On this day (Nov. 22) in 1755 sixteen Baptists, originally from New England, formed the Sandy Creek Baptist church in what is now northern North Carolina. The church immediately called Brother Shubal Sterns to become their under shepherd and leader. With the blessing of God, the congregation quickly grew to more than six hundred. Elder Sterns, not a particularly great orator, but he passionately preached salvation through the free grace of the sovereign God, and hundreds of souls were born again.
One of the founding members of Sandy Creek was Daniel Marshall who took the missionary spirit into Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia. Soon other believers, like Dutton Lane and Samuel Harriss, began to take up the mantle of the ministry, and the blessings of God spread like wild fire.
Morgan Edwards, an historian associated with the Philadelphia Baptist Association, wrote “Sandy Creek is the mother of all the Separate Baptists. From this Zion went forth the word, and great was the company of them who published it. This church, in seventeen years, has spread her branches west as far as the great river Mississippi; southward as far as Georgia; eastward to the sea and Chesapeake Bay, and northward to the waters of the Potomac; it, in seventeen years, is become mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, to forty-two churches, from which sprang 125 ministers.”