The early evolution of the Baptist Church in Jamaica

IN 1789, THE African-American Baptist George Liele (Lisle) acquired three acres of land at the corner of Elletson Road and Windward Road/Victoria Avenue in Kingston. In 1791, he built and started the first church in Jamaica to be led by a black man, and by extension, the first Baptist Church in Jamaica.

The establishment of his church was a great achievement, but it also sent him to jail for three and a half years. He could not repay the money he had borrowed to build it. It was his friends who helped to surmount this financial embarrassment. He was also jailed for sedition as the plantocracy was suspicious of the doctrine of freedom, which he preached. The opposition to Liele’s work was grounded on fear and nothing but.

“But imprisonment, opposition, and persecution did not stop him,” religion historian Lloyd A. Cooke says in his 2013 book, The Story of the Jamaican Missions. By 1793, Liele had established a line of preaching stations stretching from Spanish Town across the mountains to the parishes of St Thomas-In-The-Vale, St George, and St Anne.

Yet there was dissent from his flock, who he referred to as “the poor Ethiopian Baptists of Jamaica”, and it was fomented while Leile was in jail. Principal among the dissenters was a creole man, Thomas Wigle, one of Leile’s deacons. Personal and legal tension drove a big wedge between them. The East Queen Street Baptist Church in Kingston seemed to have grown out of an original church, St John’s Chapel, founded August 28, 1802, at James Street, from which it was moved to East Queen Street.

A sign in the present churchyard said East Queen Street Baptist was founded in 1816, but Lloyd A. Cooke says that “Leonard Tucker gives the date of the opening of East Queen Street Baptist Church as January 1822”. After it was destroyed in 1907, it was restored between 1908 and 1909. Back to 1826, it is said that Joshua Tinson, an early British missionary, established the Hanover Street Baptist Church.

While Leile was planting other churches so, too, were Swigle and some of Leile’s former members. But the great majority stuck with Leile, establishing churches all over the island. George Gibb and his assistant, James Alexander Clark, had done much in Spanish Town. George Lewis and Thomas Laing had worked in the Nassau mountains in the parish of Manchester. Laing served for a short time at East Queen Street as well.

A Pastor Kellick, associated with the British Baptists Mission, served in Morant Bay. A Harry Brown did Baptist work in Port Antonio, which he subsequently handed over to a Pastor Ward, an American Baptist who later took up the mission for Africa and at one time also served in Falmouth with the British Baptist as an associate of William Knibb.

In Kingston, there were Joseph Silva; a Mr Robinson, who was an enslaved Ibo; and Thomas Davis, who worked in Kingston and Spanish Town. There were also William Duggan and Peter Lovemore, who were associated with Liele and Swigle, and a Mr Mamby. Thomas McKean witnessed in Saint Thomas-In-The-East and a Preacher Cunningham worked extensively in Great Valley, Hanover. At Above Rocks in St Catherine, John Duff had the distinction of being the only Baptist or black preacher to be approved by the Jamaica Assembly to be given a state grant to do his work.

Chief among Leile’s associates was George Gibb, a former enslaved African from the southern United States who came to Jamaica in 1784, and who was one of Liele’s foundation members. He was a teacher at Leile’s Windward Road Chapel but was sent to evangelise on the north coast. Much work was done in St Thomas and St Mary, where he would establish churches on lands he had bought. He was also very active in St Ann, where he founded a church in Ocho Rios and Russell Hall.

Gibb was severely persecuted and jailed for being caught teaching enslaved people. But that did not break his resolve. Cooke quoted Missionary F. Russell, writing about Gibb: “His strategy was to begin with the ‘free people of colour’ then go to the slaves. As a result, he was put in prison in Spanish Town, and on several estates he was placed in the stocks or incarcerated. He practised the older form of baptism, triune immersion, and Jericho Baptist (St Catherine) was most certainly built upon his work.”

Cooke also says: “Liele’s church was orthodox in doctrine and practices. He was clearly not to be lumped with the native Baptists as some writers have sought to classify him. Gayle feels that though he may have given impetus to their preaching and establishing of churches, they were unorthodox or even unbiblical in many of their beliefs. The native Baptists attempted to mix elements of Christianity with African religious practices. He also sees a difference in their approaches to the social problems of the day.”

Next time, the enthralling Moses Baker story.chur