Remembering Sixty-Five Years of New England Baptist Ministry and Moving Ahead by God’s Grace

The Baptist Churches of New England, the 388-church fellowship of Christ-followers, commenced sixty-five years ago, on August 17, 1958, when forty people gathered on a Sunday afternoon at a Congregational church in a Greenland, New Hampshire, “to discuss the possibility of beginning a Southern Baptist church in the area,” according to Merwyn Borders, former director of the Green Mountain Baptist Association in Vermont, in his book, The Circle Comes Full: New England Southern Baptists, 1958-1998. On the following Sunday afternoon, the group met again, in Newington New Hampshire and voted to call themselves the “First Southern Baptist Church Mission” in New England.

By August 1960, the church’s membership had grown to 115 and the following January Eugene Trawick of Linton, GA, was invited to serve as their pastor. When membership increased again, to 125, the church was chartered and eventually renamed Screven Memorial Baptist Church (now Seacoast Community Church) to honor William A. Screven (1629-1713), the pioneer Baptist preacher from England who immigrated to nearby Kittery, Maine, but was forced to leave Puritan New England because of religious intolerance. He and others relocated to South Carolina in 1696 and founded the first Baptist congregation in the South, in Charleston.

On November 2, 1962, in Springfield, Massachusetts, Borders wrote, eight constituted churches, and ten church-type missions formally organized as the New England Baptist Association. When a church was started in South Burlington, Vermont, on July 6, 1963, another milestone was reached. Southern Baptists now had churches in all fifty states. In September of the same year, Calvary Baptist Church was chartered in Caribou, Maine, making it the Southern Baptist’s most northern outpost according to Borders.

In 1967, the New England Baptist Association was restructured as the Baptist General Association of New England and, in November 1983, as the Baptist Convention of New England. November 2023 is the fortieth anniversary of BCNE’s beginning in 1983 and the sixth-fifth remembrance of the first meeting of Southern Baptists in New Hampshire. Celebrate God’s blessings for that history while a bright and vibrant future ministry is ahead, by God’s grace.

A Massachusetts native and a New England Baptist since 1970, Dan Nicholas is the BCNE managing editor