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| Sturge Town Baptist Church |
The contribution of William A. Hall as a minister of the Gospel and a Jamaican missionary to Africa is not well known or appropriately celebrated by Jamaica Baptists. Part of the reason for this is that Hall’s wife – Elizabeth Garland Hall – was such a gifted person that she overshadowed her husband. Mrs. Hall, who played a vital role in the early years of the Jamaica Baptist Women’s Federation, came to be highly regarded by Baptist women in Jamaica as Mama Hall. The women have celebrated her, without usually acknowledging the contribution of her husband, with whom she served on mission in Congo, Africa, prior to coming to live in Jamaica.
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| William & Elizabeth Hall |
While a student in Richmond, William Hall was interviewed by H. Gratton Guinness, the Irish evangelical whose British missionary organization, the Regions Beyond Missionary Union, had commenced work in the Belgian Congo in 1888, under the name, the Congo Balolo Mission. This mission to Congo was preceded by the Livingston Inland Mission, which started operations in the 1870s, but the mission faced financial difficulties and its principals wished to hand over the work to a missionary organization that it approved.
In 1814, Baptists in America had established the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions, popularly known as the Triennial Convention. This Convention was the first unified national missionary organization formed by Baptists in the United States. To manage its work, the Convention set up a committee called the Baptist Board for Foreign Missions. In 1846, the name of this body was changed to American Baptist Missionary Union (ABMU).
In 1888, Henry Grattan Guinness turned over the Congo Balolo Mission to the ABMU. In that same year, after Hall’s ordination in West Virginia on September 14, ABMU commissioned Hall as missionary to the Belgian Congo.[1] He is the first person from the West Virginia Baptist Convention and evidently the first Black man to be sent on mission by ABMU. The Missionary Union did not sponsor another Black man as a foreign missionary until the 1980s.[2]
During his first years in Congo, Hall was attached to the Palabala station. He worked in partnership with Rev. Joseph Clarke and wife, Rev J. C. Hyde, Miss L. C. Fleming, Miss N. A. Gordon, and Mr Charles Markham and wife.[3]
By 1892, Hall had been transferred to the Matadi sphere and in his report to his sponsors, he stated:
The past year has, on the whole, been very encouraging. Our transport work, in which I am chiefly engaged, has been very successful…. During the year, I have received and forwarded to the other stations about 4,440 loads…. Having been alone during the year, and having so much to do, both in transport and building, I have not been able to do much by way of evangelizing, but io had services daily with the boys that are here with me and on Sundays, I had services with the boys and others who are working on the railroad. Two of the boys with me have professed conversion and …. Will make a public profession of their faith by the ordinance of baptism, on the first Sabbath in December.[4]
After serving for four years in the Congo, Hall went on furlough to the USA, where he met and married Elizabeth Garland at Richmond, Virginia, in November 1893. Soon after this, ABMU recommissioned William Hall to serve in Congo, but this time as part of a missionary couple.
In 1894, Hall had the company of his wife on the mission field. Mrs. Hall joined her husband at the Matadi operating base.[5] By 1901, the Halls were stationed at Palabala, which was experiencing significant numerical growth. Mrs. Hall had organized a women’s class which had been “well-sustained both in numbers and in interest.”[6]
By 1909, the missionary force had been reduced in numbers. In his annual report, Hall stated that he visited 20 outstations. At Palabala, 58 persons had been baptized during the year with a similar number awaiting baptism. However, growing opposition to the mission by the government was reported.[7]
By 1918, interpersonal problems within the mission team in Congo began to have adverse effect on the work. False reports about Hall’s conduct put in circulation while he was on the mission field led to ABMU dismissing him from its missionary ranks. Hall and his wife put up a robust defense, but that did not change the decision of the team leaders who were ready to end ties with the Halls. The Halls opted to return to Jamaica, William’s homeland, after William had completed more than 25 years of missionary service in Fernando Po and Congo.
In April 1918, eight months before the dreaded pandemic named “Spanish influenza” “spread like August grass fires” over Congo,[8] the Halls ended their mission in Congo.
At that time, Mrs. Hall who was severely ill, travelled to England where she received medical treatment and recovered sufficiently to be able to return to USA and conduct deputation work there. After this, she joined her husband at his home on the edge of Sturge Town, the community of Hall’s birth. [9]
Renewing her interest in ministry to women and children, Elizabeth Hall, who was affectionately called Mama Hall, established and operated, in her family home, an orphanage she named the Pansy Garden Home for Children. Mama Hall used the platforms made available to her to share her testimony, to offer reflections on her experience in the Congo and to raise funds for her Pansy Garden Home.
Meanwhile, William Hall answered the invitation to serve as pastor in the Bethany circuit of churches, commencing work there in 1919. Hall threw himself into the work of the circuit and in the wider community. He was active in the Advent Testimony Preparation Movement, which met from time to time in Brown’s Town. He also participated in the Jamaica Agricultural Society Sturge Town branch. He served on the School Board for the Dry Harbour Mountains and Alexandria District on which he was correspondent for Lynton Park and Bethany schools.
Hall made himself available to churches that were interested in learning about his experience in Africa and his interpretation of emancipation. He addressed annual missionary meetings as he did in the Stewart Town Baptist Church in November 1919. He did not restrict his preaching to Baptist churches, and he preached frequently at the Dry Harbour Congregational Church (now, Discovery Bay United Church).
In 1931, Elizabeth Garland Hall, facing a life-threatening illness, returned to USA for the last time. A year later, she predeceased her husband, when she breathed her last in the Graduate Hospital in New York.
God blessed the work of the Halls both on the African mission field and in Jamaica. When some of the Jamaicans returned home after the disappointment in Fernando Po, God opened a door for William Hall to relocate to Congo and complete his assignment taking the Gospel to the descendants of his forbears on the African continent.
[1] Baptists in America established the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist denomination in the US for Foreign Missions in 1814. It was popularly referred to as the Triennial Convention. This Convention was the Baptists’ first unified national missionary body formed in the U.S.A. To manage its work, the Convention set up a committee called the Baptist Board for Foreign Missions. In 1910, this body became the American Baptist Missionary Union. In 1910, it was given the new name American Baptist Foreign Mission Society.
[2] Beryl J. Russell, Strange Victory: “Mama” Hall: The Life and Work of Elizabeth Garland Hall, 1867-1933. Kingston, 1997, 33.
[3] American Baptist Missionary Union, Seventy-Sixth Annual Report, with the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting held in Chicago, Ill., May 23-24, 1890 (Boston: Missionary Rooms, 1890),134.
[4] American
Baptist Missionary Union, Seventy-Eighth Annual Report, with the Proceedings
of the Annual Meeting held in Philadelphia, Penn, May 24,25 and 26, 1893 (Boston:
Missionary Rooms, 1893), 131.
[5] American
Baptist Missionary Union, Eightieth Annual Report, with the Proceedings of
the Annual Meeting held in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Philadelphia, Penn, May 27,
28 and 29, 1894 (Boston: Missionary Rooms, 1894), 176-177.
[6] American
Baptist Missionary Union, Eighty-Seventh Annual Report, with the Proceedings
of the Annual Meeting held in Springfield, Mass, May 27 & 28, 1901 (Boston:
Missionary Rooms, 1901), 198.
[7] American Baptist Missionary Union, Ninety-Fifth
Annual Report Presented at Portland, Oregon, June 25-July 2, 1909 (Boston:
Missionary Rooms, 1909), 123.
[8]
American Baptist Missionary Union, One Hundred and Fifth Annual Report of
the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (Boston, MA: American Baptist
Missionary Union, 1919), 118.
[9]
Also called Birmingham, Sturge Town
was the first “Free Village” Rev John Clark of Brown’s Town Baptist Church
established in St Ann. According to Clark, when it was completed, the Sturge
Town settlement comprised “nearly 100 building lots and an equal
number of acres for provision ground.” See Hugh Paget, “The Free Village System in Jamaica”, Caribbean
Quarterly 1:4 (n.d.), 7-19.
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