Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

oward Hinton, joint Secretary of the Baptist Union, insisted that slave owners could not be members of the Alliance. American delegates, well aware that many evangelicals in the southern states had slaves, disagreed. Hopes for a worldwide Alliance proved unrealisable, and so national branches were formed. In the period 1846-1896 the British Evangelical Alliance had a major influence within the worldwide evangelical network and Baptists such as Oncken wished to foster that evangelical identity.” A year after the founding of the Alliance, the monthly journal of the British Alliance, Evangelical Christendom, reported on the growth of the Baptists in Hamburg, suggesting that like the Hebrews in Egypt, the more they faced opposition, the more they grew.° A number of Lutheran members of the Evangelical Alliance in Germany, however, were unsympathetic to the Baptists. In September 1847, Sir Culling Eardley, a Congregationalist who chaired the London inaugural meetings, warned the British Alliance's Executive Council about this, commenting that many “Lutheran brethren” > Report of the Proceedings of the Conference held at Freemasons’ Hall, London, From August 1% to September 2"4 Inclusive, 1846 (London: Partridge and Oakley, 1847), p. 242. *'N.M. Railton, No North Sea: The Anglo-German Evangelical Network in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. xvi-xviii. > |. Randall and D. Hilborn, One Body in Christ: The History and Significance of the Evangeli- cal Alliance (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2001), chapter 3. ° EC, vol. 1 (September 1847), p. 276. 15 in the region of Bavaria were proving “exclusive in their sentiments”’ The problem of bad relationships between Lutherans and Baptists would continue. Political changes in Germany in 1848 produced legislation that technically removed most of the restrictions on the work of the Baptists, but difficulties persisted.* One German state prohibited a small Baptist community from observing the Lord’s Supper and barred their pastor from home visitation. This prompted the British Alliance to appeal to the German Minister of the Interior, and a degree of liberty was then granted.’ Edward Steane, who was joint Secretary (with Hinton) of the Baptist Union, was the first Honorary Secretary of the British Alliance and was editor of Evangelical Christendom. He was part of a delegation to the German Lutheran Church in 1853 to plead the Baptist cause.'° Steane told a meeting of the British Alliance's Executive Council in 1853 that German Baptists continued to be imprisoned for their convictions and reported that two British Members of Parliament, Arthur Kinnaird and Morton Peto, both well known evangelicals (Peto was a Baptist), had called on the British Foreign Minister, Lord Clarendon, to intervene. Some progress had been made in Prussia, and it was suggested that the openness exhibited by Fred- erick William IV, the King of Prussia, might be pr