Eleazer McLaughlin Service to God through Church and Community

 

Eleazer McLaughlin 

                                                                                        

                                                    Mamby Park Baptist Church

 

Eleazer Ezekiel McLaughlin was born in Salter’s Hill, St James, in June 1888. He grew up in Montego Bay where he attended school and became a member of Burchell Baptist Church, where he accepted the invitation to follow Christ. Burchell’s pastor, Rev H. L. Webster, helped to influence him to enter the Christian ministry.

After training for ministry at Calabar Theological College, he offered many years of devoted service as a minister, starting at Mt Charles Baptist Chrich in St Andrew. In 1928, he succeeded Rev David Davis as pastor of the Mamby Park and Ebenezer Baptist Church at Lawrence Tavern. He commenced serving at Barbican Baptist Church in August, 1926.

Most of his years in the ministry were spent at the six churches in what became a large circuit of churches: Mt. Charles, Mamby Park, Ebenezer in Lawrence Tavern, Union Hill, Barbican, and Cypress Hall. The circuit emerged over time as the pastor made himself available for still more sacrificial labours over a wide geographical space.

Within the Jamaica Baptist Union (JBU), McLaughlin was for several years a county councillor and an examiner of the JBU Sunday School Society. In the wider church community, he was once president of the Jamaica Christian Endeavour Union and twice Chairman of the Jamaica Christian Endeavour Union Good Citizenship Society. He was also president of the Jamaica Permanent Development Convention.

McLaughlin was a devoted community builder. He served for seven years as a trustee of the Wolmer' s High School and for eighteen years as a member of the St. Andrew School Board and manager of the Government School. He was for several years a member of the British Empire Club and the British Empire Permanent Exhibition. He was also president of the Jamaica Permanent Development Convention.

McLaughlin was a Councillor in the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC) for more than 16 years, starting in 1923. For seven years, he was alderman. He worked alongside such famous Jamaicans as KSAC mayor Dr Oswald Anderson, who was one of the founders of the JBU Brotherhood. McLaughlin was once captain of the St Andrew Cricket Club, which he formed.

On two occasions – McLaughlin’s 16^th and 21^st years of service in his circuit – the churches celebrated their pastor’s ministry. Church representatives made speeches that offer an impression of the pastor’s service. This is what they said:

 

As our spiritual leader, you have given us of your best always. Your messages have always been very edifying, stimulating and encouraging.

 

In every department of the Church's activities, you have taken a keen personal interest and as a result of your wise and experienced leadership, you have surmounted many difficulties and accomplished remarkable achievements in spite of fearful odds.

 

By your zealous conscientious labours, many souls have been brought to the Church and won to God. The poor have been befriended and helped and as a champion of the people' s right, you stand second to none.

 

We cannot forget that, during your ministry, our buildings have been remodelled, enlarged and renovated. The spirit and tone of our worship have been very inspiring and uplifting.

 

Under your personal supervision, the standard of the efficiency of our choir and Sunday School has been greatly improved.

 

In every department of the Church's activities, you have taken a keen personal interest and as a result of your wise and experienced leadership, you have surmounted many difficulties and accomplished remarkable achievements in spite of fearful odds.

 

In every department of the Church's activities, you have taken a keen personal interest and as a result of your wise and experienced leadership, you have surmounted many difficulties and accomplished remarkable achievements in spite of fearful odds.

The described their minister as “pastor, teacher and builder, musician, educationalist, politician, legal adviser, and sportsman” and thanked him for his “cheerful words, sweet and tender voice and sympathetic action” when they faced challenges and said that their pastor had “never failed to inspire hope and comfort, courage and joy.” Through his “edifying and soul searching sermons and Bible addresses,” the churches said, “many souls [had[ been saved and brought to the Master’s kingdom.” His “sympathy for the poor, the sick and the distressed” would win for him “a gem in [his] expected crown.”

The churches also praised McLaughlin’s contribution as a politician and public figure, whom they respected on several counts: The referred to his:

 

sense of altruistic public service, your progressive political and social ideas, your extraordinary foresight, sagacity, and courage have not failed to impress us. Your interest in Agriculture, Public Health, Education, Markets, Water Supply, etc., etc., is well known to us. The implementation of a Hookworm and Yaws Campaign in Rural St. Andrew is the result of your effort…. Two new Government schools—Lawrence Tavern and Stony Hill are sufficient evidences of your work and worth.

 

As a member of the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation, McLaughlin was an advocate for rights of Black Jamaican. In 1933, when the governor refused to appoint the African Jamaican C. A.  Adams for the post of assistant water engineer in the corporate area on the grounds that he lacked experience, McLaughlin was among the few who firmly opposed this decision as being based on colour prejudice. McLaughlin advocated for the human rights of Black Jamaicans to be respected.

 

Mr. C. S. Codling, in paying tribute to McLaughlin, described the honouree as “a busybody” for communal good. He said he was in agree­ment with McLaughlin that religion embraced life in its entirety. Codling said that Laughlin must have, from his inception, been cherishing broad sympathies for his people, and innately desired to do his best for the community.”

 

To Rev F. Cowell Lloyd, pastor of East Queen Street Baptist Church, McLaughlin was “a champion willing to fight any battle his heart called him to and not afraid to be in the minority.” In the Jamaica Baptist Reporter, another of his colleagues described McLaughlin  as “a hard worker with an indomitable courage and persevering spirit. [He was] “in every sense a public-spirited man and a patriot … [who is] keen on social service work and deeply interested in education and in everything that tends to the uplift of his people and the making of a better Jamaica.”

Edwin Palmer Serving until your Work is Done

                                                                                  Edwin Palmer

Five years after emancipation in Jamaica, Edwin Palmer, a member of the Baptist Church in Spanish Town, commenced intra-mural preparation for the pastoral ministry at Calabar Theological College in Trelawny. Graduating in 1847, after four years at Calabar, Palmer, received and accepted a call to serve as pastor of the Stacey Ville (now Staceyville) Baptist Church in Clarendon. Palmer spent five years at Staceyville after which he assumed the pastorate of the Hanover Street Baptist Church in Kingston, where he served from 1852 until his death in 1892.

While at Hanover Street, Palmer also gave pastoral oversight to Yallahs Baptist Church in the parish of St. David, neighbouring parish of St Thomas in the East. The death of Robert Graham, the pastor of the Yallahs Baptist Church, led to Palmer assuming pastoral oversight of the Baptist church in Yallahs. Published accounts of an early morning baptismal service that Palmer conducted at Yallahs on Christmas Day, 1870, and at Hanover Street on Christmas Sunday, 1870, reflect the evangelistic zeal and pastoral commitment that Palmer displayed. The baptisms took place in the sea at both locations, the one at Hanover Street taking place in the nearby seaside community of Rae Town. Each of the baptismal services started at 6:00 a.m. and was preceded by a corporate prayer meeting beginning at 4:00 o’clock.   

Palmer met and married Olivia Johnson, the daughter of Rev. Francis Johnson, an early graduate of Calabar College who was pastor of the Baptist Church at Clarksonville in southern St Ann. Edwin and Olivia Palmer had a long and effective partnership in the Gospel ministry at Hanover Street Church. Olivia’s brother, Amos Johnson, became a minister of religion and was a pastor in Missouri, USA. Amos assisted his brother-in-law at Hanover Street during Edwin Palmer’s eight months of ill health preceding his death.

A man with a strong ecumenical commitment, Palmer, a Black Jamaican, collaborated with the mostly British pastors, such as W. J. Williams (Methodist Connexion), W. Clarke Murray (Presbyterian), C. A. Wookey (Congregationalist), Enos Nuttall (Anglican), James Roberts (United Methodist Free Church); and J. Seed Roberts of East Queen Street Baptist Church and Calabar, in united witness in the city of Kingston starting in 1878. These men were members of the Kingston Evangelical Union, which influenced the formation of the Union of Evangelical Churches in Jamaica in 1895.

Palmer had a strong commitment to God’s mission through the Church. It is not surprising that, when Joseph Jackson Fuller, his former fellow member of the Spanish Town (now Phillippo) Baptist Church, was in the last week of his furlough in Jamaica, Palmer arranged a Farewell Service for this veteran missionary to Africa. This was providentially Fuller’s final opportunity to address his fellow Jamaicans at a service in his home country. The people gathered in the Hanover Street Baptist Church on September 24, 1884 heard the Farewell Address as Fuller prepared to resume his ministry in Cameroon.

Edwin Palmer’s name appears in several studies in Jamaican history because of the injustice meted out to him in the aftermath of the Morant Bay uprising in 1865. Jamaica’s Governor Edward John Eyre, a former sheep farmer in Australia, whose British father had been a vicar in the Church of England, initiated a cruel and unjust response to the 1865 uprising when members of the Jamaican peasantry pushed back against racial supremacy, desperate economic hardship and the absence of concern for the poor by the governing authorities. Everyone associated with persons who were implicated fairly or unfairly in the uprising was targeted for violent treatment, including physical personal attack, swift execution, their houses being burnt down, etc. Although Palmer lived in Kingston, perhaps partly because his charge included the Yallahs church in the civil parish neighbouring St Thomas in the East where the Morant Bay uprising took place, Eyre marked him out for inclusion in his collective punishment scheme. Perhaps, additional reasons existed for Palmer being caught up in the collective punishment meted out to Black people who had even the most tenuous link with the justice seekers who participated in the Morant Bay uprising.

Early in the year of the uprising, Kingston’s mayor, Edward Jordan had called a meeting on May 3, 1865 to seek people’s opinions on the state of Jamaica and Palmer was one of the speakers at the meeting. An account of what transpired at the meeting had been sent to Edward Cardwell, British Secretary of State for the colonies and to Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) Secretary, Edward Underhill. Undoubtedly, Eyre had knowledge of the meeting that painted a picture of the devastating social and economic situation in Jamaica, where Black people who were poor were suffering hopelessly.  However, Palmer had had nothing to do with the Morant Bay uprising. That he was a Jamaica Baptist of African descent who had compassion on the suffering poor in Jamaica put Palmer in harm’s way.

On October 20, 1865, almost six months after the Morant Bay riots, the authorities had Palmer arrested without a warrant, while insinuating that he had used seditious language prior to the riots and might have helped incite those involved in the riot itself. Palmer’s hands were tied behind his back and he was marched through the streets of Kingston under guard of a detachment of armed soldiers. Then, Palmer’s persecutors cut his hair, confiscated his boots and locked him in a dark cell in confinement. Afterward, Palmer was handcuffed, taken to a wharf in Kingston and handed over to the cruel master of a boat who placed him in irons and took him to Morant Bay, where martial law was in force.

Palmer arrived in Morant Bay on November 2 to the taunts of the marines. He was shown the gallows, ropes, and other instruments of torture and was advised of a plan to execute him at seven o'clock the following morning.  He was forced to watch two fellow prisoners lashed to a post and severely beaten. Palmer’s trauma knew no bounds. After thirty-four days of imprisonment and ill-treatment, he was released and ordered to go to Kingston for trial before a Special Commission. He was charged, found guilty of using seditious language and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment. An innocent man was sent to prison and, in the end, Governor Eyre, who had described Baptist ministers in Jamaica as “political demagogues and dangerous agitators,” was recalled to England and excluded from further colonial service. He died at Devon in England 1901.

Edwin Palmer, who outlived Edward Eyre, exemplifies the suffering a servant of God may have to face. However, his life was also full of opportunities to share the Gospel of salvation and to help people find deliverance from slavery to sin. It was during his pastorate at Hanover Street that members of his church started a Christian mission that later received the name Tarrant Baptist Church.

After some four decades of service in the Hanover Street community, Palmer’s health began to fail. After prolonged illness, he breathed his last at 1:00 a.m. on January 18, 1892. Customary rites at the Hanover Street Mission House, which was at the corner of Hanover and Barry Streets in Kingston, preceded his funeral at what people referred to as “Palmer’s church” where Rev. Windsor Burke, pastor of the Lucea Baptist Church officiated. Palmer’s final resting place was the May Pen Cemetery in Kingston.

Olivia Palmer remained a widow for some 13 years that ended in an unexpected way. On Sunday, September 10, 1905, she was in her usual seat in the Hanover Street Baptist Church at the 11:00 o’clock service. The preacher at the service on that fateful day was Adjutant William Raglan of the Salvation Army. Earlier, on that fateful September day, Mrs. Palmer had attended the 6:00 a.m. prayer meeting, arranged as part of the evangelistic emphasis the Hanover Street Church was observing during that week. Suddenly, at about 11:20 a.m., when a prayer was being offered, Mrs. Palmer fell from her seat and lost consciousness. Shortly after this, a Dr. Henderson pronounced her dead. Her death was apparently the result of the cardiac troubles that had afflicted her for some time. Rev. E. A. Bell, Edwin Palmer’s successor at Hanover Street, preached the sermon at Mrs. Palmer’s funeral.

Incidentally, after ending his association with the Salvation Army, William Raglan served with the JBU, working as pastor of the Arcadia Baptist Circuit in St Thomas in the East. Soon, however, he combined with Mary Louise Coore, formerly of the Brown’s Town Baptist Church, to form the City Mission Church in Jamaica.

To return to Edwin Palmer, five years after his death, the members of the Hanover Street Baptist Church started a drive to raise sufficient funds “to erect a tablet in the chapel in memory of their late sainted pastor, Rev. Edwin Palmer.” Unfortunately, if the tablet was erected, it no longer adorns any of the walls of the Hanover Street Church. It would be fitting to have it complementing those that were installed in honour of Joshua Tinson and E. A. Bell. Yet, in Palmer’s ministry God answered the prayer included in the tablet placed in honour of  Tinson. It states, “This monument is erected … with the sincere prayer that the ardour of [Tinson’s] zeal in the cause of Christ may live in his successors when this marble shall have crumbled into dust.”

Robert Graham

A Forgotten Leader

                                              Old Yallahs Baptist Church Building

Robert Graham was a member of George Liele’s church on what was Windward Road. During Liele’s visit to England, English missionary Joshua Tinson served as interim pastor at Liele’s church. When Liele returned to Jamaica, Graham was one of the members who joined Tinson to form what is now called Hanover Street Baptist Church, where he was made a deacon.

Tinson had much respect for Graham, whom he regarded as a man of much ability and enterprise. Tinson desired to teach him English grammar and pronunciation, but Graham would have none of it. Graham claimed that Tinson’s method of speaking was appropriate for communicating in England and he insisted that his way of pronouncing words was more appropriate and effective when communicating with Jamaicans.

In 1845, Graham was ordained to the ministry and he went to work among the Baptists in Yallahs, where Tinson had been offering pastoral assistance. Graham relieved Tinson of the responsibility for the pastorate at Yallahs Baptist Church.

In 1855, Graham gathered several persons who had just left the East Queen Street Baptist Church and, for a brief period, he served as their pastor. He was the person who administered the baptism of the famous orator, Samuel Ringgold Ward, an African American from the province of Maryland, who had escaped from enslavement and became a labour leader who campaigned for abolition of enslavement in America. Drawing on the success of his book, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: his anti-slavery labours in the United States, Canada and England, Ward retired in Jamaica, where he died in 1866, after serving as a Congregational minister and farmer for eleven months. The great Frederick Douglass once said of Ward, “As an orator and thinker, he was vastly superior to any of us” and “the splendors of his intellect went directly to the glory of race.”

An influential person, Graham was one of the directors of the Jamaica Mutual Life Assurance Society. He maintained a connection with Coke’s Chapel, i.e. Coke Methodist Church. He also enjoyed a good relationship with the wife of the Honourable Robert Osborne (1800 - 1878). Osborne was the son of a white Jamaican whose father was Scottish and whose mother was Black. Osborn’s father was a member of the House of Assembly, and in 1798, speaker of the House.  Osborn himself was co-editor with Edward Jordan, of The Watchmen newspaper and the co-editors used this medium to campaign for equal rights for free coloured people in Jamaica. After the emancipation of enslaved people in Jamaica, Osborne and Jordan changed the name of their newspaper to The Morning Journal. In later years, Osborn, like his father before him, served in the House of Assembly and famously predicted that “in the years to come, which none of us can live to see, the government of the colonies will fall into the hands of the blacks.”

Osborne’s co-editor of The Morning Journal, Edward Jordan, was born to parents of different backgrounds. His father was a white man from Barbados and his mother a black woman named Grace from Jamaica. Jordan was arrested and spent seven months in jail for advocating for the protestors who were being treated with brutality after the Baptist War in 1831.  Eventually, the courts freed Jordan of the charge of sedition.

In 1859, Graham passed away and Rev Edwin Palmer of the Hanover Street Baptist Church, assumed pastoral leadership at the Yallahs Baptist Church. If only more was popularly known about Graham’s ministry

Francis Johnson: Another Trailblazer

 

Francis Johnson

Another Trailblazer

 

Clarksonville Baptist Church

An excerpt of the report that Joshua Tinson, president of Calabar Theological Institution, sent to the BMS Committee in 1848, gives us a hint of who Francis Johnson was and the sort of students among whom he was prepared for the ministry. Tinson wrote:

“During the past year, one of the students, Mr. Francis Johnson, received and accepted a unanimous invitation to settle over a church at Clarkson Ville, in the parish of St. Ann. Mr. Johnson was ordained in January last, at Brown’s Town, where he was formerly a member. And it is with much pleasure the Committee refer to the fact, that the deputation from the Baptist Missionary Society in England, the Rev. Messrs. Angus and Birrell, were present and took part in the service on that occasion. The satisfaction felt by our friends may be seen in the opinion expressed after their return, at the annual meeting of the Society, held in London, on the 29th of April last. The number of students now in the Institution is seven. They are men of sterling piety and fair promise, and their conduct during the past year has been characterized by educational diligence and domestic harmony” (Missionary Herald, 1848, p. 115].

 

Francis Johnson from Brown’s Town, St Ann, was one of the first Jamaica-born Black men to be  a candidate for the Baptist ministry. He had become a Christian under the ministry of John Clark and, in 1844, he was admitted to Calabar College for ministerial formation. He belonged to the second batch of men to study at the new Calabar Institution in Rio Bueno, Trelawny, under the leadership of Joshua Tinson.

 

After spending three years at Calabar, Johnson was ordained to the Christian ministry at his home church and assumed responsibility for the pastorate at Clarksonville and Mt. Zion churches, both of which had John Clark as their founding pastor in 1839.

 

Clarksonville was a Free Village established by John Clark, former pastor of Brown’s Town Baptist Church. Clark organized the community called Castleton into a “Free Village,” and named it in honour of anti-slave trade champion, Thomas Clarkson. Clark established a Baptist church in the community in 1838. For perspectives on the Baptist Church in Clarksonville in southern St. Ann, watch the following Youtube Videos:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaSmnAi1_Wg and www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7JkzRwqxFo.

 

Johnson started his ministry in Clarksonville in 1847. On September 19, 1883, Johnson and Mary Jane Richards were joined in holy matrimony at Gordon Castle, Easington, in St Thomas. Among the children of the union were a daughter, Olivia and a son, Amos. Olivia, became a pastor’s wife. She was united in marriage with Edwin Palmer, who served first at Staceyville Baptist Church and then at Hanover Street Baptist Church. Amos became a pastor and served in Missouri, USA. Amos assisted his brother-in-law at Hanover Street during Edwin Palmer’s eight months of ill health preceding Palmer’s death.

 

From time to time, Johnson had distinguished persons visiting him in Clarksonville. In 1862, after his visit to Johnson at Clarksonville, BMS Secretary Edward Underhill, who was on a tour of Jamaica, wrote: “Passing through Bethany, I first reached the station of the Rev F. Johnson at Clarksonville. The whole route was through settlements of enfranchised population, amid pimento walks, coffee plantations, and provision grounds. Neat houses and cottages peeped out among the dark foliage of mango trees or the broad-leafed banana, in every direction, the abodes of a prosperous and contented peasantry. Leaving Clarksonville, under the guidance of its excellent native minister, I continued my journey to Mount Zion, where a meeting of the people awaited me.”

 

Johnson, whom Underhill described as “an excellent native minister” spent his years of ministry in southern St Ann and offered a steady hand of leadership to the communities he served. In 1850, he started the Baptist Church at John’s Hall in Clarendon.

 

After his pastoral ministry came to an end, Johnson went to live in Kingston and, when he died in 1887, Edwin Palmer, his son-in-law, officiated at his funeral at Hanover Street Baptist Church.