BOOK NOTES
DEVON DICK.
THE CROSS AND THE MACHETE - NATIVE BAPTISTS OF JAMAICA: IDENTITY, MINISTRY AND LEGACY.
IAN RANDLE PUBLISHERS, 2009.
According to Devon Dick, Native Baptists were a distinctive 19th century religious movement in Jamaica. These were
Christian believers who self-identified themselves as Native Baptists after they “broke away from the English Baptists in
response to the discrimination against persons of African ancestry becoming pastors.”
The term Native Baptist came into use at the earliest in 1832. There were two distinct Native Baptist groups. The Jamaica
Native Baptist Missionary Society formed sometime between September 1839 and July 1840, a few years before the
English Baptists had established an independent missionary society in Jamaica. The second group, the Native Baptist
Communion, was formed after the 1860-61 great revival in Jamaica and was concentrated mainly in the east of the island.
Two of the most well known leaders of the Native Baptist Communion were George William Gordon and Paul Bogle, two
of Jamaica’s seven National Heroes, the highest honor given in the country.
After the Native Baptist War in 1865, led by Bogle, and in which Gordon was implicated, the surviving Native Baptist
churches were largely absorbed by the Jamaica Baptist Union, with which the English Baptists were affiliated. Many
Native Baptist leaders, including Bogle and Gordon, were hanged or otherwise executed, and a number of churches
destroyed or forced to close.
Native Baptists were inspired by George Liele, an African American former slave who started Baptist work in Jamaica
in 1783, and Sam Sharpe, a Jamaican Baptist deacon and slave who led a rebellion in 1831‑32. Dick, who did his PhD
studies with the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, said that these “were Christians whose spirituality embraced
equality and justice for all humans,” and that they embraced “a hermeneutic of liberation.”
According to Dick, a member of the Baptist World Alliance Commission on Baptist Heritage and Identity, the common view
of Native Baptists as superstitious; as embracing and engaging in African religions and practices such as Obeah, Kumina
and Myal; as not embracing orthodox Christian faith; and as disorganized are not borne out by the evidence. Native
Baptists were “a significant denomination … whose outstanding contribution to Jamaica and the world has been neglected
for far too long.”
BOOKS BY BWA LEADERS
A DIVINE ASSIGNMENT: THE MISSIOLOGY OF WENDELL CLAY SOMERVILLE
Lucas Park Books, 2010
DAVID EMMANUEL GOATLEY, executive secretary-treasurer, Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention
HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF THE BAPTISTS, SECOND EDITION
The Scarecrow Press, 2009
WILLIAM BRACKNEY, professor, historical theology and ethics, Acadia University, Nova Scotia, Canada
CHRIST AND COMMUNITY IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL: PASTORAL SYMBOLS AS THE SYMBOLIC RELATIONSHIP
ABGTS Publications, 2010
LILIAN LIM (deceased), former president, Asia Baptist Graduate Theological Seminary
MINISTRY PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CARIBBEAN: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF HORACE O. RUSSELL
Caribbean Diaspora Baptist Clergy Association, 2010
EDITED BY ERON HENRY, Associate Director, Communications, Baptist World Alliance