On this day in 1855 William Bagby was born. He was born again under the ministry of the pioneer Texas Baptist, Rufus Burleson, and he was educated under the ministry of B.H. Carroll.
In January 1881, Brother Bagby and his wife sailed from Baltimore toward the Bay of Rio in Brazil. Forty-eight days later, they became the first Baptist missionaries in that country. Upon his arrival, William commented in this journal that the place was astoundingly beautiful, but “my heart is grieved that here there are thousands who are without God, and without hope, walking as under the shadow of an eclipse. Oh, may God grant this land His truth, ‘as it is in Jesus,’ shall fill this land from north to south and from the Atlantic to the Andes.”
Brazil at the time was a “closed country,” dominated by Catholicism, and where evangelical truth was illegal. For a time the Bagbys suffered persecution in a strange land with a strange language and without a single friend.
However, before the missionary’s arrival, the Lord had been at work in the heart of a Catholic priest named Antonio Teixeria de Albuquerque. This man had come to faith in Christ by reading his Catholic Bible. Although he yearned to be immersed in baptism as a testimony of his faith in Christ, he couldn’t find anyone who agreed with him or anyone whom he thought had authority to administer the ordinance. And then he providentially found the Bagbys. Soon, he was teaching them Portugese and William was teaching him the Word of God more perfectly. Some months later, the first Baptist church in Brazil was organized in Salvador, and Albuquerque was one of the charter members. The persecution against the believers continued. As others confessed Christ, some were beaten and some were imprisoned, but the work persisted. This mistreatment continued until 1889 when the country was declared a republic, and the Roman Catholic Church was disestablished as the national church.
