system. They offered invitations in their sermons for people to come to Christ. Likewise, they were both becoming increasingly convinced of the need for the gospel to be taken globally. However, they were lesser-known pastors, in less influential churches, and in a dying and shrinking denomination. Still, these two were given the opportunity for their voices to be heard, and it would change history forever. 

Fuller’s Sermon

Andrew Fuller first delivered his message entitled “The Instances, Evil, and Tendency of Delay, in the Concerns of Religion” from Haggai 1:2 on April 27, 1791. Fuller was determined to begin turning the ship of the denomination. He said regarding the great commission: 

When the Lord Jesus commissioned his apostles, he commanded them to go and teach “all nations” and preach the gospel to “every creature”; and that notwithstanding the difficulties and oppositions that would lie in their way. The apostles executed their commission with assiduity and fidelity; but, since their days, we seem to sit down half contented that the greater part of the world should remain in ignorance and idolatry. Some noble efforts have indeed been, made; but they are small in number, when compared to the magnitude of the object. [1]

In his sermon, Fuller did everything but say that the Great Commission was binding on Christians, but it was very much implied. Fuller believed that Christians were to carry on the work of the apostles and urged his fellow Particular Baptists to do that very thing. Fuller continues, 

Are the souls of men of less value heretofore? No. Is Christianity less true or less important than in former ages? This will not be pretended. Are there no opportunities for societies, or individuals, in Christian nations, to convey the gospel to the heathen? This cannot be pleaded as long as opportunities are found to trade with them, yea, and (what a disgrace to the name of Christians) to buy them, and sell them, and treat them with worse than savage barbarity? We have opportunities in abundance; the improvement of navigation, the maritime and commercial turn of this country, furnish us with these; and it deserved to be considered whether this is not a circumstance that renders it a duty peculiarly binding on us.[2]

Fuller turned from exegesis to practical application. He was directly challenging those who were hesitant by asking, “how could the time not be now?” Because of advancements in technology and travel, it had never been easier to take the gospel across the seas. Moreover, even if these advancements did not exist, it was their duty to preach the gospel and invite people to respond. Fuller loved to use the word “duty” because it carried significant theological meaning and calling. He truly believed it was a duty of all humanity to believe the gospel, and the duty of all pastors to preach invitational sermons for them to come to Christ, and it was the duty of his denomination and fellow Christians to engage in world mission. Fuller concludes his sermon by declaring,

We pray for the conversion and salvation of the world, and yet neglect the ordinary means by which those ends have been used to be accomplished. It pleased God, heretofore, by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believed; and there is   least to try by some means to convert more of the good news of salvation to the world around us than was hitherto been conveyed? The encouragement to the heathen is still in force, “Whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved: but how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach except they be sent?”[3]         

Fuller’s sermon did not bring instant change. Instead, it took root in the minds and heart of the pastors in the Northampton Association. 

Carey’s Sermon

A year later, in 1792, a young William Carey gave a sermon to the Northampton Association from Isaiah 54:2-3. In his message, he uttered one of his most famous lines: “Expect great things. Attempt great things.”[4] Because Carey was lesser-known, he had only pastored smaller churches, this was one of the first times Fuller heard Carey preach. The sermon, though, would prove to be one of his most crucial while in England. After listening to the sermon, the difficult-to-impress Fuller said, “We must know more of each other.”[5] They were kindred spirits, and soon would be dear friends. 

John Ryland reflected on the sermon nearly a decade later saying, “Had all the people lifted up their voice and wept, as the children of Israel did at Bochim, I should not have wondered, so clearly did he prove the criminality of our supineness in the cause of God.”[6] The people were struck by the words and deliverance of Carey’s sermon. It resonated strongly with Fuller: “I feel the use of his sermon to this day. Let us pray much, hope much, expect much, labor much; an eternal weight of glory awaits us!”[7]

However, many were still apprehensive about turning from High-Calvinism to global missions. Many of the ministers praised and thanked Carey for his message, but it looked as if no action would be taken. A frustrated Carey grabbed the arm of Fuller and cried out, “Is there nothing again going to be done sir?”[8] It was an act of desperation by Carey, and the frustration of once again, nothing happened. Historian Timothy George described this moment as a “catalytic moment in the history of the Church. How could those earnest Christians, however timorous, say no to what their ears had heard, their eyes had seen, and hearts had felt?”[9]

Maybe many of their hearts were still held captive by the High-Calvinism they were brought up under. Perhaps they had no confidence that a small association like theirs could do anything for world missions. Many were just tired and wanted to get home after a long few days of meetings. But Carey was not ready to let his message go to waste. Before the meeting concluded, the ministers voted and passed a resolution brought by Fuller (at Carey’s strong pleading) that said: 

Resolved, that a plan be prepared against the next ministers’ meeting at Kettering, for forming a Baptist Society for propagating the gospel among the heathen.

The Sermons’ Effects

It was a small step, but it was the step that was needed to make Fuller and Carey’s sermons a reality. These two sermons were able to provide the foundation for the organizing of the Baptist Missionary Society. According to historian Christopher Smith, “Nothing less than a grand, God-glorifying, mission-oriented ‘theology of hope’ was entrusted to the Church that day.” These two faithful, but unknown, pastors delivered two faithful, but mostly unheard, sermons that would usher in a movement in history that is influencing our world today.

A few months later, the fruit of these two sermons was born as the Baptist Missionary Society was formed on October 2, 1792, in a small twelve by ten-foot room in Kettering. Fuller would be appointed as the first Secretary for the organization upon its inception, and Carey would serve as its first missionary to India. Fuller recalls his promise to support Carey,

Our undertaking to India really appeared at its beginning to me somewhat like a few men, who were deliberating about the importance of penetrating a deep mine, which had never before been explored. We had no one to guide us; and whilst we were thus deliberating, Carey, as it were, said, “Well, I will go down, if you will hold the rope.” But, before he descended, he, as it seemed to me, took an oath from each of us at the mouth of the pit, to this effect that “whilst we lived, we should never let go the rope.”

Andrew Fuller would give the rest of his life to pastoring his church in Kettering and serving as the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society. He made sure they had enough funding to keep his friend William Carey in India where he would spend the rest of his life preaching the gospel. Perhaps more loudly and consequential than the sermons these men preached were the sermons they lived.

Jared Cornutt is the Senior Pastor at Plymouth Park Baptist Church in Irving, TX and the co-host of The Potluck Podcast (@potluckpodcast_). He is working toward his PhD at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Follow him on Twitter at @jaredcornutt.

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[1] Fuller, Pernicious Consequences of Delay in Works, 1:147.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, 1:148.

[4] Ibid., 1:147. The quote is often recalled as, “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.” Apparently, this was added twenty-five years later in a work about Fuller. However, Carey’s original quote did not include this. Timothy George points out that Carey was careful in his wording, and it was intentional. “From first to last he was keenly aware of God’s sovereignty in awakening the Church from its slumber and sending forth to accomplish His eternal purpose in bringing the lost to a saving knowledge of the Redeemer. In this sense, both the ‘expecting’ and the ‘attempting’ were ‘from God.’ It was His mission, His Spirit, His call.” See Timothy George, Faithful Witness: The Life and Mission of William Carey (Birmingham: New Hope), 32.

[5] George Smith, The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker and Missionary, (London: John Murray, 1887), 50.

 [6] John Ryland, The Work of Faith, the Labour of Love, and the Patience of Hope Illustrated in the life and Death of the Reverend Andrew Fuller (Bristol, 1815), 241.

[7] Letter from Andrew Fuller to John Fawcett, Kettering, August 30, 1793. George, Faithful Witness, 33.

 [8] John Clark Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward: Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), 1:15.

 [9] George, Faithful Witness, 33.