Depiction of the Venerable Bede (CLVIIIv) from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493
One of the great historians of the Church is the Venerable Bede (672/673–735). Although he was best known in his own day for his commentaries on the Bible, over the centuries his most remembered-book is his History of the English Church and People in which he recorded how Christianity came to his people, the Anglo-Saxons. He rightly believed that God was active in history, all of history, and though contemporary Christian historians might disagree with some of his detailed judgments about specific divine activity, if we are Christians we cannot disagree with his conviction about God’s presence in the historical realm. This regular column seeks to be faithful to this conviction of Bede: that history is a valuable realm of wisdom for believers and needs to be read.
In this first column I begin with a little of my own story—how I became a Christian. A significant part of my conversion was the faithful witness of a Baptist community in Hamilton, Ontario—Stanley Avenue Baptist Church at the corner of Locke Street and Stanley Avenue—and of its pastor at the time, Bruce Woods. Nothing of the history of this Christian community did I know when I first walked through the doors of this church in the autumn of 1973. But over the years that I attended Stanley Avenue I began to learn her history and appreciate deeply the witness of many who were long in glory when I first came to the church.
The church originated in a Sunday School that was started in 1875 by Palemon Lewis Scriven, an engraver by trade, and at the time a member of James Street Baptist Church in downtown Hamilton, which was the mother-church for a good number of Baptist churches in Hamilton. He and his family moved to Hunter Street in 1872, and, in his words, he became concerned about the “perishing souls” in that area of the city and about the fact that there was no Baptist witness there. He and his wife took a survey of the area to see if parents would consent to send their children to a Sunday School. A room was found in a private home in the area and on June 6, 1875, the Sunday School began with 22 children in attendance.
Within a year there were 77 children attending. This Sunday School had ceased to function by 1879, though, due to the fact that the room being rented was no longer available and no other accommodation could be found. But in 1884, under the leadership of William Henry Midgely, Herkimer Baptist Mission was born, being built on Scriven’s Sunday School work. Finally, this mission was formally recognized as an independent church on December 17, 1889.
When Scriven came to write up the story of the church’s origins a number of years later, he asked, “who shall estimate the ultimate results” of the work? Who indeed? Over the years, under a succession of godly pastors, the work flourished, and hundreds were saved. And today, over 125 years later, the church is still a lighthouse, shining out the light of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. All this, humanly speaking, because a man by the name of Palemon Lewis Scriven and his wife moved to Hunter Street and became exercised in their souls that men and women and children in the area were without Christ and without hope.
