An Overview of the Missions Activities of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board in Iran

This paper overviews the American missionary activity in Iran from the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board. Much of the research is based on the Board of Trustee minutes of the Foreign Mission Board, as well as archival material from the International Mission Board, the new name for the Foreign Mission Board that includes personal correspondences, letters, communications, statistics of churches in Iran, strategies for missions, and other documents. Academic papers, diaries, composed and written oral histories, and other information from Foreign Mission Board missionaries of this period also are used. Therefore, the significance of this paper lies, I hope, at least in presenting documents previously unknown and inaccessible.

Indian Slaveholders and Presbyterian Missionaries, 1837–1861

Founded in 1837 to provide a denohinational foreign mission board for the Old School Presbyterians, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (PBFM) had from the outset a very different outlook toward mission work among slave-holding Indians than did its closest rival, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which served the New School Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists. The difference increased until 1859 when the latter organization, unable to reconcile its antislavery conviction with the determined proslavery position of the southern Indians, withdrew from that field. The PBFM, headquartered in New York City, thereupon took under its patronage most of those ABCFM missionaries who had been abandoned by their Boston-based board for refusing to expound and practice an antislavery position among the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles and Creeks.

The Problem of Developing the Christian Ethic in the Japanese Culture

The hev. George H. Hays is a missionary of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, who is teaching Christian Sociology at Seinan Gakuin, a college on the Island of Kyushu. This paper was recommended for publication in the OCCASIONAL BULLLTIN by professor H. C. Goerner of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville. One of the major purposes of this BULLETINS is the provision of a vehicle for the publication of brief research projects and valuable articles produced in courses in Missions in the various seminaries and missionary training schools in the United States and Canada.–Editor.