4.2 4.3 mission field  (Page 12/9)

Mission field . Southern Baptists were late to catch and capitalize upon the missionary enthusiasm of nineteenth-century Protestantism. They entered most foreign fields after Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and a number of British and American cooperative bodies had already established enclaves. Having gotten a late start, however, they have been strong finishers, winning themselves the reputation of

the most persistently missionary-minded of American churches,

Until after the Civil War, "home" or "domestic" missions were of primary concern to Southern Baptists, and Texas itself still qualified as a mission field. When Texas ladies' aid societies packed mission boxes, they usually sent them to those working on the western frontier of the state, in Indian territories, or on the Mexican border. They still shared with northern Baptists the heroes and heroines of the faith like Adoniram and Ann H. Judson who were sent to Burma by American Baptists in the early nineteenth century, prior to the creation of separate conventions over sectional conflicts; and some notice was given to the few Southern Baptist missionaries who went to China when its ports opened to foreigners in mid-century. A real interest in foreign missions was not born within the state, however, until 1880, when Texas' own

sons and daughters

The first distant place to capture the imaginations of Texas Baptists was Brazil. Attention was focused in that direction by a retired Confederate general, A. T. Hawthorne, who, in his disillusionment with the outcome of the Civil War, decided to lead a group of emigrants there in order, one supposes, to recover the glory of the Old South. ^{O. K. Armstrong and Marjorie M. Armstrong, The Indomitable Baptists (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1967), pp. 261-262.} Originally Hawthorne had no religious motive for colonization, but his subsequent conversion gave him added incentive to abandon the compromised United States for a place with more promise. He was so effectively persuasive on the topic that he was hired by Texas Baptists to be an agent of their Foreign Mission Board, promoting and collecting money for mission causes.

Hawthorne is something of a mystery man. It is not known how or why he came to Texas, but he remained there, working for the Foreign Mission Board until his death in 1899. Because of his wife's illness and his child's untimely death, he decided to promote the Brazilian cause rather than take it on himself. See A. R. Crabtree, Baptists in Brazil: A History of Southern Baptists' Greatest Mission Field (Rio de Janeiro: Baptist Publishing House of Brazil, 1953), pp. 35-37.