Elisha Andrews was born in Connecticut, on September 29, 1768. After his family moved to Vermont, he ended up in New York, where the Lord saved him. He was baptized by Elder Joseph Cornell, after which he united with the Baptist church in Galway. Then soon after that, the young man began preaching Christ. In 1803, at the ripe old age of thirty-five, he was awarded an honorary degree from the Rhode Island College. It appears that at that time he was the pastor of the Templeton Baptist Church in Massachusetts. However, on this day in 1813, during the War of 1812, he was dismissed, because he was a Federalist and opposed the war. For the next two years the church had no spiritual leader, so Brother Andrews was invited from time to time to preach to his old congregation. Then following the war, he was apparently fully restored to his old position.
Now, we switch scenes and go back several years. The first Baptist church in Canada’s interior was either the Baptist Church at Beamsville, Upper Canada, or it was the church at Caldwell’s Manor, Quebec. Late in his life Brother Andrews wrote about an invitation he received in January 1794 from Caldwell’s Manor. There were some people requesting scriptural baptism. Andrews heard the call and a friend volunteered to take him from Vermont to Quebec on a sleigh, where they found a mighty moving of the Holy Spirit. “Soon after we arrived, the house was filled with people, and I preached to them… The next day we met at 9 o’clock in the morning, and spent the whole day in examining candidates for baptism; we heard and received thirty of all ages from 10 to 50 years. They possessed very little theoretic knowledge. Nearly all they knew, they had been taught by the Holy Spirit, and they told a plain, unvarnished tale of the dealings of God with their souls; and I have seldom heard such a number of Christian experiences so highly satisfactory, and decidedly evidential of a real change of heart. The next day we repaired to the Lake, cut a hole in the ice, and fifteen of those happy and devoted disciples were, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, immersed agreeably to the command of the divine Saviour. The baptism of the remaining fifteen was deferred unto the next Monday, it being their choice to have it performed in the vicinity where they resided.” Four weeks later those people, along with several more who had received Christ and had been baptized, formed “The Baptist Church of Christ in Caldwell’s Manor.”