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| Randolph & Sybil Knight |
Toward the end of his JC years, Knight won a scholarship to study classics at McMaster University in Toronto. He became the first foreign student to help a McMaster team win a debating competition. He returned to Jamaica having successfully completed a Bachelor of Divinity degree and a Master of Arts degree. However, he did not receive an invitation to serve in any church. So, he taught at Calabar High School – becoming the first Jamaican to join the Calabar High School staff – and shared his time between Calabar and Christ Church, Jones Pen (now Jones Town). He also accepted invitations to preach at several other churches. Not neglecting his home church, he presided at debates sponsored by the East Queen Street Baptist Temperance and Literary Society.
In December 1915, Knight commenced serving as pastor of Hanover Street Baptist Church, while continuing to serve the Jones Pen Church. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Christian Endeavour movement. After three years at Hanover Street, he received a call to the pastorate in Falmouth, Trelawny. Calabar reluctantly released him to serve in the Falmouth Circuit, where he led the believers to restore the historic church building that was erected when the Falmouth Church under the leadership of emancipator William Knibb. Knight offered 40 years of service to God in the Falmouth Baptist Church, 1918-1958. While he laboured in Falmouth, his brother Glaister, served at Calvary Church in Montego Bay.
During his years in the Falmouth circuit, he oversaw the restoration of the church building in Falmouth. The first church building there was erected in 1831 when the church enjoyed the leadership of William Knibb. It was destroyed in 1832 and replaced in 1836. In August 1944, a Category Three hurricane destroyed the building which was again replaced under Knight. This resulted in the present structure that incorporates material from the nineteenth-century church, erected when William Knibb was pastor there.
Interested in community affairs, Knight served as a Vice President of the Jamaica Agricultural Society branch in Wakefield. He also contributed to education by serving as manager of the school in Wakefield. He was also chairman of the Falmouth and Good Hope District School Board and a member of the Board of Education. Knight was also a member of the Parochial Board of Trelawny.
Knight was active in the Trelawny Minister's Fraternal where, from time to time, he presented papers on issues under consideration, such as “The Labour Problem and the Church.”
Knight was critical of, but also grateful for, the Jamaica Baptist Union, to which he made his gifts available. In 1924, the Carey Press in London published Knight’s book, William Knibb, Missionary and Emancipator. Knight said he wrote the book “to give the young Baptists of our land an idea of the early history and struggles of our denomination, and to make them humbly proud and thankful that they belong to such a body.”[1] He wrote to meet the need for shared information on “the greatest missionary who ever came to Jamaica.”[2]
Knight was elected JBU Chairman (now President) for 1927-28. He also served as JBU Acting General Secretary, and then, as General Secretary, over the period 1931-1947.
In 1938, when Jamaica was celebrating the centenary of emancipation, JBU published Knight’s edited work, Liberty and Progress. Its seven chapters deal with the Union, the Jamaica Baptist Missionary Society, Calabar College, the JBU Sunday School Society, Baptist Contribution to Education, Baptist Women’s Work and the Development of Literature in Jamaica.
In 1930, Mrs. Sybil Knight, Knight’s wife, went to England for surgery. She used the opportunity to visit Kettering, England, the birthplace of William Knibb. She was disappointed that she did not find in Kettering “as much knowledge of his [Knibb’s] life and work amongst our people, as we have in Jamaica, who still reverence and honour his memory and keep burning the flame of freedom” as she put in The Guardian newspaper. She continued:
Perhaps I had better
not say what I thought when I found that the birthplace of Knibb in
Market-street, which I had come to Kettering especially to see, had been
converted into a public-house, without even a tablet to mark the spot. All I
can say is that had Knibb been born in Jamaica such a desecration would never
have been tolerated for one moment.
In the graveyard at the
rear of Fuller Chapel, I saw the grave of Andrew Fuller Knibb, the two-years
old son of William and Mary Knibb, who died during his parents visit to
Kettering in 1834, and was buried in Fuller graveyard within a yard or two of
his illustrious name-sake, Andrew Fuller, the first secretary of the Baptist
Missionary Society….
I was glad to find that
Kettering honours its famous sons, and that Knibb has been immortalised for
future generations by a bronze bust in your exceedingly interesting Museum and
Art Gallery, the work, I understand, of a talented amateur sculptor of
Kettering….
In the Anglican
churchyard, I was also interested to see that the headstone of the grave of
William Knibb’s father and mother, which my husband found on the ground when he
visited six years ago, was restored by Kettering Baptist friends.
In 1958, owing to declining health, Knight resigned the pastorate in Falmouth. In July 1976, he breathed his last and was buried in the churchyard. It is surprising that R. A. L. Knight is not a household name” among Baptists in Jamaica for his outstanding contribution through the Jamaica Baptist Union
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