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Baptists have no single historical figure like a Luther or Wesley as founder and leader. But since its beginnings men and women of faith and courage have been instrumental in developing its theology and extending its witness. A selection of examples is presented.

Educated at Cambridge, he took Anglican orders, becoming a Puritan and then a Separatist. He emigrated to Massachusetts in 1638, but returned to London in 1641. By 1645 he had become a Baptist and led a church in London the rest of his life. Interested in education, he published Hebrew, Greek and Latin grammars, and also an exposition of the Book of Revelation. He had Fifth Monarchist sympathies, which brought him into tension with the state, leading to several spells in prison. Differences in political understanding did not prevent Knollys and William Kiffin working together as leaders among the Particular Baptists.

A tailor by trade, Keach became pastor of the General Baptist church at Winslow, Buckinghamshire. He published a primer for children’s education, and was tried in 1664 for its attitude to the Book of Common Prayer. Keach was pilloried and all copies of the book were burned. He rewrote his Child’s Delight, and it ran to several editions.
Keach moved to London in 1668, and became a Particular Baptist, and Pastor at Horslydown, Southwark—the church which many years later was to call the young Charles H. Spurgeon to London.
Keach was an enthusiastic advocate of congregational hymn-singing. Horslydown was probably the first church in England to sing hymns, as opposed to psalms and paraphrases. Keach’s hymnbook, published in 1691, provoked heated debate in the 1692 Assembly of Particular Baptists.

Dr. Gill was the foremost theologian of the first two centuries of Baptist history. He was the learned pastor of a London church for 50 years. A high Calvinist, his Body of Divinity was “considered as almost an essential part of the library not only of ministers, but of private Christians of the Baptist denomination who could afford to purchase them. They were read almost exclusively to the neglect of other works of divinity.”
His works did not appeal in the same way to the next generation of Particular Baptists, who were keenly evangelical. Robert Hall was to describe Gill’s works as “a continent of mud,” so much had theological outlook changed.

“Tall, stout and muscular, a famous wrestler in his youth,” this self-taught farmer’s son became a champion for Christ, “the most creatively useful theologian” of the Particular Baptists. His book The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, 1785, restated Calvinist theology for Baptists influenced by the Evangelical Revival. His Doctorate of Divinity was bestowed by Brown University, Rhode Island.
Fuller was minister at Kettering, where the Baptist Missionary Society was formed in 1792, with Fuller as the energetic first Secretary.

Dan Taylor worked in a Yorkshire mine from boyhood. He was converted by the Methodists, and began to study Greek, Latin and Hebrew in his spare time. In 1762 he left the mines to become the minister of a local church in Lancashire, which left the Methodists and became Baptist, forming links with the surviving Arminian Baptists which led to the New Connexion of General Baptists in 1770. Taylor remained a leader of the New Connexion, moving to a London church in 1785. He believed in education for the ministry, and founded the Midlands Baptist College in 1797. His Methodist background and its emphasis on revivalism equipped him to be a vital force for evangelism.

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