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Musings and Memories

Journey to faith, freedom

Doug Dezotell
Posted 2/26/22

Today is the last Saturday in February 2022, and in honor of Black History Month I have been writing about some of the Unsung Black Heroes of the Christian Faith.  Today I want to honor a man of God by the name of David George.  

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Musings and Memories

Journey to faith, freedom

Posted

Today is the last Saturday in February 2022, and in honor of Black History Month I have been writing about some of the Unsung Black Heroes of the Christian Faith.  

Today I want to honor a man of God by the name of David George.  

David was an 18th century runaway slave who was raised in the southern British colonies. He was born somewhere around 1740, a second-generation slave in the colony of Virginia. About the age of 19, David was forced to watch as his mother was whipped by their slave-owner, and she was left to die. Shortly thereafter he ran away and headed south towards Georgia. For the next 10 years David lived on the run, hiding out in the wilderness areas of Georgia. Eventually he was caught and then sold or traded several times until he finally ended up on a plantation in Silver Bluff, South Carolina. 

 In what he later recalled as “a miraculous and divinely ordained reunion,” David’s childhood friend from Virginia, George Liele, a freedman and Christian minister, passed through David’s town on a preaching tour. Rev. Liele (whom I wrote about last week) shared Jesus’ words with David from Matthew 11:28, “Come unto Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  

As he listened to his friend, David admitted that he was “weary and heavy laden,” and he prayed with Rev. Liele and received the rest given to him by Jesus Christ. David later said that during that time he was troubled and tormented by the conviction of sin in his life.  

“I saw myself as a mass of sin,” he said, “but at last, in prayer to God, I began to think that He would deliver me, but I didn’t know how.” Then his friend showed up and introduced him to Jesus Christ.  

It was somewhere between 1773 and 1775, that David George and his wife, and six other slaves at Silver Bluff were baptized and together they formed the first all-black Baptist church in North America. David and his wife taught themselves to read, and David became the first official pastor of their church which had grown to 30 baptized members.  

About that time, the Revolutionary War was moving into their area of South Carolina, and George’s master, a British army sympathizer, fled and left all his slaves behind. The British promised freedom to any slaves who would be loyal to the King of England. David and his wife and most of his church members pledged their loyalty to Britain and moved south to Savannah, Georgia, where they endured three years of war, sickness and starvation.  

David and his congregation found themselves on the losing side of the war, but the British promised the slaves freedom and land in Nova Scotia, Canada, so David and his folks boarded a ship with other black Loyalists and set sail in November of 1782. Much to their dismay, Nova Scotia turned out to be less than the “promised land” they were hoping for.  

Canada provided them with a harsh winter, lack of housing, and communities in total chaos because of all the British Loyalist refugees from America. But David began holding outdoor church service and preached the Gospel.  

He wrote, “I was so overjoyed with having an opportunity once more of preaching the word of God, that after I had given out the hymn, I could not speak for the tears.”  

By 1783, he had formed the first Baptist church in Canada. Over the next six months, the church attendance grew and multiplied, and even white folks joined David’s church in Shelburne, Nova Scotia.  

But, when David baptized a white couple, the outdoor baptismal service caused some racial turmoil. People in that area were not used to baptism by immersion, and on top of that to have a black man baptize white people was considered outrageous. So, persecution increased against David’s congregation, and his home was destroyed, and his church nearly burnt to the ground.  

Through it all, the Rev. David George became famous, and he began going on missionary tours across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Sometimes David would travel by boat, but he usually traveled on foot, and it was said that at one time David walked 80 miles to baptize less than a dozen new believers.  

On one of the times that his crew was traveling by boat on a missionary journey, their boat was blown off course in a winter storm and David’s legs were seriously frostbitten up to his knees. It took David several months to recover and be able to walk again, so some of his men made a wooden sled so he could be pulled to church and continue to preach.  

Racial persecution continued to grow against all the free black people in that part of Canada. Because of the racial trouble, David and his wife and some of their church members partnered with Lt. John Clarkson of the Sierra Leone Company. Clarkson was a part of this British association of abolitionists, philanthropists, and businessmen, who recruited free black people to return to West Africa and resettle.  

So, on January 15, 1792, David and his crew, and 15 ships carrying 1,196 black people set sail for Sierra Leone. True to his calling from God, even on the rough crossing back to Africa, David George led more people to the Lord. When the ships arrived in West Africa on March 7, 1792, the people named their new settlement Freetown.  

Some of these settlers were people who had been born in that same region of Sierra Leone and had been forced into slavery and sold in the American Colonies. One of the freed ladies was lovingly reunited with her mother; and one of the gentlemen met the man who had sold him into slavery. He humbled himself and gave that man a gift for having been the means of his conversion to Christianity in America.  

David and his crew soon built a church building, and he again became an active evangelist, and in the first few weeks in their new settlement, David baptized five new believers in the Sierra Leone River. He was the first Baptist pastor in Africa and had founded the first Baptist Church in Africa.  

David George was a wonderful example of a Christian man who faced the most difficult of trials without ever wavering in his faith. It is said of him that in Freetown, “George combined the roles of preacher, community leader, official representative with the British authorities, humanitarian, campaigner against the slave trade, and lightning rod for missionary awakening among Baptists in England, where he visited in 1793.”  

I want to honor the memory of this amazing man of faith, David George.