Under the influence of Georg Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, modern historians lost their faith in the ability of the individual to effect change or to make decisions that were not manipulated by invisible social pressures. Instead, historians began to describe historical change as the competition of social groups based on class, race, gender, or sexuality.
The group-identity and competition approach to history is most cynical and destructive when applied to the history of religion. Historians who embrace this interpretation ignore that each Christian is engaged in a true relationship with the eternal Judge of the universe. Instead, they argue that people embrace specific religious beliefs in order to benefit themselves socially or to oppress some other group. They rarely stop to consider what these people actually believed and practiced as individuals.
This social approach to history has proven most destructive to the memory of African American Christianity where it has dominated the field from its earliest days. In part, historians were more likely to embrace social interpretations because of the history of slavery and legal exclusion, which led the black church in America to take on unique social and political roles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also, the first significant historical studies of black Christians in America were written after the adoption of Marxist interpretations. Regardless of the reason, most scholarly histories of the black church in America have tended to depict it as an institution for social and political change only. This approach does our brothers and sisters in Christ a great disservice and dishonors their individual relationships with God in communion with the saints.
In this essay, we will examine the life and thinking of one man, who sought to love the Lord his God with all of his heart, soul, mind, and strength. Further, he gave his best to love his neighbors as himself and shepherd them as a faithful minister of the Gospel.
Early Life
In July, 1753, Lemuel Haynes was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, and orphaned five months later when his parents abandoned him in the frontier town of Granville, Massachusetts, likely because they were unmarried and of different skin colors. Though black and white folks occasionally married or bore children together in mid-eighteenth century America, it was rare enough to cause significant social censure. Regardless, his white mother chose to give him over to indentured service on the farm of Deacon Rose, where he was contracted to stay and labor until the age of twenty-one.[1]
Haynes reported that the Roses treated him as one of their own children and faithfully instructed him in the knowledge of the Lord. Each day the family held communal prayer, and, on Saturday evenings, they had a time of extended religious instruction, including the reading of sermons by the likes of Isaac Watts and George Whitefield.[2] He also attended school along with the other Rose children as often as the rhythms of farm life would allow. However, most of his early education was the result of his own reading, taking advantage of the library of a nearby neighbor.[3]
At some point in his late youth or early adulthood, Haynes became convinced of his need of salvation, repented of his sins, and was baptized into a Congregationalist church. After spending time in the Continental Army, he turned to farming but also committed himself to studying theology at nights and early in the mornings. Nine years later, Haynes was ordained and went on to a forty-year career in pastoral ministry, serving as a black minister for majority-white congregations. Of those forty years, he spent thirty at the Congregationalist church in Rutland, Vermont.
Preaching and the Qualifications of the Minister
Born at the height of the First Great Awakening, Haynes’s family was fond of Whitefield and other evangelical preachers. For his own part, Haynes warned against coldness of spirit.[4] His emphasis on “the new birth” and practicing a “holy temper of mind” were quintessential characteristics of the Awakening. Like Whitefield, he decried purely intellectual affirmation of the truths of Scripture that produced cold religion but no new life of piety.
The form of Whitefield’s dramatic preaching style also influenced Haynes. He contended that preachers “awfully betray their trust who deliver their discourses in a cold, formal, and lifeless manner, as though death, judgment and eternity, and the souls of men are things to be trifled with.”[5] Instead, the seriousness of their task should lead them to deliver their sermons with verve and power.
Nor should the preacher mince words. He feared that “vague, equivocal expressions” of the minister serve only “to obscure, the truths of the gospel, by which anything and almost everything may be understood.” The result of such preaching “causes the trumpet to give an uncertain sound and has no tendency to impress or give feeling to the mind.”[6] In this way, Haynes was following the leadership of another of his heroes, Jonathan Edwards, who sought to tell the truth to his congregations with directness and precision of speech so that they might turn from their sins to salvation.
However, Haynes’s emphasis on the new birth, piety, and fervent preaching did not lead him to ignore careful study. Rather, he was convinced that study of God’s Word, church history, and theology were key aspects of the Christian life. His sermons were carefully constructed to explore the full breadth of his text, noting how various aspects of theology related to it and applied to the daily lives of his congregation.
Haynes took sermon construction and delivery so seriously because he saw the ministry as a holy and consuming calling for which the man of God will be held accountable. For this reason, no man should foolishly thrust himself into the work unless he had been called by God.[7]
Yet Haynes looked for no mystical sign of calling. On multiple occasions, he noted that, in the days of the Apostles, some ministers were called by miraculous and extraordinary events, but he was quick to explain, “we are far from believing that this is the present mode by which ordinary ministers are introduced.”[8] Those sign gifts and miracles had passed away, and “in all succeeding ages,” ministers required “some kind of credentials.” Their call from the Holy Ghost must be confirmed by evidence that they were good men of sound judgment and “endowed with ministerial gifts and graces.” Only such men could be “recommended and set apart by those in office and ordained by the laying on of hands.”[9]
Once called, ministers were to develop their skills of study, prayer, sermon construction and delivery, and loving personal leadership, while cultivating prudence, patience, courage, and fortitude. If they stewarded well these gifts from the Lord, they could anticipate that He would direct “outward circumstances, by which a door [would be] opened for their usefulness and improvement.”[10]
In one sermon, given at the ordination of a young man, Haynes made the necessity of training and education explicit: “Natural endowments, embellished with good education, are qualifications so obviously requisite in an evangelical minister that it is needless for us to insist upon them at this time.”[11] He found it scandalous that so few ministers actually pursued their work with this sort of diligence. They had given themselves over to entertaining their audiences with “vain speculations or vain philosophy,” instead of “speak[ing] forth the words of truth in soberness, modesty, and Christian decency.” Like actors, they put on characters to please the crowds and cultivate celebrity.[12]
For Haynes, it was essential for the minister always to keep in mind that the “heart-searching God who requires truth in the inward part . . . will shortly call him to account.”[13] More, God will “proclaim” the motives of our hearts “before the assembled universe. Oh, solemn and affecting thought!” The labor before the minister requires great “searching of heart . . . and self-abasement. . . . Under a sense of your weakness, go to Him for help. . . . do all in the name and strength of the Lord Jesus.[14] Haynes held no illusions about the nature of his calling. The faithful minister would train his mind, heart, and body to serve his congregation with excellence, knowing that the culmination of his labor would be exposed for all to see on judgment day.
Conclusion
Lemuel Haynes’s ministry was long and fruitful. After three decades in Vermont, he spent the last eleven years of his life ministering in Granville, New York. At the age of eighty, an infection in his foot led him to lay down his burdens and, for a time, his body. From his life and ministry we are reminded that history is not fundamentally about groups but individuals. Individual men and women—not groups—choose to accept or reject the call of the Holy Spirit to come to the fountain of living water. More, our stewardship as ministers (and lay-leaders) will be measured one day before the judgment seat of Christ. May we not be found wanting when the day comes.
[1] Timothy Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, A.M., for Many Years Pastor of A Church in Rutland, Vt., and Late in Granville, New-York (New York: Harper, 1837), 28–30.
[2] Ibid., 48.
[3] Ibid., 36, 38.
[4] Lemuel Haynes, “Sermon on John 3:3,” quoted in Cooley, 57.
[5] Lemuel Haynes, “The Sufferings, Support, and Reward of Faithful Ministers, Illustrated (1820),” in Thabiti M. Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 50. Thank you to Matthew Pinson for introducing this book to me.
[6] Lemuel Haynes, “Important Concerns of Ministers and the People of Their Charge (1797),” in Anyabwile, 39–40.
[7] Haynes, “The Sufferings, Support, and Reward of Faithful Ministers, Illustrated (1820),” 65.
[8] Haynes, “The Character and Work of a Spiritual Watchman Described (1792),” in Anyabwile, 27.
[9] Haynes, “The Sufferings, Support, and Reward of Faithful Ministers, Illustrated (1820),” 65.
[10] Ibid., 49.
[11] Haynes, “The Character and Work of a Spiritual Watchman Described (1792),” 27.
[12] Ibid., 32, 33.
[13] Ibid., 31.
[14] Ibid., 34.
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