The Bible and Missions

Introduction

1 h Introduction Sharyn Dowd IN 1920 HeLeN BARReTT MONTgOMeRy published The Bible and Missions to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions. At the age of forty-nine, she was at the height of her influence, both within the ecumenical women’s missions movement and within her denomination, the Northern Baptist Convention. This new edition, with inclusive language for human beings, makes Montgomery’s thought accessible to a generation of Baptist readers and students of missiology who are only vaguely familiar with Montgomery’s work, if indeed they have heard of her at all. This edition is published by Baylor University Press a little over one hundred years after the appearance of Montgomery’s first publication for the Central Committee, Christus Redemptor: An Outline Study of the Island World of the Pacific (1906). Helen Barrett was born in 1861 to Amos Judson Barrett and emily B. Barrows Barrett in Kingsville, Ohio. Her father was a graduate of the University of Rochester (New york) and her parents met when Judson Barrett was president of Nunda Institute, where emily was a preceptress. In the 1870s Helen’s father entered Rochester Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1876. His only pastorate was at Lake Avenue Baptist Church, Rochester, which he served until his death in 1889. Helen majored in classics at Wellesley College, graduating in 1884 when fewer than 2.2 percent of American women attended college. She 2 / The Bible and Missions taught in preparatory schools for three years before marrying William A. Montgomery, a business entrepreneur and member of the Lake Avenue Baptist Church in 1887. Also in 1887 Helen Barrett Montgomery addressed a meeting of the Monroe Baptist Association, where she met her lifelong friend and co-worker in the cause of missions, Lucy Waterbury. Waterbury was the widow of a missionary; she later remarried and became Lucy Peabody, as she is known to historians of Baptist missions. Peabody is the author of the original Foreword to The Bible and Missions. Montgomery worked in Rochester as a civic leader and member of the school board—the first woman to serve in that capacity. She became a wellknown speaker in the city, addressing primarily women’s groups on a variety of topics. She was an associate of Susan B. Anthony in the successful effort to have women admitted to the University of Rochester. Always an active church member, Montgomery was licensed to preach by the Lake Avenue Baptist Church in 1898.1 She and Lucy Peabody were among those who worked in the cause of ecumenical cooperation in the promotion and funding of foreign missions, a cause that received national attention in 1900 at the ecumenical Missionary Conference held in New york City. In 1910 Montgomery went on a national speaking tour as part of the “Jubilee” celebration of fifty years of organized women’s work in missionary endeavors. She wrote a number of missions study books and edited a women’s missions magazine. In 1921–1922 Montgomery served as president of the Northern Baptist Convention, guiding the convention through the crucial fundamentalist–modernist controversy, which resulted in the rejection by the Northern Baptists of a rigidly Calvinistic creed in favor of “no creed but the New Testament.” In 1924 Montgomery published a translation of the New Testament that she had originally prepared for her private use. This was called the Centenary New Testament because its publication commemorated the one hundredth 1 The most comprehensive account of Montgomery’s life to date is the dissertation of Kendal P. Mobley, “Helen Barrett Montgomery, 1861–1910: From Progressivism and Woman’s emancipation to global Mission” (Th.D. diss., Boston University School of Theology, 2004). It is the source of the biographical material in this Introduction. Mobley’s estimate that Montgomery’s licensing must have been in 1898, rather than the traditional date of 1892 is accepted here. Introduction / 3 anniversary of the American Baptist Publication Society.2 Poor health resulted in her withdrawal from public life in 1930, and she died in 1934 at the age of seventy-three. Helen Barrett Montgomery is known today primarily among the American Baptist churches in the U.S.A., the historical successor denomination to the Northern Baptist Convention. Among American Baptists her reputation is that of a proponent of foreign missions, the first woman to be elected president of a major American denomination, and (incorrectly...