John Gano: Evangelist, Calvinist, Baptist

John Gano, a contemporary of Isaac Backus, served both as a pastor and as an itinerant evangelist in New England, the Middle Colonies and the South. David Benedict comments that as an itinerant evangelist, Gano was “inferior to none… unless it were the renowned Whitefield.” Gano had extensive evangelistic experience both as an itinerant and as a pastor. His initial ministry experience came when he accompanied Benjamin Miller and John Thomas, who were responding to a request made for assistance by a pair of Virginia churches to the Philadelphia Association. On this journey the young evangelist had the opportunity to preach. Taking Romans 10:3 as his text, he preached with power and several people were converted. This embarkment led to several preaching invitations for the novitiate.

In 1755 the Charleston Association authorized Oliver Hart, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charleston, to secure the services of a missionary. This missionary was to be sent to the destitute parts of that colony and to its neighboring provinces. Gano received the appointment and began his career as an evangelist. The resulting missionary tour at the Jersey Settlement on the banks of the Yadkin River was very successful. Henry C. Vedder notes this “was the beginning of that work of evangelization to which the subsequent rapid progress of Baptists was made.”

Gano’s subsequent pastoral ministry included stops in New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, but the bulk of it was spent serving the First Baptist Church of New York City. First Baptist was constituted in 1762 with 27 members. Under Gano’s leadership and evangelistic zeal, the membership grew to 132 in five years. The War of Independence suspended the ministry of the church, as it did many other congregations. Disbanded in 1777, the congregation did not reconvene until 1784. When the church reopened its doors, the members who made their way in –noticeably smaller in number than seven years earlier – found that their facilities had been damaged by the British troops who had used them as a stable. The ravages of war had not only wreaked havoc to the structure of the church building but had also depleted the congregation of well over half of its members. Nevertheless, Gano penned the circular letter on behalf of the Philadelphia Association with a hopeful tone. He wrote to the affiliate churches:

We trust, you will unite your efforts with ours, to the same good purpose; and that our thanksgivings for the present peace, harmony, and increase of our churches, our prayers for their further growth, with a more powerful effusion of the Divine Spirit and grace upon them, will be mutually offered up. May the consideration of our effectual calling prove an incentive thereunto! Which is the subject now to be considered, as in the tenth chapter of our Confession of faith…. This is an act of sovereign grace, which flows from the everlasting love of God, and is such an irresistible impression made by the Holy Spirit upon a human soul, as to effect a blessed change…. We are to consider who are the called. They are such as God hath chosen and predestinated both to grace and glory, elected and set apart in Christ, as redeemed by his blood…. The changes produced are from darkness to light, from bondage to liberty, from alienation and estrangedness to Christ to a state of nearness and fellowship with him and his saints…. This is an holy calling, and is effectual to produce the exercise of holiness in the heart, even as the saints are created in Christ Jesus unto good works.

Samuel Waldo, moderator for the association, and William Verndon, its clerk, signed the letter by order of the association. Gano remained with the New York congregation only four more years; yet in that brief span he baptized 125 individuals and the total membership of the church grew to 192.

Richard Furman, who served as the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charleston, and as the first president of the Triennial Convention, stated the doctrines Gano “embraced were those which are contained in the Baptist Confession of Faith, and are commonly styled Calvinistick [sic].” Furman described the evangelistic preaching of Gano, observing, “The careless and irreverent were suddenly arrested, and stood in awe before him; and the insensible were made to feel, when he asserted and maintained the honour of his God.” It was under such searching preaching by Gano and others that A.H. Newman says a “large proportion” of General Baptists in Virginia “felt…for the very first time they understood what conversion meant.” Leon McBeth declares Gano “must be ranked as one of the most outstanding Baptist leaders in early America” because his preaching abilities, his evangelistic zeal, and his appointment as an associational missionary helped “turn scattered Baptist churches of America into a denomination.”